Minotaur's Moment: Zvyagintsev Just Changed the Game

The festival circuit in September 2026 is doing something it rarely manages — producing actual conversation instead of just content. And the conversation right now belongs to Andrey Zvyagintsev.

The Russian director's *Minotaur*, a political thriller that left Cannes with the Palme d'Or, has just released its first trailer, and it is exactly what you'd expect from the man who made *Leviathan* and *Loveless* — which is to say, it is cold, precise, and structured like a trap you don't see closing until it already has. What makes this moment stranger and more interesting than a typical awards-circuit victory lap is what Zvyagintsev said alongside it: that he would be "very proud, and very grateful" to represent France in the Oscar race for International Feature Film. A Russian filmmaker. Representing France. In 2026. The geopolitics alone could fill a dissertation, and he knows it, and the way he said it — measured, almost quiet — suggests he has thought about every angle of that sentence before letting it leave his mouth.

Meanwhile, Venice gave its Golden Lion to May el-Toukhy's *Woman Unknown* and handed John Malkovich Best Actor, which means the awards season now has two serious contenders arriving at the same time from opposite directions, and the conversation about what actually wins is already fracturing along the lines it always does — the prestige European arthouse entry versus the performance that nobody can ignore. Malkovich has been doing extraordinary work for forty years in roles that the industry reliably underestimates. Venice just made it harder to look away.

At TIFF, *Stuffed* — Jodie Comer and Harry Melling in a macabre original musical — is getting the kind of reviews that call the performances extraordinary and the film itself a structural disappointment, which is cinema's most familiar heartbreak. Comer in particular deserves better material than the material she keeps being given. She is doing the heavy lifting and the scaffolding keeps wobbling.

The other TIFF story worth time is *Onwards and Sideways* — Laura Linney and Rhys Ifans in a Parkinson's disease drama directed by John Madden — which is reportedly the kind of film that does exactly what it promises and does it devastatingly well. No formal innovation, no subversion. Just two actors at the absolute height of their craft, and a director who trusted them enough to get out of the way.

And then there is *Practical Magic 2*, which opened to thirty million dollars and a collective shrug. Hollywood spent real money asking whether anyone still cared about a 1998 box office bomb. The audience answered honestly.

Zvyagintsev, though. That's the name to remember. *Minotaur* is coming, and it already feels like the kind of film that arrives once and then sits in you permanently.