Reviews 2026.

ENOUGH

Somewhere between Edvard Munch's 1893 anguish and a six-inch ceramic figurine glazed for export to China lies the entire argument of Enough, and Sally Llewellyn makes that journey in thirty-two pages without once raising her voice. Her title is a small act of philosophical sabotage: enough as sufficiency, as correct dosage — Gwen's stoned, kindly "one is enough to take the edge off" — set against enough as cessation, refusal, the threshold crossed. Sian has spent three decades being precisely, exhaustingly sufficient, and Llewellyn's great insight is that Winnicott's "good enough mother" was never a diagnosis of maternal adequacy but a life sentence of measured self-erasure, one that expires without notice somewhere around the fifty-fifth birthday. What the script anatomises is the collision of Hochschild's emotional labour with Beauvoir's La Vieillesse, in which ageing arrives first in the eyes of others: a young GP googling how to treat a stye before he googles his patient's own body back at her, then delivering the sentence that functions as this world's foundational violence — "All perfectly normal. You're a woman of that age. It will pass." Sian is not ill; she is being administratively decommissioned. Llewellyn sets this against Butler's grievability and the peculiarly contemporary cruelty of the sandwich generation, a cohort simultaneously mothering adult children, managing a mother-in-law's decline, and watching their contemporaries die mid-sentence over small plates. The relevance scarcely needs arguing. We are living through a loud cultural conversation about the menopausal body and a near-total silence about the menopausal self, and Enough has the nerve to suggest the crisis is ontological rather than hormonal.

Stylistically, Llewellyn writes in a clipped, unsentimental present tense that conceals its devastations inside subordinate clauses — "Sian moves out. Quietly, apart from the barking. No drama." — and her formal masterstroke is the voice note, which I would argue constitutes one of the most intelligent uses of a technology in recent British screenwriting. Speech severed from the ear; utterance that circulates without ever arriving. The device gives her a perfect hauntological object in Mark Fisher's sense, a marriage conducted entirely as asynchronous transmission between two people who have not heard each other in years, and it permits the coldest line in the script — "Text if important. I'm working." — to be cruel without its speaker ever intending cruelty. Llewellyn then runs the device through a complete dialectic: instrument of servitude, instrument of revolt, then switched off entirely in the script's truest declaration of independence, then finally weaponised against her when Amira's speakerphone converts private confession into public catastrophe. The lineage here runs from Willy Russell's Shirley Valentine (1989, Lewis Gilbert) and the bilingual choral sprawl of Under Milk Wood (1972, Andrew Sinclair) through to a striking cluster of recent work: the incandescent female fury of Hard Truths (2024, Mike Leigh), the ageing-body grotesquerie of The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat) — though Llewellyn achieves with a mammogram machine and a pair of white jeans what Fargeat needs prosthetics for — the filthy provincial insurrection of Wicked Little Letters (2023, Thea Sharrock), and the frank late-life eroticism of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022, Sophie Hyde). Her Gower is The Feast (2021, Lee Haven Jones) with the folk horror swapped for HRT: a Welsh coast stratified by generation, each cohort studying the one above it for instructions on how to die.

The scene work is exceptional, and three sequences in particular reveal a writer operating well above spec level. At Oxwich Bay, Llewellyn disguises her foreshadowing as filth — Anna's cardiac event announced inside a punchline about a Lebanese chef, "Boom, thump, boom. Has been all day, I can feel it!" — so that the audience hears a joke while the script quietly delivers a death sentence, and then compounds the cruelty by having Sian laugh too hard to notice her best friend dying. That the resuscitation is subsequently performed to the Bee Gees is not irreverence but Bakhtinian carnival, the grotesque body and the sacred corpse occupying one frame. The surgery sequence that follows is a small masterpiece of Foucauldian clinical gaze, culminating in a toilet cubicle staged as heist — two pads, an elephant tampon, the entire loo roll dispenser, a coat knotted into a skirt, "All good" — in which Kristeva's abject, the matter that must not be looked at because looking collapses the fiction of the clean and proper self, is instead handled with the brisk competence of a woman who has done this before and will do it again. And then Rotherslade, which is the finest thing here and worth the whole read: a suicide attempt thwarted by the buoyancy of the victim's own wetsuit, described in the funniest stage direction I have encountered this year — "It is a rescue that is less Baywatch and more existential crisis" — before the comedy stops dead and Gwen states her case with total lucidity. "I'm frightened. Everything floats away, words, people. I can't be in a home not knowing who I am. That's not me." That is Parfit's problem of personal identity delivered in freezing April water by an octogenarian in neoprene, and Llewellyn's refusal to underline it is what makes it land.

Structurally, the script's most elegant achievement is its double helix: two women saying enough from opposite ends of the same life, Sian's project to begin and Gwen's to end, each requiring a permission the other man in their lives — neat, appalled, rolling his trousers up on a beach where his mother is drowning — is constitutionally unable to grant. Llewellyn is entering a rich and very current conversation about autonomy at the end of life, alongside The Room Next Door (2024, Pedro Almodóvar), Plan 75 (2022, Chie Hayakawa), the extraordinary tenderness of Familiar Touch (2024, Sarah Friedland) and the split-screen dementia of Vortex (2021, Gaspar Noé), yet she brings something those films lack, which is jeopardy braided with jokes and a solicitor pouring wine while calmly itemising the custodial sentence. Her use of Welsh as the language of the unsayable is a genuinely novelistic stroke — Gwen announces her intention to die in a tongue Sian cannot parse, and later switches to English only when she requires comprehension, which retroactively reframes every earlier line as something she chose not to be understood in. Meanwhile the moral centre hides inside the funniest runner: two octogenarians running a contraband ceramics empire out of a sixth-form art room, "legal, smegal, lighten up Sian, we're a female cottage industry", into which Sian buys at fifteen per cent having improved the product. And what is her improvement? Two black eyes and a small round mouth on every figurine, so that a hundred miniature Welsh women in traditional dress are boxed, labelled and shipped abroad wearing the face of The Scream. She has industrialised her own anguish and taken a margin on it. The reproductive labour Federici spent a career arguing was rendered invisible is here made literally, absurdly saleable, and Llewellyn plays it as a throwaway gag. The message, if the script has one, is not that Sian escapes — it is that she stops asking to be released and simply reprices herself.

A personal note, because this deserves one. I came to Enough expecting a menopause comedy and finished it having to sit still for a minute, which happens perhaps three times a year. What moved me was not the grief or the rage but a single stage direction: "For the first time in decades Sian considers the unthinkable, herself." Eleven words, doing what most pilots fail to do across three acts. The affective architecture here is Barthes' punctum — the detail that pierces rather than informs — deployed again and again: the birthday cake arriving on cue, the postcard of Frida Kahlo's The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938) turned over idly on a kitchen table, Munch doodled on a napkin at half nine while the candles burn down, a vile chihuahua nobody wants becoming the only creature in South Wales who reliably shows up. That final image — Sian's face pulling the shape one last time on a sunlit terrace as Doug opens his arms — completes a motif that has travelled from napkin to canvas to kiln to export crate to flesh, and it is the work of a writer who knows exactly what she is doing even when she appears to be larking about. Sally, you have written something with a genuine philosophical spine and a filthy mouth, and those two things almost never survive in the same script. A proofing pass and a little more room to grieve Anna properly — her voice is already sitting there in the phone, waiting — and this is not merely commissionable, it is the sort of series people press on their mothers, their sisters and, eventually, themselves. Keep going. The world has been waiting rather a long time for this woman to stop being nice.<br>

MEANS TO AN END

Every culture keeps a story about the woman who devours children. The Greeks had Lamia, Mesopotamia had Lamashtu, the Talmud its Lilith; Goya, hedging, made his devourer a father. What all that mythic extravagance conceals — the serpent tail, the rolling eyes, the cosmic appetite — is the far less bearable proposition that the devouring might be done by someone perfectly ordinary, in a good dress, at a bar, on a weeknight. Tanya M. Wheeler's Means to an End opens exactly there, in the most unremarkable of hunting grounds, and proceeds to dismantle the assumption that we always know which body in the room is the predator. Jenna moves through the bar with a practised, unhurried grace, selecting married men the way one selects produce; Luke is chosen, taken outdoors behind the building, and the transaction concludes. Twelve weeks later she finds him again and asks him, quite calmly, to hit her in the stomach — to terminate the pregnancy the old-fashioned way. Wheeler has described finding horror in the mundane and in the ways human beings harm one another, and this is precisely the register she achieves: a silent horror film in the truest sense, built not on shocks but on the unbearable duration of its own silences. She lets her camera linger; she lets her actors sit inside what is not said, so that the clumsy, half-spoken dialogue becomes a thin membrane over something enormous and unspeakable beneath.

The thematic architecture here is considerably more audacious than its eleven minutes advertise, because Wheeler has made a film that attacks what Lee Edelman terms reproductive futurism — the tyrannical cultural logic by which the Child functions as the unquestionable horizon of all value, the figure in whose name every social demand is issued and no refusal permitted. Jenna gestates not in service of the future but in order to abolish it; she conceives in order to consume, which converts pregnancy from productive labour into what Bataille would call pure dépense, expenditure without return, the accursed share spent for nothing but itself. Around this sits Kristeva's abject in its most literal configuration — the blurring of the boundary between self and not-self, inside and outside, food and flesh — and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine, though Wheeler's innovation is to strip the archetype of every supernatural alibi. There is no coven, no possession, no ancient evil; there is only a woman with a plan. And then there is the matter of timing. Shot in November 2020, released in May 2022, the film went into its festival run weeks before Roe v. Wade was overturned, acquiring overnight a political charge its maker never solicited: a scene in which a woman must beg a man to strike her because the legitimate route has been closed to her now reads less as invention than as reportage. Wheeler did not write a film about biopolitics and reproductive governance. She wrote one anyway. That is what happens when an artist locates a genuine cultural fault line by instinct.

Stylistically, Wheeler and her cinematographer Shayne Archer make one decision that betrays far more confidence than a debut has any right to: they shoot this bar-bound chamber piece in 2.35:1, the ratio of the epic and the western, and then fill all that lateral space with dead air and waiting. The result is a widescreen frame that feels like a cage — a compositional irony worthy of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), whose apartment expanded and contracted with its heroine's unravelling, and whose Rosemary's Baby (1968) remains the ur-text of gestation-as-dispossession. Where Polanski's woman is a vessel commandeered by others, Wheeler's has commandeered herself, which places her closer to the anarchic lineage of Alice Lowe's Prevenge (2016) and to David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979), that great film about rage given reproductive form. Your critic is right that the high concept vaults clean over Promising Young Woman (2020, Emerald Fennell): Cassie's sadism was a ledger, a moral accountancy directed at specific men, whereas Jenna's is unmoored from grievance altogether, a psychopathology rather than a programme — and that is the more frightening proposition by a considerable margin. Most striking of all is how thoroughly Wheeler anticipated the wave. Everything the last three years have thrown at this material — the reproductive dread of Michael Mohan's Immaculate (2024) and Arkasha Stevenson's The First Omen (2024), the parasitic maternity of Tilman Singer's Cuckoo (2024), the maternal animality of Marielle Heller's Nightbitch (2024), the grief-ritual of Danny and Michael Philippou's Bring Her Back (2025) — was already latent in a New Zealand bar in 2020, on a budget of three and a half thousand dollars.

Which brings us to the ending, and to the film's best-kept secret. Wheeler has spoken of being thrilled that audiences caught the ageing and fountain-of-youth strand, buried so deep that she doubted anyone would find it, and it is this that elevates the final revelation from atrocity to argument. Jenna's consumption of the miscarried foetus is not merely psychopathology made physically manifest — though it is that, shockingly so, the interior at last erupting into the visible — it is an act of alchemy, the oldest and ugliest one, in which youth is extracted from a body that has not yet had the chance to spend any. She is Báthory in a cocktail dress; she is Kronos, who ate his children precisely because he could not bear to be succeeded by them. Melanie Klein theorised the infant's oral-sadistic phantasy of devouring the maternal body; Wheeler simply reverses the vector and lets us sit with what remains. None of this would survive contact with an audience without Esther Louise, who is the film's absolute centre of gravity and its principal attraction — a performance of terrifying stillness that withholds and withholds, playing charm as a surface tension rather than a quality, so that the horror arrives not as a twist but as a confirmation of something we have been refusing to read in her face for eleven minutes. And there is a genuine Ruth Gordon quality in the deadpan with which the unthinkable is finally handled; one senses, behind it all, a director who has watched Harold and Maude (1971, Hal Ashby) more times than she can count and understood that the blackest comedy and the deepest tenderness are drawn from the same well.

A personal note, because this one deserves it. Somewhere in the making of this film there is a detail I have not been able to put down: several actresses read the script and declined, not because they disliked it, but because they feared that appearing in something this polarising would end their careers. That is not a casting anecdote. That is the review. An eleven-minute short, self-funded on three thousand six hundred dollars over four nights in a friend's bar, produced enough moral vertigo in professional performers that they walked away from it — and Wheeler, who had spent a decade insisting she would never direct, sat down in the chair herself because nobody else could see the character clearly. Five years between script and screen; a gestation, appropriately enough, that went its full term against every obstacle available. The affective power of Means to an End is that it refuses us the exit we most want, which is the belief that a woman could not do this, that maternal feeling is installed rather than chosen, that goodness is distributed by gender. Evil knows no gender, Wheeler writes, and her film proves it not with a monster but with a mirror. To any filmmaker who has been told their vision is too difficult, too dark, too divisive to be worth funding: this is the film to point at. Tanya, you were right to stop waiting for permission. Now go and make the ambitious one.

JUMPING AT SHADOWS: FORSAKEN FATHER (PART 1)

In 1962 Chris Marker built the most haunting time-travel film ever made out of nothing but still photographs; La Jetée (1962, Chris Marker) understood that temporal rupture is not a matter of spectacle but of arrested images, of a frame held until it bleeds. Locky Boaretto arrives at the same conclusion from the opposite direction — not through theory but through necessity — and Forsaken Father is where his storyboard method stops being a workaround and starts being a poetics. The film opens on Charlotte's eighteenth birthday, the precise juridical instant of majority, and detonates it: Agent Nixon is not her father, her closest friend is not human, her parents were killed by the species she has been living beside. This is the Freudian family romance inverted and weaponised — the childhood fantasy that one's parents are impostors turns out, cruelly, to be true — and with it comes the foreclosure of what Lacan named the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic anchor that organises a subject's world. Remove that signifier and reality itself destabilises, which is precisely what the narrative then does, quite literally, to the fabric of history. Boaretto has stumbled onto the defining neurosis of his generation, and dressed it as an alien-hunter thriller.

Structurally, the opening five minutes are audacious: a triple anagnorisis, Aristotle's recognition tripled and compressed, fired in sequence like a burst from a rifle before the audience has settled. It works because the drawings are static enough that the words land like blows — an economy Waltz with Bashir (2008, Ari Folman) understood when it let animation carry testimony too raw for live action. The film's tonal DNA runs through the noir fatalism of The Terminator (1984, James Cameron) and the tragic fall of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas), both of which Boaretto has openly claimed as touchstones, while its paternal thunderclap belongs to the tradition of The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner). Its most illuminating contemporary company, though, is elsewhere: the multiversal grief and "canon event" determinism of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson), the absent-parent fantasia of The Boy and the Heron (2023, Hayao Miyazaki), and the lost-future ache of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, George Miller). Again the animation is charming rather than groundbreaking and the voice work is doing heavy lifting; again the charm wins, because the imagination behind each composition is manifestly inexhaustible.

The film's central act of horror is not a monster at all. Nixon, having decided that history can be corrected, erases from existence the very girl he set out to protect — and the catastrophe ripples outward into an alternate future of human extinction that Locky and Jett must then race to undo. That is a properly tragic conceit, and it yields the saga's most resonant idea: protective violence, the love that annihilates its object in the act of shielding it. It also supplies the moral thesis, unusually clear-eyed for genre work pitched at a young audience — the difference between acting out and working through, between compulsively repeating an injury and metabolising it. Nixon acts out; the brothers, scrambling to reverse him, begin to work through. The time travel here functions as Nachträglichkeit, Freud's "afterwardsness", whereby an event becomes traumatic only once a later event retroactively assigns it meaning: Charlotte's childhood is not unbearable until the birthday that reinterprets it, and Nixon's crusade is not monstrous until the future reveals its price. In Deleuzian terms the film sustains a crystal-image, actual and virtual timelines coalescing until memory and prophecy are no longer separable — and the storyboard form, which suspends every moment between sketch and realisation, is uncannily well suited to that indeterminacy.

A personal note, because it is the truest thing I can offer. What moved me here is not any single image but the fact of the thing: a forty-minute proof of concept about a girl written out of existence, drawn frame by frame by brothers who have written themselves into it under their own names. The act of making is the refusal of erasure. Watch the sequence in which Charlotte's world is unmade and ask how many filmmakers three times Boaretto's age have risked a feeling that large. Forsaken Father is not yet the finished thing, and it does not pretend to be — it is Part 1, a door held open, with Part 2 already in development and a great deal left to say. But the hauntological melancholy underneath it, the sense of futures cancelled by somebody else's certainty, gives this adolescent adventure a gravity that lingers well past its running time. Boaretto is twenty-two. On this evidence, the second half cannot come quickly enough, and I intend to be watching when it does.

ALONE ON THE MOUND

There is a nine-minute hole in the middle of American sporting history, and John Jeffrey Condit and Tom Friend have climbed down into it with a torch. On 11 September 1985, while Pete Rose wept in his son's arms and Marge Schott wheeled a car onto the grass, the pitcher who had just surrendered hit number 4,192 sat down on the mound. The nation read it as sulking. Almost nobody read it as what it was: a man with nowhere left to stand. Alone on the Mound takes that one misread gesture and reverse-engineers an entire interior life from it, and the excavation is conducted with such fastidious research, such an embarrassment of first-rate interviews and such intelligent marshalling of archival footage that the film arrives feeling less assembled than exhumed. Its governing insight is Winnicottian to its marrow: Eric Show was a false self with a fastball. The paternal blow to the dashboard after a bad Little League outing is not merely backstory here but the film's primal scene, the moment the Name-of-the-Father is violently installed and a boy learns that his body is an instrument of somebody else's ambition. A father who makes a pitcher of his son because the boy egged a car with uncanny accuracy has already committed a category error about what a human being is for. Everything afterwards — the textbooks at spring training, the physics of finger pressure and spin, the guitar in hotel stairwells — is the true self trying to file an appeal.

What lifts the documentary beyond the melancholy-athlete subgenre is its unflinching anatomy of scapegoating. Show is a textbook Girardian pharmakos: the community's unease requires a body to carry it out of town, and the culture obligingly selects the awkward, bookish, politically compromised right-hander who happened to be standing sixty feet six inches from the wrong piece of history. Add Debord and the mechanism completes itself, because the record chase was not an event but a spectacle, and in the society of the spectacle a man's body language is admissible evidence while his inner life is not. Goffman would recognise the process exactly: stigma is conferred by the discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, and once conferred it becomes the lens through which every subsequent act is read. Hence the Andre Dawson beaning of 1987, where public sentiment convicted Show of intent before the ball had stopped rolling, and where his handwritten apology — composed alone in the clubhouse, in longhand, to a man who had just tried to chase him across a diamond — could not be entered into the record because the record was already closed. Forty years on, in an era of the viral freeze-frame, the four-second clip and the context collapse of the algorithmic feed, this is not a period piece. It is a documentary about how quickly we decide what a face means, and how rarely we revisit the verdict.

Stylistically, Condit and Friend work in the high-archival register that runs from When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast) through Asif Kapadia's Senna (2010, Asif Kapadia) and Amy (2015, Asif Kapadia), where the footage is not illustration but testimony, and where the grain of 1980s broadcast video acquires precisely the quality Barthes called the punctum — the detail that wounds because it insists that this happened, and that the man on the screen did not know what was coming. Morgan's edit has the confidence to let the past stand as a Deleuzian crystal-image, the actual and the virtual refracting through one another, and the whole enterprise is quietly haunted by what Derrida named mal d'archive: the archive fever that drives us back to the tape in search of an origin that keeps receding. Its closest recent cousins are exhilarating company. Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) (2025, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson) shares its thesis that virtuosity and self-destruction are often the same engine running in different gears; September 5 (2024, Tim Fehlbaum) shares its fascination with the live broadcast as a machine that manufactures meaning faster than anyone can verify it; Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui) shares its tenderness towards a body that the culture insisted was invulnerable. In fiction, the film's DNA is unmistakably that of The Iron Claw (2023, Sean Durkin), another study of patriarchal athletics as a slow-motion familial catastrophe, with glances towards the elegiac late-innings melancholy of Eephus (2024, Carson Lund), the pharmaceutical ruin of The Smashing Machine (2025, Benny Safdie), the body-as-sacrifice of The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky), and the pugilistic self-loathing of Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese). And when the final descent arrives — a man in a closet with guns, convinced he is being followed — the film knows perfectly well it has wandered into Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese) territory, where paranoia arrives as the last available form of narrative.

Certain moments detonate on a delay. The guitar functions throughout as a transitional object in the strictest Winnicottian sense, the thing that makes the unbearable survivable: a boy weeping in his bedroom after his father's hand, a grown man sitting in with jazz bands in whatever town the schedule had deposited him. Which is why the film's most devastating beat is a negative one. Walking back to the hotel after the Rose hit, Cara Mia asks her husband whether he wants to play, and he says no. Three letters, and a life quietly forecloses; the one door he had always been able to open, he now declines to touch. Equally extraordinary is the interview with Rose himself, conducted for this film ten days before his death and now, unrepeatably, his last in a studio — an accidental memento mori in which the supposed victor absolves the supposed villain of an offence he never took in the first place. The tragedy is pure Sophoclean irony: the anagnorisis arrives on the wrong side of the grave. And the coda, with Cara Mia throwing out the first pitch on 5 July 2025 to Bruce Bochy, is less a curtain call than a liturgy — a delivery forty years in the air, finally caught by the man who was crouching behind the plate the night it all came apart. That Collin Raye's new recordings carry "Guitar Man" and, inevitably, "Heart of the Matter" is not sentimentality but structure: the whole documentary is an argument about forgiveness arriving too late to be heard and mattering anyway.

A personal note, because it belongs here. I was moved to learn that Condit is the same young aspiring sportscaster whom Show asked to smuggle him out of the stadium the night before the record fell — which means this is not a documentary made about a witness but by one, a man who has carried a small, unresolved fragment of another person's suffering for four decades and has now spent a first feature giving it back with interest. That is an unusually honourable reason to pick up a camera, and it shows in every frame: the film never gawps, never prosecutes, never reaches for the cheap pathology when the harder compassion is available. It sits with "Why me?" — the oldest question in the Book of Job, and the question Simone Weil called malheur, affliction, the suffering that severs a person from the world rather than teaching them anything — and declines to dignify it with a tidy answer. Instead it offers the only thing that has ever worked: attention, paid late but paid in full, plus the reconciliation of estranged sisters and the recovery of a man's goodness from beneath his worst nine minutes. For a debut feature, this is remarkable work; for a portrait of addiction, faith and public humiliation, it is genuinely restorative. Keep going, both of you. You have proven you can make an audience mourn a stranger and then, astonishingly, absolve him. Eric Show spent a life being the wrong man in the wrong place; this film is, at last, the right one.