From top to bottom: Moments from It Was Just an Accident, Dead Man’s Wire, and Bugonia. Photo: Focus Features, NEON, Row K Entertainment |
Our cinema has been taken hostage, it seems, by hostage movies and kidnapping dramas. But not the kind where Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson must rush in and save the day. This most recent spate of films leaves genre theatrics behind and instead uses the power dynamics of captivity as a jumping-off point for other conversations. Last year’s Venice Film Festival premiered Yorgos Lanthimos’s demented sci-fi-adjacent drama Bugonia and Gus Van Sant’s crime thriller Dead Man’s Wire, while at the same time the Toronto International Film Festival was premiering Romain Gavras’s comic-epic Sacrifice. Earlier in 2025, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. All these pictures share a premise that involves the downtrodden grabbing ahold of someone with great power — an always-compelling concept, but perhaps there’s a reason they have flourished at this particular moment.
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This week on Good One, Griffin Newman and Alison Willmore (co-host of Critical Darlings) take a look at the Academy's complicated relationship with comedy. |
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“We need to know without a doubt that she is alive and that you have her.” |
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