Welcome to CFTCA’s monthly digest for Spring 2026, a roundup of recent reviews, features, interviews, and more by CTFCA critics.
Film Reviews
Backrooms | Reviewed by Todd Pengelly | Read the Full Review
“Backrooms is an expansion (literally) on an already expansive idea. What began as an unsettling image of a fluorescent-lit bare room, carpeted and wallpapered a dehydrated yellow, morphed into a nauseating idea: What if this room never ended?”
Find more of Todd’s work at For Reel.
Best Boy | Reviewed by Dakota Arsenault | Read the Full Review
“This film is watching three siblings know exactly how to get under the skin of one another in ways only the closest people to us can ever do, all in the messed up name of family.”
Find more of Dakota’s work at Northern Reel.
Blue Heron | Reviewed by Dom Sinacola | Read the Full Review
“Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, the luminous Blue Heron, is revelatory—even as it intentionally offers no revelations.”
Find more of Dom’s work in the Portland Mercury.
The Christophers | Reviewed by Dom Sinacola | Read the Full Review
“The Christophers simply lets commerce—a concoction of social influence, taste, and a vague idea of what anyone is owed for their art—float like a translucent balloon in the foreground, ambient and never directly discussed with contempt, but occasionally obscuring the feelings of characters or even the physical view of the art itself. “
Find more of Dom’s work in the Portland Mercury.
Eight Bridges | Reviewed by Eric Zhu | Read the Full Review
“When faced with a filmmaker like James Benning, there’s an understandable, but misguided tendency to frame the minimalist, durational work as a type of cinematic endurance test, a piece of anti-spectacle spectacle discussed almost derisively in the way people talk about “modern art”.”
Find more of Eric’s SIFF coverage in the The Insert.
Fjord | Reviewed by Elizabeth Mulloy | Read the Full Review
“Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is no stranger to making his audiences uncomfortable… With his latest feature, Fjord, he turns his attention towards assimilation, progressivism, and conflicting values.”
Find more of Elizabeth’s Cannes coverage on That Shelf.
Hope | Reviewed by Elizabeth Mulloy | Read the Full Review
“A film about a small town discovering that we are not alone in the universe. But nothing could have prepared me nor the entire press audience for the cinematic thrill-ride that is Hope.”
Find more of Elizabeth’s work on The Celluloid Correspondent.
MySpace | Reviewed by Dakota Arsenault | Read the Full Review
“Early in the documentary Myspace, directed by Tommy Avallone, one of the most interesting questions gets posed to some of the subjects being interviewed about the rise and fall of the pioneering social media site. When did you stop using Myspace? For people who grew up with it, the answers mirror the talking heads. I don’t know exactly when, but I stopped using it as often and eventually never went back. “
Find more of Dakota’s work at Contra Zoom Pod.
New Experimental Shorts | Reviewed by Eric Zhu | Read the Full Review
“Inspired by technicolor coloring methods, she passed ambient shots of the city through red, green, and blue filters and overlaid them, resulting in images that shifted in color depending on the offset natural motion.”
Find more of Eric’s writing at The Insert.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma | Reviewed by Elizabeth Mulloy | Read the Full Review
“From the opening moments, it is clear that Jane Schoenbrun completely understands the mechanics of a slasher franchise. They understand why people love these films in the first place: the excessive gore, the teenage sex, and the spectacle of watching idiots get brutally slaughtered one by one.”
Find more of Elizabeth’s Cannes coverage at The Celluloid Correspondent.
Retrospectives
Agitator by Takashi Miike | By Marta Djordjevic | Read the Full Piece
“In Takashi Miike’s Agitator, momentum never quite belongs to anyone. The first few minutes are suspended in a deceptive stillness, offering no indication of the scale it’s about to unleash. Minutes later, we’re thrown into motion, packed into a car with yakuza members and staring through a windshield as they speed through crowded city streets. “
Find more of Marta’s writing on Rewind & Revive.
The Dancing Hawk by Grzegorz Królikiewicz | By Marta Djordjevic | Read the Full Piece
“Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s The Dancing Hawk (1977) is yet another descent into the Polish filmmaker’s feverish, visceral style of cinema. “
Find more of Marta’s writing on Rewind & Revive.
Lessons of Darkness | By Dom Sinacola | Read the Full Piece
“Lessons of Darkness reaches past documentary into something that acts as myth, a “crime against creation.””
Find more of Dom’s writing on Herzog at The Werner Herzblog.
Moneyball 4K Release | By Dakota Arsenault | Read the Full Piece
“The film has been released on 4K Ultra HD and it looks stunning… The grass is so crisp and green you feel like you can reach out and feel the texture. Miller utilizes a lot of shots of computer screens and showing screens of real game footage from the A’s and the lowfi aesthetic pops with this upgrade.”
Find more of Dakota’s writing at Contra Zoom Pod.
Sky Hopinka Career Retrospective | By Eric Zhu | Read the Full Piece
“These are Hopinka’s dancing images at their most expressive, the composite landscapes exploding with unforeseen pop-art colors, layers of yellows and reds flashing like screen prints.”
Find more of Eric’s writing at The Insert.
Spider-Man 2 Retrospective | By Wes King | Watch the Full Review Here
Wes King dives into the 2004 superhero classic Spider-Man 2, exploring how the film foresaw the rise of predatory technologies, and in particular A.I.
Find more of Wes King’s reviews on their YouTube.