Week Ending 9/11/26

I will keep this brief as I've been scrambling to get as many TIFF films reviewed before TIFF starts so I can then get to even more once I'm back from TIFF. As of now, I'm confident these 44 titles will be covered before the end.

As with previous years, I won't spam everyone's inbox with a TIFF daily dispatch each morning. So, if you want to follow along with the festival, please hit the TIFF tag instead. My curtain raiser went up yesterday and my first reviews were published right alongside this newsletter at 8am today.

As for the rest: there are a couple non-TIFF reviews below and a couple more coming next week. Everything else will be TIFF for the foreseeable future.

The above quote is from Dr. Mark Perlmutter during the opening scene of American Doctor. He's showing director Poh Si Teng photos taken of Gazan children they were forced to bar from ambulances so those with a chance of survival could be transported instead. Teng's justifiable reaction is one of horror as she tells him she'll need to pixelate the images for use in the movie. He quickly rejects that assertion, calling it journalistic malpractice if she does.

It's not the only instance of Perlmutter using that word. He later tells a group of medical professionals that not treating the Israeli genocide on the Palestinian people as a disease to root out would be medical malpractice on their part. He pulls no punches with his words about this tragedy after having gone to Gaza twice to help the wounded with his orthopedic expertise. The vehemence with which he speaks about Zionism makes Dr. Thaer Ahmad wince with worry.

Not because he disagrees. Ahmad is a Chicago native of Palestinian descent who spends the entire film partaking in a Sisyphean cycle of trying to cross Jordan's border only to be rejected by the American embassy—not Israeli. He shares these sentiments but knows the color of his skin and religion he practices make it impossible to say so aloud without being labeled an anti-Semite. The line between speaking the truth and hamstringing the cause is a fine one.

Perlmutter can cross it because he's a white Jewish American. He can let his emotions get away from him. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa toes it closer than most too, but from a place of precise calculation. He doesn't have a dog in this fight as a Californian of Pakistani descent whose parents practiced Zoroastrianism. His main concern is to educate the country on its own complicity by way of their tax dollars. His mounds of books on the conflict prove he can.

Is it an unlikely trio of doctors that Teng has collected? Not really. Not if you remember that they are all Americans simply doing their damnedest to advocate for children's lives and the sanctity of a Geneva Convention law that was once unfathomable to ignore: you do not target hospitals, period. It's succinctly pointed out that the latter war crime began when the first one being hit was met with zero retribution. Israel tested the waters and hasn't looked back.

So, it means something when an anecdote about the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis being "safe" because that's where the international community told health practitioners to go is met with a scoff. Netanyahu doesn't care about that. He's been laughing at an arrest warrant issued from the International Criminal Court way back in 2024. Maybe you could be optimistic after one was destroyed. Maybe you could delude yourself after three. But now? Nasser would be next.

Perlmutter, Sidhwa, and Ahmad keep going back (or try to) anyway. They see it as their duty to, as Sidhwa describes it, "achieve their moral potential." In many ways, this is the easy part for them. Working mass casualty events inside a hospital to the best of their abilities with limited resources is what they went to school to do. The more difficult part is the activism back home and becoming official voices for the issue on national television.

But that's the task they've absorbed as three of the very small group of people who are first-hand observers of what's going on. It's what the Palestinians they treated and the loved ones of those who didn't make it asked them to do. And they take it seriously—even going so far as visiting Capitol Hill to reason with republican legislators they know cannot be reasoned with. It's not lost on them that the conversation around Palestine is much different than Ukraine.

The footage Teng has compiled isn't for the faint of heart, but it demands to be seen if only to bear witness to what our own government tries to tell us isn't true. Perlmutter and Sidhwa's conversations with Palestinian doctors and nurses helps to humanize their terror and prove their heroism while Ahmad travels between protests and lectures to ensure the message never grows silent. And there can be no denying reality when the bombs literally start falling around them.

I think an invaluable part of the whole is also witnessing the lengths they must go to just do their jobs. Yes, the emotion is palpable and the hypocrisy is rampant (good on Sidhwa for calling out that the "video" evidence of tunnels under hospitals is just computer-generated animation devoid of concrete proof), but the bureaucratic hoops they must jump through to provide a basic human right is astounding. It's a miracle they are allowed in at all.

I also love what Teng says about creating a record. Will this film change hearts and minds of those who refuse to be changed? No. But it documents those who were on the right side of the issue before the (hopefully) inevitable shift to empathetic reason prevails. And it will educate those who are still willing to believe their eyes—like Perlmutter himself. Stem the propaganda, teach the youth, and watch them lead us towards the reckoning we desperately need.

Still struck by the concept of being the "oldest living person in the world" years after working on a movie about the Guinness World Records, documentarian Sam Green let fate guide him to the public birthday party of Susannah Mushatt Jones in 2015 just a few blocks from where he lived. She was asleep pretty much the whole time, but that's kind of perfect since a milestone like this proves to be something that everyone else hopes to celebrate more than yourself.

Whether a result of the lack of lucid footage of Jones or an epiphany that would have stuck regardless of Green capturing hundreds of hours of her stories from Alabama and New York City, the idea to keep this train rolling has now ballooned into a ten-year journey with six different holders of the iconic title. That's why the title The Oldest Person in the World is singular despite the revolving door of faces on-screen. It can only ever describe one at a time.

What we quickly discover, however, is that this film isn't really about them. Sure, they are the catalysts of its content and the through line to continue for another decade with plans of releasing a sequel, but they aren't the stars of the show. That distinction belongs to Green himself. Not just as a narrator contextualizing what he shot since so much is silent due to the fatigue of his subjects, but also as the lens from which that context is born. They're mirrors of his unknown.

Green approaches this realization with full cognizance considering the questions he's forced to ask are generally boilerplate and human interest-coded for general appeal. The interviewees become objects in many ways. Different versions of a single entity that are as unaware about how they've lasted this long as the next. They don't therefore have answers or insight beyond symbolizing the mystery of life. So, Green must turn the camera on himself for more.

Some of that is contrasting these women (all the titleholders are women after the family of one man who probably should have held the title couldn't procure the proper documentation to prove it) to his own aging mother. Some of it is using the birth of his son Atlas as a benchmark for how much time passed while his subjects all stay around one hundred and fifteen-years-old. Some of it is his own mortality via a cancer scare and his younger brother's suicide.

What then is the easier sell? That all these disparate pieces of his life are crucial to understanding the stories that connect Jones, Emma Morano, Violet Brown, Kane Tanaka, Sister André (née Lucile Randon), and Maria Branyas Morera? Or that their presence allows Green to better understand his own life, anxieties, and dreams? It's definitely the latter because that's the way you turn a rote exercise into an introspective and emotional journey into the soul.

And that's exactly what The Oldest Person in the World is. It's about the smile on the faces of Jones' niece and Brown and Morera's daughters. That same pride and love that we see on Green's face when interacting with Atlas or remembering his brother with his mother. The film becomes less about the subjects (record holders or Green's family alike) than it is about empathy and joy and embracing the miracle of life when you're young enough to hold on.

That's not to say these women aren't still young at heart—Kane Tanaka is almost never not shown downing a bottle of coke with pleasure. But there's also Sister André chastising God for letting her life drag on this long. There's Jones sleeping and Morano quietly watching the excitement surrounding her without the strength to join in. As much as we want to see them as benchmarks of possibility, they're also the proof that we should give life everything we have when we can.

Guinness editor Craig Glenday isn't wrong for joking that his idea of living is doing what he wants rather than wasting time in the gym for an "extra two days" in senior living. We can't all be Jeanne Calment chain-smoking until the age of one hundred and twenty-two. We can't all be as sharp as Violet Brown reciting a poem she learned a century ago. Some of us can only hope to make it to tomorrow and plan for a future with and without our own presence.

What does that say for the inevitable Part Two of Green's series? I don't know. Maybe it will show his recovery has been sustained. Maybe it will show a relapse. Maybe his talk about Atlas inheriting the challenge once he passes will take shape. Maybe we'll hear from the teen that he has no interest in becoming a filmmaker. All we know for certain is that we'll meet an eclectic bunch of centenarians to better contextualize our own existence and memories.

This week saw Accidental Texan (2024) added to the archive (cinematicfbombs.com).

Opening Buffalo-area theaters 9/11/26 -

• Don't Move at Dipson Capitol; Regal Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Epic - First Semester at Regal Elmwood
• The Fix at Dipson Flix, Capitol; Regal Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Haiwaan at Regal Elmwood
• Hanuman Ansh at Regal Elmwood
• Hope at Dipson Capitol; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Michael Mann's Manhunter: The Final Cut at North Park Theatre (select times)
• The Marching Band at North Park Theatre (select times)

"[The external drama] can punch us in the gut, but only to push Jimmy and Thibaut forward rather than usurp our attention. This is a film about brotherhood, first and foremost. It’s about love, vulnerability, and letting your truth sing." – Full thoughts at HHYS.

• Maremma at Regal Elmwood
• Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger at Dipson Amherst, Flix, Capitol; Scene One Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Practical Magic 2 at Dipson Amherst, Flix, Capitol; Scene One Market Arcade; AMC Maple Ridge; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Runner at Dipson Flix, Capitol; Scene One Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria, Quaker
• Sardar 2 at Regal Elmwood
• The Uprising at Dipson Flix, Capitol; Scene One Market Arcade; AMC Maple Ridge; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria, Quaker

Streaming from 9/11/26 -

• Go Team! (Netflix) – 9/11
• Mārama (Shudder) – 9/11

"Their third act is a bloody and bold bid at reclamation. More than one woman’s vengeance, Mary is a symbol of familial, cultural, and indigenous retribution." – Full thoughts at HHYS.

• Rich Flu (Hulu) – 9/11

"Similar to the director’s previous work on The Platform, things get dark and violent fast. It’s all a bit messy, but it does work." – Full thoughts at HHYS.

• Tribeca 25 (Netflix) – 9/11
• Bouchra (MUBI) – 9/12

"It’s an inventive approach turning the whole into a meta film for Bouchra to exorcise demons and reconcile emotions. That sense of personal attachment is apparent as you can tell this subject is close to the filmmakers’ hearts." – Full thoughts at The Film Stage.

• In the Grey (Starz) – 9/12
• Plastic Beauty (Netflix) – 9/17

Now on VOD/Digital HD -

• Cookie Queens (9/8)
• Hot Spot (9/8)
• Lockjaw (9/8)
• Moana [2026] (9/8)
• Mutiny (9/8)
• One Night Only (9/8)
• Remake (9/8)
• Sheep in the Box (9/8)
• Drive Through Fire (9/11)
• Knightfall (9/11)