Review · Lead Story
Lysistrata in Lagos: On Akéba Okunola's Restless, Generous Third Feature
Set between a Lagos market and a rainy Lisbon winter, "Aunty, We Swore" refuses every easy frame the international festival circuit has come to expect from West African cinema — and arrives, finally, as something like a new grammar.
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More from the Newsroom
Three reads, three rooms of the building.
The Quiet Decade: How the disappearance of the mid-budget drama rewired American cinema — and the four producers trying to bring it back.
Read the feature →Cannes, day six: a stranger Palme contender emerges from the Directors' Fortnight, and the market is suddenly paying attention.
Read the dispatch →
Today's Reviews
The slate, as filed this morning.
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The Rain Will Come Tonight
Directed by Hiroko Tanaka · Japan / France, 2026 · 134 min
"A meditation on inheritance that earns its silences — and refuses to explain them."
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Pigeons of Guadalajara
Directed by Renata Saldaña · Mexico, 2026 · 98 min
"Loose, funny, and politically exact; a debut that announces a voice, not a brand."
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North Sea, January
Directed by Anders Vik · Norway / Denmark, 2026 · 117 min
"Cold light, colder grief. Vik has made the year's first undeniably rigorous film."
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Her Mother's Kitchen
Directed by Ifeoma Achebe · Nigeria / UK, 2026 · 109 min
"A domestic epic on a budget, and the most generous film you'll see this season."
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Dispatch · Festival
From Cannes: a competition that has remembered it is allowed to be strange.
Day six of the 78th edition, and the Croisette is no longer whispering about safe bets. Two features from first-time directors — one from Maputo, one from Tbilisi — have unsettled the slate in ways that suggest the Palme conversation is, finally, wide open.
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Critics' Roundtable
Does the theatrical window still matter?
Three of our critics — on opposite sides — on the year the studios finished reshaping release patterns, and what (if anything) is owed to the cinema itself.
"The window isn't a tradition — it's a contract. And the studios have, quietly, stopped signing it."
"Audiences don't owe theaters their loyalty. They owe them a reason to show up — and we haven't built one in twenty years."
"What 'matters' is the wrong frame. The question is what survives — and on which of the two Tuesdays it is allowed to."
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