CINE-FILE [Shaun Huhn]

Premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, THEYDREAM received the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression. A most-deserved award, as William D. Caballero’s documentary acts to resurrect family members that have passed to provide closure, celebration, and remembrance. Cultivated from a decades-long act of witnessing, Caballero chronicles his Puerto Rican family through a blend of animation styles, vérité footage, voicemails, audio recordings, interviews, and raw mother-son conversations. The result is a handmade offering to those who…

CINE-FILE [Ben Kaye]

Though BOREALIS is kick-started by a science-fiction-inflected catalyzing event, Heixan Robles—a celebrated cinematographer in Puerto Rico, here making his directorial debut—reveals early on that he’s far more interested in social storytelling than in any particular genre trappings. After a massive electromagnetic storm strikes Earth, the population awakens in an amnesiac state, their memories and identities completely erased, with a small section of the population even further turned into feral, zombie-like creatures. As Robles guides us through his…

CINE-FILE [Kat Sachs]

Cine-File co-managing editor Ben Sachs, also my husband, once wrote for this site that F.W. Murnau’s SUNRISE is “probably one of the greatest [movies] ever made about love.” I disagreed, arguing that I didn’t think it was very loving for a husband to try to kill his wife. It was my opinion that, at the bare minimum, romance should be free of attempted murder, something I expect as much from my auteurs as I do my spouse.…

CINE-FILE [Ben Sachs]

Though it was generally dismissed on first release, MASKED AND ANONYMOUS looks scarily relevant in the 2020s, which makes it worthy of serious consideration. The film imagines an alternate reality in which the United States resembles a Latin American dictatorship that’s been in a state of civil war for decades. Bob Dylan stars as Jack Fate, a legendary singer-songwriter who’s let out of prison to headline a benefit concert for the victims of the war that will…