ScreenAnarchy

All week, we've been happily engaged by New York Film Festival reviews by our own Dustin Chang and Olga Artemyeva, so be sure to click that link to catch up on any that you may have missed. More festival reviews are on their way, but while we wait for many of those films to make their way to local theaters, what films are opening today? It's no surprise that a horror movie leads our pack today, though the lack of any advance press screenings raised our suspicions.

When it comes to the Coppolas, there always has to be someone on the sidelines to keep them in check. The great filmmaking dynasty has forever been known for breaking convention; from grandfather Francis Ford to granddaughter Gia, their works have alternatively inspired and reviled many, tracing disastrous highs (Apocalypse Now) to misunderstood gems (Palo Alto, Somewhere, The Bling Ring, damn, maybe even Megalopolis) and everywhere in between.

It has been 20 years since Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was booed at its Cannes debut, before becoming an instant cult classic in its commercial release. I remember the splashy marketing, the contrast of a lavishly produced period picture with contemporary indie rock soundtrack, and an absolutely alive camera capturing the immaturity and glee of the young future Queen of France. It was as if the pitch for the film was Barry Lyndon by way of Jim Jarmusch.

When newspapers, radio stations, and television news programs reported the first successful summit of Mt. Everest on May 29th, 1953, Edmund “Ed” Hilary, a New Zealand member of a spring expedition organized by the British, received prime, sometimes sole credit for arguably one of the greatest accomplishments in recorded human history. A knighthood followed Hilary’s success. The truth, of course, was far more complicated than contemporary accounts showed. Hilary wasn’t alone.

Halloween is creeping up, which means a new V/H/S is landing on Shudder today, just in time for some post-trick-or-treat trauma. Since the series’ resurrection, V/H/S has largely traded its loose narrative throughline for an annual theme, and while the franchise has mostly played things pretty safe by horror-anthology standards, V/H/S/Mixtape finds a surprisingly fresh hook in that subtitle: Every found footage segment is built around sound or the concept of an old school mixtape.

The official trailer for Jen Wexler's contribution to the Becky franchise, The Last Temptation of Bekcy, is here. Starring Lulu Wilson, Kate Siegel, Brandon Flynn, Catherine Walker, with James Urbaniak and Neil Patrick Harris, The Last Temptation of Becky will only be in theaters on November 4th, 2026 Now a CIA field agent, Becky (Lulu Wilson) goes undercover in Poland to infiltrate a family running an inn at The Wolf's Lair, one of Hitler's WWII bunkers.

A middle-aged man, Said (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), comes back to his small Bulgarian hometown, situated not far from the borders of both Turkey and Greece. He is here to conduct some shady deal involving diesel fuel, but when his car is stolen, he conveniently bumps into an old friend, Veska (Yana Radeva), who is also back for the first time in years, overseeing a small archeological dig.

I always love it when a distributor goes crazy when releasing a film, and few go quite as crazy as Australian distributor Via Vision with their Imprint label.

Following advice from his boss, who had a premonition of his mother's death, Sakol, a middle-aged businessman, embarks on a trip of merit making to nine Buddhist temples in one day, to prolong his mother's life before her birthday, which is coming up in two weeks. He enlists nine family members, spanning three generations, into a rental van to visit all nine temples. The number 9 is considered a lucky number in Thailand, with it being similar sounding as the word 'progress', or 'moving forward'.

Beatrice Gibson's At Night, shot on film and entirely at night, is a thing of beauty. It concerns a group of women as they converse about anything from family, motherhood, desire, economic inequality, to sex under dim fluorescent lights of late-night cafes, restaurants and clubs, of the deserted back-alleys of Paris. "I am a tone of voice," starts At Night, an experimental film by Gibson, making her feature debut here.