Festivals: IFFR
Rotterdam 2026 Review: NO HIT WONDER Scores Quite A Few Hits
Crack jokes all you want about the concept of German comedy films, but they exists and are often quite good. Case in point: Florian Dietrich's comedy No Hit Wonder, which played at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year and...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: GUNMAN Is One Shot That Hits
Festival people are the best. At the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a filmmaker I met for the first time almost immediately recommended I should watch Cris Tapia Marchiori's thriller Gatillero, released internationally as Gunman, and it turned out to be...
Rotterdam 2026 Wrap: All Our Coverage
The 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam has concluded, so here's our reviews, features, and interviews (so far).
Rotterdam 2026 Review: PELELIU, GUERNICA OF PARADISE
Anime was well represented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. The selection included Hosoda Mamoru's Scarlet (reviewed here), Aoki Yasuhiro's ChaO (reviewed here), and this peculiar one: Kuji Gorō's war drama Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. Based on a...
Rotterdam 2026 Interview: Guillaume Nicloux Talks About MI AMOR
The French writer, playwright, professor, actor and director Guillame Nicloux is no stranger to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In the past 30 years, he visited several times, and his films have often featured in the festival's program. This year...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: TEKENCHU, THE RITE OF THE NAHUALES, Beware Of The Were-Birds
Mexico has a rich tradition of genre films, both serious and outrageous, and that shouldn't be a surprise because the country has an incredible selection of mythologies and histories to pull inspiration from. Back in 2020, the Mexican director Carlos...
Rotterdam 2026: BAZAAR (MURDER IN THE BUILDING), On Lions in the Highlands, Or, The Eternal Life of Alfred Hitchcock
With Bazaar (Murder in the Building), Rémi Bezançon delivered the intended closing film of IFFR: a playful homage to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. One of Hitchcock's finest films, Rear Window, is about watching, listening, and cinema itself. Photojournalist Jeff, accustomed to...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: I SWEAR Is The Ultimate Crowd Favorite
This year's winner of the Audience Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is I Swear, Kirk Jones' biopic about John Davidson. To say it is a crowdpleaser is an understatement: from hundreds of votes, the film got a mean...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: FISH, FISTS AND AMBERGRIS Hits All Of Its Targets
The International Film Festival Rotterdam doesn't just do the no-budget debuts of beginning directors, it also allows glimpses of what is hot in other countries. This is the festival where we got introduced to the Korean classics of the past...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: BAZAAR (MURDER IN THE BUILDING), Funny Hitchcockian Shenanigans
Time flies when you're having fun, and that saying applies to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Last Saturday there was the screening of the closing film already, the world première of Rémi Bezançon's Le Crime du 3e Étage, to be...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: MI AMOR
The International Film Festival Rotterdam is host to many beginning directors, but that doesn't mean there are no regular returning guests. Writer, director and actor Guillaume Nicloux has visited the festival several times in the past 30 years, and for...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: ROID, An Ode to the Bengali Landscape and Its Cinema
Director Mejbaur Rahman Sumon's evocative tale from the Bengali countryside about love and fate, echoing the freshness of Satyajit Ray's cinema.
Rotterdam 2026 Review: TALKING TO A STRANGER Shows A Grief, Scarier Than Ghosts
We have been fans of director Adrián García Bogliano ever since his films Cold Sweat (reviewed here) and Here Comes the Devil (reviewed here), so we consider it good news when a new film by him comes out. Yesterday, the...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: THE NIGHT Holds Horrors And Wonders
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has started its 2026 edition. And even though the festival slants towards arthouse as always, there are plenty of genre films to enjoy as well. Case in point: Paul Urkijo Alijo's Gaua a.k.a. The Night,...
BOWELS OF HELL: Blue Finch Films Boards Sales On Rotterdam Selected Horror-Comedy
Ah, toilet humor. It exists both as a description of a type of humor, and currently it has served as a setting and location for a growing crop of movies within the horror genre (Scared Shitless, Holy Shit!, and Flush). ...
SICKO Official Trailer: Kazakh Thriller Heads to IFFR With a Sales Agent
A cash-strapped couple hatch a plan to solve their money troubles, but soon become embroiled in a toxic web of social media, violent criminality, and spiralling greed.
Rotterdam 2025 Interview: Toshiaki Toyoda
At the beginning of the year, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, I interviewed Toshiaki Toyoda about his film Transcending Dimensions, which premiered at the festival. But life got in the way, because as they say, life is what happens...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: THREE DAYS OF FISH Proves You Can Never Go Home Again
Peter Hoogendoorn debuted very strongly almost ten years ago with Tussen 10 en 12 (Between 10 and 12), a rigidly structured movie set in a limited time-space. In it, a family one by one get told bad news by two...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: VIDEOHEAVEN, Alex Ross Perry's Juggernaut Essay About Video-stores
Alex Ross Perry's new film is a video-essay in the style of Thom Andersen's seminal Los Angeles Plays Itself, in that it focuses on a place and location, and explores this place solely through deep analysis of footage from films...
Rotterdam 2025 Interview: RAINS OVER BABEL Director Gala del Sol Talks Mythic Worldbuilding, Queer Programming, Personal Healing
Gala del Sol, a visionary Spanish-Colombian debut director, talks fresh world building and personal healing.
