Credit: Lance Oppenheim

Credit: Courtesy of Nicolas Pereda/Pragda

Even more than my usual combinations of films within a single film, I acknowledge that this trio is even flimsier than usual, with most of their similarities stretching to only two points on the triangle. Two films are compact films running less than 75 minutes, while the other is longer than their combined runtime by over 40 minutes; two films are shot in Academy ratio while the third is in CinemaScope; two films are resolutely modest and fictional affairs covering, respectively, a day and a month (or so) in the lives of their characters, while the third takes on the form of a documentary sprawling out over the course of three years. But they share a few important things in common, the kind of connection that film festivals thrive on: above all else, they are scabrous comedies about a small group of people, typically thrust together in an enclosed space, trying to figure out each other’s motivations and varying levels of performance.

The first film, Nicolás Pereda’s Main Slate selection Everything Else Is Noise, is the most literal about this concept. Pereda occupies a curious place in the film festival landscape, as prolific as Hong Sang-soo and not far off from matching him in both the reflexivity of his filmmaking and the pleasantness of spending time with his recurring cast of actors—most notably Lázaro Gabino Rodriguez, one of the most expressive eye actors alive—yet never quite breaking through. His most recent “hits” were Fauna (2020) and Lázaro at Night (2024), willfully metafictional affairs involving multiple levels of reality. By contrast, Everything Else Is Noise, which will hopefully introduce Pereda to his widest audience, is straight as an arrow by his standards: a cellist composer enlists the apartment of one of her older colleagues in order to film an interview about her work. Taking place entirely within this domestic space—save for a magnificent overture observing an unplanned traffic jam outside the apartment that rivals Abbas Kiarostami’s “Orderly or Disorderly” in its organized chaos—the relationships that develop between the two women, the older cellist’s daughter, and the director and cinematographer as they deal with various hilarious delays form the crux of the film. In particular, the older composer’s advice to her friend to make up stories to liven up the interview calls into question each line of dialogue, enhanced by the use of two anecdotes thanked in the credits, James N. Kienitz Wilkins-style.

Shooting in CinemaScope in order to catch the five people as they move across the apartment, Pereda nevertheless relies heavily on what cannot be filmed, most notably in a remarkable sequence where the camera stays inside the apartment as the film crew goes out to the café to wait out one of several inexplicable power outages, laying the sounds of their conversation over the three women as they go about their own business. The two scenes of actual performance are entirely offscreen: the older cellist begins practicing close to the end of the traffic jam, while the younger cellist performs a highly modernist piece, asking the apartment’s other occupants to close their eyes. Unlike Alexandre Koberidze or Lois Patiño, Pereda does not ask the viewer to do so as well, and the fundamental unreadability of their reactions, somehow embodying both disgust and pleasure, typifies the experience of watching Everything Else Is Noise, a film of intent observation that earns its unexpectedly lovely and dramatic coda.

While Pereda’s previous film was just last year, Dan Sallitt (full disclosure: a good friend and one of my guiding lights as a critic) has only made six films in a forty-year career as a filmmaker. Coming seven years after his lovely Fourteen (2019), Currents world premiere What Can’t Be Mentioned (2026) operates as an only partially standalone sequel to the epochal The Unspeakable Act (2012), which featured Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron (also a friend) as Jackie and Matthew, siblings struggling with his imminent departure to college and her latent incestuous desire. That 91-minute film, while certainly not lacking in humor, was a fairly serious and emotional affair; this 62-minute film jettisons much of that baggage in favor of a fleet, all-out comedy that might be Sallitt’s most accomplished film to date.

Taking after the still never-bettered analysis scenes in The Unspeakable Act, Jackie is now herself a therapist in training—Caroline Luft, playing her therapist in a welcome one-scene Zoom cameo, is the only actor to return from the prior film—and in a sexually dysfunctional relationship with Anthony (Kyle McCormack). After just under half the film explores her attentive but not overly passionate relationship with her job/patients and reluctance to explore couples therapy (using her own profession as a cover), she receives an email from Matthew divulging that his wife Lily—Kit Zauhar, herself the director and star of This Closeness (2023) and Actual People (2021), two of Sallitt’s favorite films of recent years—is pregnant again after a past miscarriage. Jackie impulsively decides to stay with them for a week, and what follows is an extraordinary set of interactions, fueled by Jackie’s increasingly absurd red wine consumption, where Matthew’s ego and Jackie and Lily’s fascination with each other’s quirks only grows.

Medel’s work across their films with Sallitt has only sharpened in its range and expressiveness, and the drinking scenes in this, both in the apartment where all but a few moments of What Can’t Be Mentioned‘s second half have few rivals for the way alcohol blurs the lines between unintentional gaucheness and outright hostility that intentionally clashes with the natural friendliness of Medel’s demeanor and increasingly at-home body language. When the visit inevitably comes to an end, it is with its closest acknowledgment of the eponymous desire, which indeed might not be apparent to those who have not seen The Unspeakable Act, and its final shot is appropriately abrupt, with Jackie not so much accepting her situation as approaching it with a crucial extra bit of grace. Sallitt’s cinema, as with the tough pragmatism of two of his director heroes Maurice Pialat and Howard Hawks, is founded upon those hard-won small victories and changes in temperament, and What Can’t Be Mentioned depicts that crucible with as much vividness as he’s ever conjured.

Another magic act of a film comes with, if not a world premiere, then the closest thing to it: the late announcement of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Spotlight behemoth You Can See Everything, showing for only one night in the first screening actually advertised as such since its secret world premiere in Telluride. By now, most of the film’s twists and turns are common knowledge even those who have not yet experienced it, but I will preserve the precise nature of its surprises. The first half of You Can See Everything acts as a silent tug of war between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans: the thirty-four days that these three people spent together before the disgraced Theranos co-founder went to prison are posited as, in spite of the sunny locale, something akin to Sartre’s No Exit, a shifting tapestry of three unreadable faces often seen in discomfiting close-up, shimmering with uncommon beauty and energy as each attempts to ascertain the intentions of the other. The conduct is outrageous, and the scenarios that Fielder steers the couple into from his very first lurking appearance are even more absurd, but the distillation of his past, more overtly comedic/performative work into caginess forms a mirror to Holmes’s purported attempts at transparency and Evans’s increasing resistance towards the same.

When You Can See Everything rolls into its second half and begins folding in on itself, it is with Fielder and Oppenheim’s acute knowledge that something has been lost that cannot be recovered by traditional means. When Del Mar reappears, it is as a space haunted by the viewer’s memory of their own (mediated) experience there, a temporary domicile etched into the mind, and the uncanniness of the film’s eventual fourth major participant’s presence is only enhanced by her familiarity to many viewers. She acts as no mere co-conspirator, but as the appointed (yet biased) conscience and externalization of what Fielder is incapable of expressing about his subject. Her own complicity in crafting the web of images that forms Elizabeth Holmes—one of her final utterances, whether scripted or not, is almost word for word what Oppenheim’s fictionalization of Chris Hansen says in his other exploration of the mediated image this year, Primetime—is turned against her, against Evans, and even against Fielder and Oppenheim. The second half rapidly expands in its focus and geographical span, incorporating social media and cultural signifiers to capture all that has transpired in the past three years, and yet it might be one or two misremembered words that holds the key to everything. Seeing of course is not believing, but it’s also not even understanding; thus, You Can See Everything provides a canvas large and foreboding enough to allow the viewer to see all of these four people’s flaws and idiosyncrasies that it becomes an abyss of its own.

Credit: Courtesy of Julian Garcia