Keep in mind the audience are late boomers and not into "weird" movies, aka, my parents

Summary: 9/10: Panahi's defiant meta-documentary exposes the mechanics of authoritarian control through the lens of village superstition, proving that Iran's attempt to silence one of its greatest filmmakers has only made his voice more essential.

It's a small miracle that this film exists at all. In 2010, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison; and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, writing screenplays, and international travel by Iranian authorities for what they called "making propaganda against the system." He made films anyway, smuggling them out of Iran on USB sticks, continuing to work in defiance of a regime determined to silence him. In 2022, shortly after completing this film, he was arrested again and detained for seven months before being released following a hunger strike.

No Bears proves Panahi hasn't lost his edge; if anything, his filmmaking has sharpened with constraint. Working in a documentary style, he plays a fictionalized version of himself directing a film remotely from a rural Iranian village near the Turkish border, unable to cross because of the government's travel ban. What unfolds is a piercingly self-aware exposition on invisible borders, superstition, and the stories that maintain authoritarian control, whether religious or governmental.

The villagers warn Panahi not to walk a certain path because of bears. There haven't been bears in the area for years, maybe decades, but the belief persists, passed down from generation to generation. Without education, without anyone willing to question inherited wisdom, the imaginary becomes as powerful as the real. The path remains forbidden not because of actual danger but because everyone agrees to believe in danger that no longer exists.

Panahi's political critique is devastating. The film explores what the "primitiveness" of village life, but it's not condescension; it's recognition that these dynamics are universal. My own grandmother had superstitions that made no logical sense but governed her behavior completely. And how many of us still say "gesundheit" or "God bless you!" when someone sneezes? The difference is scale and consequence. In the village, a photograph Panahi allegedly took becomes "evidence" in a morality case against a young woman, and suddenly unconfirmed belief, or the bear that may or may not be there, has the power to destroy lives.

Panahi structures the film around two parallel stories: the film-within-the-film about a couple trying to escape Iran, and his own entanglement in village politics when his camera becomes a tool of surveillance and accusation. The boundaries between the two narratives, between fiction and documentary blur deliberately; we're never quite certain what's staged and what's real, which is precisely the point. In a country where the state controls narrative, where a filmmaker can be imprisoned for telling stories the regime doesn't like, the act of making any film becomes inherently political.

The film reminded me of something Sam Harris once said: "I don't get that — people going to war over religion. I don't know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if you're going to war over religion, now you're just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend." The villagers' insistence on invisible bears, the morality police's enforcement of arbitrary rules, the government's persecution of artists: it's all the same mechanism. Belief systems that can't withstand scrutiny require force to maintain, whether that force comes from social pressure or state violence.

Panahi's brilliance lies in connecting dots between the microcosm of village superstition to the macrocosm of authoritarian control. Both depend on unquestioned belief, both punish deviation, both create borders that exist only in collective imagination but have entirely real consequences. The filmmaker can't cross into Turkey not because of any physical barrier but because his government says he can't. The woman faces punishment for living her own life outside the villagers' imaginary borders set up to maintain control over her.

No Bears won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival; his award was accepted by two of the film's actors in his absence, the audience giving a standing ovation for a filmmaker imprisoned for refusing to stop making films.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_odyssey_2026

Summary

After the Trojan War, Odysseus faces a dangerous voyage back to Ithaca, meeting creatures like the Cyclops Polyphemus, Sirens, and Calypso along the way.

Director
Christopher Nolan

Writer
Christopher Nolan

Cast

• Matt Damon as Odysseus
• Tom Holland as Telemachus
• Anne Hathaway
• Zendaya
• Lupita Nyong'o
• Robert Pattinson
• Charlize Theron
• Benny Safdie
• Jon Bernthal
• John Leguizamo
• Elliot Page
• Himesh Patel
• Samantha Morton

Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Metacritic: 88

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/vidya@piefed.social/p/2213425/matt-damon-as-odysseus-from-christopher-nolans-odyssey-joins-fortnite-just-as-homer-alw

So why hasn’t IMAX just built more? According to IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond, the answer is surprisingly simple: It isn’t practical.

[...]

“The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, we rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we could take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”

When asked why IMAX couldn’t just manufacture brand-new 15/70 film projectors, he said the idea simply isn’t realistic.

“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film, it’s not practical. So we’ve got to find them, and we’ve got to rebuild them, which is what we did for The Odyssey. But can all 2,000 of our theaters have the film projectors? No, there’s just not that many around. But I think we could continue to grow it.”

In other words, the issue isn’t that IMAX doesn’t want more 70mm screens. The original projectors stopped being manufactured decades ago, meaning the company now has to hunt down existing machines, restore them and keep them running instead of producing new ones from scratch.

Building an entirely new production line for a format used by only a handful of blockbuster releases would be an enormous investment, and films made specifically for IMAX 1570 are still incredibly rare.

As incredible as the format looks, Christopher Nolan is still the exception rather than the rule. Most cinemas simply can’t justify investing in specialist equipment for a format that only comes around every few years.

"Fran and I have been writing a script for the next Tintin film because 15 years ago, Steven Spielberg directed a Tintin film and I produced it," Jackson exclusively tells Gold Derby. "The idea was that then I was supposed to go straight onto a second one, and we'd swap the roles, so I'd direct the second one and he'd produce it. It's just taken 15 years to get there, unfortunately, a bit late. But it's a timeless story. So we just wrapped up. So probably the next film that I'd actually direct is a Tintin movie."