MEDUZA (2025)—Review

A little over halfway into Roc Morin’s essay documentary Meduza (2025) there’s footage of a murmuration of birds whose wavering shape seems to set the template for the film’s narrative meanderings, which are stylistically reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s eccentric documentaries but without Herzog’s quirky narration. The association is enhanced by Morin having produced Herzog’s Family Romance LLC (2019).  

Meduza offers an intriguing cast of characters ranging from war-torn villages in the Ukraine to the Ecuadorian rainforest, with stops along the way in Hawaii, Japan, and India, rhyming and braiding themes throughout to create a composite construction evocatively and crisply shot by Morin and atmospherically scored by Filip Mitrović. Production marks are high. Meduza’s digital release on Prime has been tied to the 4-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. 

Recent projects such as Porcelain War (2024) and 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025) have addressed the tragic circumstances visited upon Ukraine through varying cinematic perspectives and techniques. Similar to Porcelain War, Meduza’s central character, Pavlo Aldoshyn (nicknamed “Pasha”) is an artist conscripted into military service, an actor who had been cast to portray a sniper in a film prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion who then channeled that skill set into becoming an actual sniper in an artillery brigade on the war’s front line. 

Morin and his producer and longtime film collaborator Leïla Wolf met Pavlo when he was on brief leave from the front line. They were struck by what they perceived to be Pavlo’s unique spiritual perspective of himself in the context of the war. They set out to witness and chronicle his psychological transformation through a series of interviews conducted in Kyiv, Kharkhiv, and near the front line over the first two years of the war. Perhaps because he was already an actor, Pavlo is able to dramatically articulate his inner life, his dreams, and his spiritual mythology to provide the film’s core; but, with all due respect to his military service, this proves a problematic core in that—as they say—his acting technique shows. Several of his monologues feel rehearsed and staged, weakening the film’s authentic effort to express the intimate cost of war. 

This doesn’t demean, however, the astute and fascinating amplifications explored by director Morin. It’s in those (again) Herzogian amplifications where Meduza is most effective though it does raise a chicken-and-egg inquiry as to whether Morin pursued external themes to underscore Pavlo’s inner life or whether inversely the external footage influenced Pavlo’s interviewed monologues? Either way, the effort to meld the two is an admirable and noteworthy construction. 

Some of the film’s images—such as the wavering murmuration of birds previously mentioned—are hypnotic. The opening sequence of the forging of artillery shells connotes a choreographed industrial beauty that sadly leads to the devastating destruction of villages bombed beyond recognition. Morin has a gifted eye, however, and manages to sift abstracted beauty out of the debris of war while we listen to lovely accordion music played by Fedor, a villager from Zaporhizia, Ukraine. 

Morin also has a literary gift for metaphor. “Meduza” is a word used in various Slavic (e.g., Russian, Croatian, Serbian), Baltic, and Romance languages that translates into “jellyfish” and, indeed, jellyfish serve as a recurring metaphor throughout the film. Voiced over the image of jellyfish washed upon a shore, Pavlo ruminates: “When you see a jellyfish on the shore you have a strange attitude towards it. You don’t know what it is. It is non-water. It is non-animal. It is non-entity. And your attitude towards that point on the shore is exactly that: non-existence.” Though that statement is problematically vague, Morin then centers the metaphor by segueing into a sequence where Artyom lierusalymskyi, Director of Museum of Jellyfish in Kyiv, Ukraine rhapsodizes on the marine animal in scientific detail. 

Meduza next profiles Yoshinori Hasegawa, Kazusa DNA Research Institute in Chiba, Japan who seeks to unravel the phenomenon of immortality, using advanced machines to study the DNA of organisms. He expounds on how jellyfish regenerate in response to stimuli. Their cells grow younger and retract into an orb, which then becomes a new jellyfish. 

From there we meet Dmytro Moldovanov, a painter in Parutyne, Ukraine, 10 km from the front line, whose witness of the war’s atrocities underscores his creative necessity to counter destruction with art. When the Russians blow up a nearby hydroelectric plant flooding the local zoo and drowning the animals in their cages, Moldovanov channels his sorrow into painting the departing souls of the animals as jellyfish with their tendrils like wings. 

The tagline on Meduza’s theatrical poster quotes Pavlo: “A sniper takes the final portrait.” Whether killing a hare, or the enemy, Pavlo apologizes to the life he is taking even as he takes aim through the reticle’s cross on the scope of his rifle, which he compares to the lens of a camera. The crosshairs provide a focused intersection of two paths, two lives. Having been a photographer in his civilian life, Pavlo admits that his experience as a sniper has induced mixed feelings about the camera’s lens. The only difference between a photographer and a sniper, he explains, is that the sniper takes the final photograph. When a sniper gets his target in the crosshairs of his rifle, he is taking the last portrait of that person. 

Morin then segues to Los Angeles art collector Maher Ahmad who combs flea markets and antique stores for photo albums from the past which he understands to be the photographs that finalize an otherwise unknown life. He remembers his partner of ten years succumbing to AIDS and how he felt compelled to take a photograph of his corpse in the body bag being carried out of the hospital: again, the final photograph. 

Meduza endeavors to suggest hope and remedy in the face of Russia’s tragic onslaught on Ukraine, whether through a belief in reincarnation among the members of the Utekar family in India who are convinced that the soul of their patriarch has entered the body of his grandson coincidentally born on the same day. Or the alternate theory of reincarnation proposed by Nanki Callara, a native of the Achuar Territory, Ecuador, who believes that humans reincarnate as birds, trees, rain, fire. Or the ornithological perspective that recorded memory survives extinction, as with the account relayed by Patrick Hart of the LOHE Bioacoustic Lab in Hilo, Hawaii of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, which was declared extinct after the last remaining male was recorded singing a mating call to a female that never answered. Still, there remains a bird that imitates the call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō. The hope is that something we have lost will somehow come back to us, perhaps in a different form. 

That shifting of form receives the bookend treatment in Meduza from the opening sequence of the forging of artillery missiles to a performance of “The Voice of Hell’s Arrow” by composer Roman Grygoriv of Kyiv, Ukraine who plays a repurposed MLRS BM-27 Uragan Missile with a bow backed by a chamber orchestra. 

Perhaps that will be the score for the requisite question: after the war is over, will Pavlo be able to be the man, the artist, he was before the war?

THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE (2025)—An Evening Class Question For Hasan Hadi

Iraqi director Hasan Hadi’s first feature The President’s Cake (2025) had its U.S. premiere at the 48th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival (“MVFF”). The first Iraqi feature to play at Cannes, The President’s Cake won the festival’s Camera D’Or. It also made history for being the first Iraqi film to make the official 15-film shortlist for Best International Feature Film (formerly Foreign Language Film) for the 98th Academy Awards scheduled to broadcast mid-March, although it did not advance to the final list of five nominees. Regardless, the honor and achievement is considerable. 

Having streamed The President’s Cake to preview for MVFF, I was delighted that my recent visit to San Francisco afforded the opportunity to catch the film in theater introduced by executive producers Chris and Eleanor Columbus and accompanied by director Hasan Hadi. Picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, The President’s Cake opened in Bay Area Theaters February 13, including AMC Metreon 16, San Francisco. In Boise, Idaho, it opens at The Flicks on February 27. 

As I wrote for MVFF: “Negotiating, cajoling, begging, at times even stealing, Lamia, her pet rooster Hindi, and her friend Saeed range a day in the city, offering finely-drawn glimpses of Baghdad in the early aughts (with murals of Saddam Hussein painted on nearly every wall), contrasted against the impoverished but tranquil marshes where Lamia lives with an infirm grandmother. She and Saeed frequently play a game where they try to outstare each other; a practice in perseverance and focus, essential to surviving the rain of American bombs as Hussein’s dictatorial regime nears the end of its 24-year run.” 

After the screening, San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Anne Lai joined Hadi for conversation, during which I was able to briefly converse with the director. Hadi had mentioned that he was proud of the film’s multiple layers and that he believed it could bear repeated viewings. I confirmed this was so as—in my second viewing—I noticed things I had not noticed before. Early in the film, Lamia (in a wholly natural performance by Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is rowing across the river with her grandmother Bibi (again, another unpretentious characterization by first-time actor Waheed Thabet Khreibat) who offers Lamia this advice: “if you look deeply into the river, God promises the pure in heart that they shall see the image of their loved one". Later in the film, Lamia looks deeply into the river and does see the image of her loved one. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t catch this the first go-round. 

I then asked Hadi: “In our current moment here in our country we have a president who wants to put his face and his name on everything, and I was amazed in your film that it seemed like every wall had a portrait of Saddam Hussein. In terms of the logistics of location shooting, are those portraits still there or did you put them up to re-create the time period?” 

Hadi confirmed that he re-created the time period and recalled that—when he was a kid—Saddam had over forty million images of himself throughout Iraq, whether in posters, framed portraits both painted and photographed, and statues. Everywhere he went there were at least two or three images of Saddam. Walking home from school—sometimes with a good grade, sometimes with a bad grade—he would analyze all the images of Saddam’s face to determine “Oh, he’s laughing. He’s mad.” It was common to see his face everywhere. 

Powerful men, he added, usually like to celebrate their birthday and are accustomed to putting their names everywhere. Iraq is one of the oldest civilizations of the world with some very old structures. Saddam managed to put his mark even on them. He would modify them. 

“I don’t want to get too political,” Hadi admitted humbly, “because it took me almost three years to get this film made, but what I would want to say to people is that freedom is a fragile thing and needs to be protected. It’s there, but then it can go away rapidly.”

MOSTLY BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL 18 (2026)—PREVIEW

Ah, how time flies. I can recall when Ruthe Stein’s Mostly British Film Festival was nothing more than a wee tyke. The festival has all grown up now and turned into a proper little adult as it blooms into its 18th edition at San Francisco’s Vogue Theater (February 5-12, 2026) with an array of award-winning movies from the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India. Further, the festival has entered into a prestigious partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), which has provided the program with three films that BFI helped complete. 

Opening night for Mostly British commemorates the life and talent of Richard Burton with a double bill comprised of a revival screening of Tony Richardson’s Look Back In Anger (1959) coupled with an advance screening of Marc Evans’ Mr. Burton (2025), the revelatory British biopic about the early life of Welsh actor Richard Burton and his relationship with his insinuated gay mentor Philip Burton. Harry Lawtey convincingly channels the commanding sensuality of the impoverished young Richard Jenkins, who under the tutelage of his high school teacher Mr. Burton (in a compassionately restrained performance by Toby Jones), discovers his considerable acting talent under Mr. Burton’s guidance, with his career insured and furthered by being adopted and supplied with Mr. Burton’s last name. Second fathers rarely achieve such a vital role in releasing the potential of their adopted sons. As value added, Kate Burton will reminisce on the Vogue stage about life with her famous father and what it was like to be parented by Elizabeth Taylor.

  

Producer, director, actor, fashion designer and author Sadie Frost brought her first directorial feature-length documentary Quant (2021) to Mostly British editions back and now returns with Twiggy (2024), likewise screening on the festival’s opening day. In London’s “swinging sixties” Twiggy, aka Dame Lesley Lawson (née Hornby), burst onto the scene at 16 as the waifish androgynous model with the Raggedy Ann eyes. She was the first model that I ever knew by name and for a while she seemed to be everywhere (here in the United States at least due to the marketing prescience of Diana Vreeland). But after she retired from her modeling career, I lost track of her and so it has been illuminating to see how she carried on over the decades, successfully amplifying her persona into movies, Broadway, the recording industry and subsequent fashion and modeling endeavors. Her more recent appearances in Frost’s documentary, as well as in the soon-to-be-distributed Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (2025), reveals a seasoned personage comfortable in her own fame and fascinating in her familiarity. 

Frost, whose father David Vaughan was a psychedelic artist who did work for the Beatles in the 1960s, has an experiential grasp of the era that revolutionized my generation, bringing it all to the foreground with entertaining dexterity and a heady ensemble of talking heads: Paul McCartney, Lulu, Dustin Hoffman, Joanna Lumley, Brooke Shields, Tommy Tune, Ken Russell, and on and on.

   

The History of Sound (2025) directed by Oliver Hermanus and starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor (“two of the hottest young actors across the pond”) is, arguably, one of my favorite films, if not my favorite, from the last year and I was crestfallen that it didn’t receive a single Oscar® nomination, not only for its heartfelt performances but its stellar score. 

This haunting ode to synesthesia wounded my heart with its regretful practices of longing and unfulfilled desires and is not to be missed at the festival for fear of your own regrets. It offers the story of two young men, a musical prodigy (Mescal) and a musicologist (O’Connor) whose mutual love for the folk songs of New England and their efforts to record them for posterity provide a temporal overlap that gives shape to their physical intimacy. Which is to say that sound provides form. In this incandescent film memory is shaped by sound.

  

Both My Father’s Shadow (2025) and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024) are children-in-peril narratives situated in Africa during the political tumult of the Nigerian 1993 presidential election and war-torn Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1980. Perhaps, because of the severity of the atrocities at play, both films lean into magical realism through the point of view of children victimized by external circumstances they can’t fully comprehend. 

Akinola Davies Jr.’s feature length film debut My Father’s Shadow, co-written by his brother Wale Davies, stars Sope Dirisu as Folarin, the father whose frequent absence has elevated him into a mythic stature by his two sons Aki and Remi. Joining him on a day trip into the city of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria, the two boys are forced to inadvertently confront the dark secrets their father harbors; both his involvement with a woman other than their mother, and revolutionary activities that presage his ultimate absence. The film had its world premiere at the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Nigerian film to be selected for the festival's Official Selection. It won the Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or. Critically acclaimed, My Father’s Shadow received numerous awards and nominations, including a British Independent Film Award and two Gotham Independent Film Awards. It was also selected as the UK's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, though it did not make the final shortlist.

  

Embeth Davidtz’s feature directorial debut Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is seen through the eyes of eight-year-old Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller (in a remarkably embodied and feral performance by Lexi Venter) and is based on Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War. 

"Don't let's go to the dogs tonight" is an idiom meaning "let's not ruin our evening" or "let's not let things fall apart," often implying the avoidance of rowdy, messy, or excessive behavior. It originates from a poem by A.P. Herbert which describes avoiding a night out for fear of encountering older, rowdy people ("mother will be there") and is commonly used as the title for Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, suggesting a chaotic, dysfunctional, or deteriorating situation, often in the context of partying or personal decline. Not only does this incriminate Bobo’s mother, Nicola Fuller (Davidtz adds her acting chops to the project), whose sketchy alcoholic behavior signals a psychological doom spiral, but likewise reflects the chaotic, unsettled, and often desperate life of Bobo’s white family in ‘80s Rhodesia, highlighting themes of dysfunction, political instability, and the decline of colonial life. It bravely tackles the difficult subject of how colonial practices of racism are learned. As value added to the festival, Embeth Davidtz will be Zoom interviewed before the screening. And as an aside, for those unable to attend the festival, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight has been recently added to stream at Netflix.

  

As a so-called “gay” man watching so-called “gay” narratives, I frequently wonder how much cultural subtext and subcultural humor is truly being appreciated by so-called “straight” audiences? For example, Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers (2025) centers a middle-aged man in an exasperated scenario caring for four elderly women. Even before the AIDS pandemic anointed gay men with the near-archetypal role of caregiver, gender-variant individuals in multiple cultures throughout the world and over time have traditionally been assigned the onerous tasks of caring for the sick and tending to the dead. That’s a historical fact most folks might be completely unaware of and have little concern about, but that’s where queer humor—specifically, queer gallows humor—can win over even the coldest of hearts, eliciting compassion for such burdensome responsibilities. Four Mothers’ script, co-written by Darren and Colin Thornton with Gianni Di Gregorio, deftly lets audiences in on all the gay jokes while opening the story out into a wide-eyed observation of mother-son relations and the dangers of forgetting to care for oneself while caring for others. A script, however, even as clever a script as this one, is only as good as its performances and this ensemble—headed by the ever-delightful Fionnula Flanagan—effectively mines every laugh and every insight without much to-do. You won’t know whether to cry with exhaustion or laugh with relief, but the filmmakers have insured you’ll combine the two.

  

You never know which pub Willy the Shake will haul himself up to for a pint. It happens to be Kenny’s Bar in Paul Kennedy’s Dead Man’s Money (2024), his droll and lilting reimagining of Shakespeare’s MacBeth where Young Henry (Ciarán McMenamin) and his wife Pauline (Judith Roddy) become concerned that Old Henry will write them out of his will and hand their inheritance over to his new lady friend the Widow Tweed. Worried that they’re not going to get what’s coming to them, Young Henry and Pauline—ignoring the pricking in their thumbs—get far more than they bargained for in this dark hard-hearted comedy of errors.

  

Harris Dickinson’s swoonworthy performances in The Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Babygirl (2024) didn’t prepare me for his confident and credible feature film directorial debut Urchin (2025), which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won him the FIPRESCI Prize and Frank Dillane the section’s Best Actor Award for his portrayal of Mike, a young homeless man struggling with poverty and drug addiction. 

With unflinching observation coupled with keen compassion, Dickinson ushers in a new generation of British realism, taking viewers into a world from which they would customarily look away. In an interview with Dazed magazine, Dickinson has described Urchin (originally entitled Dream Space) as being about mental health and "people who fall between the cracks" and "the ways in which the system fails people in certain ways.” 

Frank Dillane, who I know from the television series Fear the Walking Dead (where he plays Nick Clark, a similarly deadbeat character recovering from drug addiction) strengthens what could hazardously become type-casting with a fierce quality of wanting to overcome the thrall of recidivism, opening our hearts to how difficult it truly is to overcome shadows in a world where you’ve been cast away and denied entrance to normality.

  

Mostly British closes with I Swear (2025), which tells the true story of John Davidson who has Tourette syndrome but doesn't know it. In fact no one in his small Scottish hometown of Galashiels knows it or is even aware of it as a medical condition—they deem him rude and ripe for the nuthouse—until after being interviewed at the age of 16 for the 1989 BBC documentary series Q.E.D. (John’s Not Mad), then again at age 30 for The Boy Can't Help It (2002), and yet again at 37 for Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It (2009), his activism on behalf of those with Tourettes kicks into high gear. The BBC describes him as “a nationally known ambassador for the condition." 

Robert Aramayo won Best Lead Performance at the British Independent Film Awards for his perfectly-pitched portrayal of Davidson, learning how to become independent in the world and then advocating for the independence and acceptance of others. En route is perhaps one of the most ribald and hilarious meet-cutes I’ve ever seen on-screen when John meets a young woman with Tourettes for the first time.

 

SCARLET (2026)—REVIEW

There is no question that Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet (2026) is as beautiful as it is sentimental, which poses a query as to the association between beauty and sentiment. At a 1998 symposium entitled “Beauty: A Conference in the Healing Arts” sponsored by the Pacifica Graduate Institute, panelists James Hillman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ciel Bergman (née Cheryl Bowers), Suzi Gablik and Julian White circumambulated that query. 

American painter Ciel Bergman outlined her approach to beauty as rooted in a post-modern, environmentally conscious, and deeply subjective framework that moved away from traditional irony (i.e., Warhol’s soup cans) toward an emotional, and symbolic reclamation of beauty. The basic premises of her attachment of sentimentality to beauty included what she termed “objectifying the subjective”, reclaiming beauty as meaningful and transcendent, engaging in passionate “environmental affinities”, and using a symbolic visual language intended to convey deep feeling. In essence, Bergman did not view beauty as mere decoration, but as a "passionate" tool to (re)connect with the world, nature, and the human spirit. 

Julian White described sentimentality as the frontage road to the highway of true emotion: both going in the same frenzied direction. Ursula LeGuin defined sentimentality as the obverse of cynicism. In notable contrast to Bergman, James Hillman viewed beauty not as a sentimental, subjective emotion, but as an inherent, objective, and cosmological force. He argued that true beauty is often mistaken for, or reduced to, mere "prettiness" or sentimentality. Instead, Hillman proposed beauty is a "visceral" aesthetic response that grabs us, commanding attention, and connecting the individual soul to the world. 

Which brings us to Scarlet. In his director’s statement Hosoda explains earnestly: “As we witness heartbreaking conflicts around the world, I believe that finding love and choosing to live together in unity is what will lead us towards something better. That’s why I want to share this new film with the world—now more than ever.” Using anime as his “passionate” tool “to (re)connect with the world, nature, and the human spirit”, Hosoda’s pitched sentiments come off as an overtly nostalgic response to a fractured, modern world. The balance between the sentimentality of his themes and the beauty of his animation is off just enough as to cheapen the sentiment and demean the beauty, which is unfortunate because the animation—especially in its landscapes—is epic in scale (if David Lean made anime….) and—in an evident citation to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—I’m sure Scarlet will be a thrill ride on IMAX as the titular character springboards from death through time into a three-dimensional Otherworld where the photorealism of Hosoda’s animation seems an impressive simulation of beauty more than the cosmologically forceful beauty defined by Hillman.  

Scarlet opens on Bay Area IMAX screens February 6, notably in San Francisco at the AMC Metreon 16 and the Apple Cinemas Van Ness IMAX. In Boise, Idaho, Scarlet opens on February 6 at the Regal Edwards IMAX.