Le Journal

Democracy has fallen and the most evil forces in the galaxy have no checks on their virtually unlimited power. We’re talking, of course, about the new trailer for Maul — Shadow Lord, of which Disney shared a new teaser for today. The series will pick up where Star Wars: The Clone Wars left off, and Maul’s got one thing on his mind: revenge. “Times have changed. I will show you the galaxy for what it truly is. See things from a new perspective,” he intones as the trailer starts. Within the clip, Maul meets a “disillusioned Jedi Padawan” who apparently survived Order 66 and now has potential to be his new apprentice. Described as a “pulpy adventure,” Disney shares that the plot will otherwise focus on “Maul plotting to rebuild his criminal syndicate on a planet untouched by the Empire.” Untouched for how long, it’s hard to say—as Maul hears by the end of the trailer, “the Emperor wants you dead.” Dave Filoni, the mind behind Clones Wars, The Bad Batch, Rebels, and several other Star Wars series also created Maul — Shadow Lord. Sam Witwer, Gideon Adlon lead the voice cast along with the newly-minted Oscar nominee Wagner Moura. Maul — Shadow Lord will debut on Disney+ on April 6; two episodes will air each well until its conclusion on May 4.

Sundance Film Festival is wrapping up its storied run in Park City, Utah, just a few months after founder and frequent festival emcee Robert Redford died. Sundance is bringing a chapter to a definitive close, preparing to start anew in Boulder, Colorado in 2027, perhaps becoming a less isolated and dense collision of indie film nerds, industry players, out-of-place marketeers, and unflappable skiers. But regardless of what that move brings, 2026’s festival offers a familiar selection of documentaries with dry descriptions, dramas from some of the smallest filmmaking communities in the world, and Hollywood talent striving to make their tiny film stand out amid the packed program. The A.V. Club‘s most anticipated movies of Sundance 2026 count bleeding-edge genre films and long-gestating lost films alike as we unearth the hidden gems among the 90 feature films that made the cut. While we’ll be covering Sundance 2026 from Chicago, publishing dispatches and features throughout the festival’s run from January 22 to February 1, we’ll still be watching as much as the poor parka-clad souls standing in line one last time in Utah. As the festival begins, our preview can help prepare prospective ticket-seekers for what’s in store, ranging from timely immigration documentaries, insightful artist biographies, searing Japanese delinquent dramas, and the greatest party of Black luminaries ever held. Barbara Forever Barbara Hammer’s prolific work already put her life front-and-center, and Brydie O’Connor’s documentary about the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker completes the referential cycle, making Barbara Forever into a visual biography run through with Hammer’s aesthetic and ideological fascinations. That means it’s very gay and very naked—body-based and poetic in its focus as opposed to the structural filmmakers that made up the majority of her avant garde contemporaries in the ’60s and ’70s. Her early projects feel like a filmed sexual awakening; her final films find beauty and energy in the end of life. With her spiky dandelion hair, addiction to cameras, and unrepentant openness (a prime example is her doing a version of Subway Takes decades and decades ago), Hammer offers something rare to a nonfiction filmmaker: An electrically watchable subject who was constantly documenting her own life. The resulting archival assemblage is therefore more than just her life story, but her life story viewed in a similar fashion as she perceived it, full of loving relationships, professional slights, artistic triumphs, and great sex. Big Girls Don’t Cry A charmingly contained Kiwi coming-of-age drama, Big Girls Don’t Cry sees writer-director Paloma Schneideman capture a moment on the cusp—a teen encountering her own queerness for the first time, exploring the shadier elements of the internet, and trying to grow up too fast. The posturing of puberty bleeds into the anonymity of being online—Sid (Ani Palmer, an excellent newcomer) plays at being one of the cool kids in person, while catfishing through instant messenger and Omegle. She’s got no real safety net, either. Her drunk single dad (Noah Taylor, perfectly scuzzy) is ill-equipped and her big sister brought a flirty exchange student home to stay with them. This small-scale collision drives Sid to some questionable decision-making, captured with an understated yet evocative style. Reminiscent of Cate Shortland’s Somersault and 2024’s Sundance charmer Dìdi, Big Girls Don’t Cry is both bittersweet and nostalgic, filled with memories that might dance around your mind as you lie awake at night. Burn A visually chaotic and inventive runaway saga smackdab in the Kabukicho red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Burn is like a nightmarish, Requiem For A Dream take on a side quest from the Yakuza games. Plenty of silly humor interrupts the harrowing story of the stuttering Ju-Ju (Nana Mori) and her gang of eccentric street kids, but writer-director Makoto Nagahisa fills Burn with bright, pink,…

Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. Check out last week’s roundup here. Song of the Week—Modern Woman: “Dashboard Mary” When Modern Woman’s Sophie Harris sings, you can feel it in your ribs. On “Dashboard Mary,” her voice moves like a sprung trap: taut with pressure, capable of sudden force, and brutal when it snaps. The song unfolds as a charged overnight vignette—age gaps, bad decisions, long drives, the queasy silence of the morning after—rendered with a novelist’s eye for detail and restraint: “She thought that he was regretting, cos his hands on the wheel were blue / If the boy at home had woken and if the Dashboard Mary knew.” The instrumentation thrives on tension and contradiction, gliding between hush and abrasion as violin, saxophone, and rhythm section pull against one another—at least until the song’s final stretch, which is all riotous distortion. Nothing here is smoothed over or moralized; the thrill curdles, the momentum keeps going, and the picture never quite resolves. It’s an utterly gorgeous and brilliantly structured track, possibly one of my favorites of the year thus far (granted, it’s only mid-January, but still). Modern Woman’s debut record, Johnny Dreamworld, is set to release this May, and believe you me, I’m already lining up to hear it. —Casey Epstein-Gross Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” A year ago, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori made a masterpiece together: the psychedelic, structureless Los Thuthanaka. Now Crampton’s first solo full-length since 2024’s Estrella Por Estrella is coming next month. Anata is dedicated to the Andean ceremony of the same name, “where we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans/nature,” according to the liner notes. Crampton has totally redefined the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” is shredded noise captured in trance-y loops and crushing ascending lines. Surges of metal guitar couple with the acoustic backings of charango and ronroco into an overwhelming spate of texture. It’s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean ceremonies where the audio’s bottomed out. The energy of “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” takes me to a different place. It’s not magic but a creative experiment—an explosive, suspended tribute. —Matt Mitchell Mitski: “Where’s My Phone?” Everybody wants to figure Mitski out but nobody can. In the wake of her 2018 breakthrough Be the Cowboy (long before she landed a Billboard Hot 100 spot with “My Love Mine All Mine”), she gave management the keys to socials and has since maintained an enigmatic distance from her adoring audiences who’ve turned her into a patron saint of sad girls (a role which she has vehemently rejected). On the lead single for her eighth album, she’s fighting fruitlessly to de-clutter her mind—jangly guitars and dusty distortion crowding its corners, fogging up the “clear glass” every time she tries to wipe it clean. Mitski plays the in-between Mother to a Maiden and Crone, rounding out the Hecate trio in a music video that lands somewhere between The Haunting of Hill House and Grey Gardens. Following a wordless bridge of backing vocals and a rising tide of strings, Mitski returns to ask once again, “Where did it go?” Over a decade into her strange and unparalleled rise through the ranks of (and beyond) indie fame, it’s a joy to see Mitski revel in meta-madness once again. —Grace Robins-Somerville OHYUNG: “all dolls go to heaven” Between the exquisite You Are Always On My Mind and the delicate dressings of her Sorry, Baby score, OHYUNG was my most important artist of 2025. Lia Ouyang Rusli makes sounds that have stayed so wonderfully present in my body, and…

I’ve been thinking about music videos a lot lately. Right at the start of the new year, when most of us were watching the ball drop or popping bottles and sipping bubbly at the clurb or, let’s be real, rewatching When Harry Met Sally for the 30th time, MTV shut down all its music-only channels—including MTV Music, MTV ’80s, and MTV ’90s—in the UK and Australia. For music fans online, the news signaled the death of the music video. But then again: Did it really? After all, how many people were still watching MTV by the end? I mean, who even has cable these days? (I suppose you could’ve watched MTV on Pluto too, but what the hell is Pluto, anyways?) My suspicion that this all amounted to a cultural nothingburger was partially confirmed by the fact that so many of the eulogies bemoaning MTV’s demise got so many of the basic facts wrong: MTV still exists, at least as a channel that mostly hosts an agonizing assortment of reality TV shows (which is its own topic of conversation, but I digress). Even the music-only channels still exist on cable in the US right now, although those are slated to go dark throughout this year as their distribution contracts expire. And so MTV isn’t really “dead”—at least, not in the way that news outlets and music fans online seemed to be implying—and the fact that very few of the people relentlessly mourning MTV clocked the fact that it was still alive in the US suggested, to me, that no one was turning on their TVs to actually watch MTV in the first place. In reality, MTV has been dying a long, slow death for a while now, its cultural relevance fading with each year. I suppose that’s just not as exciting a story as the ‘90s nostalgia thinkpieces that the MTV announcement spawned. Perhaps more importantly, though, YouTube announced in December that it would no longer provide its video streaming data for Billboard’s various charts. The decision was based primarily on YouTube’s disagreement with Billboard’s method for counting music streams, where paid streams (ex: a Spotify Premium stream) are weighted more heavily than free or ad-supported streams (ex: a free YouTube stream.) YouTube wanted both paid and ad-supported streams to be weighted equally, and even though Billboard did agree to slightly bump up the weight on ad-supported streams, it wasn’t enough to reach an agreement with YouTube. Thus, as of January 16th, Billboard officially no longer uses YouTube streaming data for its charts. And if we were going to worry about music videos, that feels like the real tea leaves to read. Perhaps I’m biased in my viewing of this YouTube announcement as a more crucial indicator for the culture; after all, I came of age in the 2010s, when YouTube VEVO channels had effectively already replaced MTV as cultural and musical kingpins. The biggest videos from that era of VEVO world domination still have absolutely mind-boggling view counts: 8.9 billion for “Despacito,” 6.9 billion for “See You Again,” 5.7 billion for “Uptown Funk.” YouTube is how I remember encountering so many music videos in my own childhood: Nicki Minaj’s candy-colored, hallucinatory “Starships,” Rihanna’s Requiem for a Dream knock-off “We Found Love,” even Avril Lavigne’s flop “Hello Kitty” (which, years later, is very fun in an unbearable sort of way). Part of the reason why some music videos from that period have such high view counts is simply because those songs were popular. Before the true rise of streaming services, watching music videos on loop was the closest you had to “streaming” itself. Music videos were a crucial means of consuming music, so everyone watched them; that’s probably how you found a lot of music at that time, regardless of the quality or memorability factor of the videos themselves. Even held at gunpoint, I couldn’t tell you what actually happened in Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” music video (4 billion views) without rewatching it, but God knows I watched it to hear the song then. For all the hand-wringing that came with MTV…

“The difference between a poison and a cure is the dose,” forest witch Selveig (Toby Poser) tells the skeptical father of a dying young woman in the horror film Mother Of Flies. This concept can be applied in both science and magic, and Mother Of Flies is informed by both Western medicine and occult practice, syncretizing these opposing forces by filtering them through its creators’ personal experiences with illness. The result is occult horror as potent as the snake venom in one of Selveig’s dreadful “cures.” Specifically, writer-directors John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser draw parallels between the powerful chemicals used in chemotherapy and the baneful magic of its title character, a necromancer who offers a college student a last-ditch treatment for her terminal cancer. Selveig first contacts Mickey (Zelda Adams) in a dream, a fact that Mickey declines to share with her dad Jake (John Adams) until they’re already at the witch’s Baba Yaga-esque hut. He wouldn’t have agreed to drive her there if he knew; she’s skeptical herself, but given her recent diagnosis, she has nothing left to lose. Selveig’s “cure” will take three days, and will be extremely painful. It will require Mickey to wade into the rot and decay that fuels Selveig’s power, confronting her own mortality in the process. Mother Of Flies accompanies the two step-by-step through the ritual, which is informed both by actual occult practices and Selveig’s fictional backstory. Selveig loves death. She’s intimate with it, both emotionally and physically. Poser gives herself completely to this strange, serious character, and her commitment is key to what makes the film work. The woods are an invaluable asset as well. As in their films Hellbender and Where The Devil Roams, the filmmakers favor a high-contrast look that renders the forest in saturated shades of green punctuated with eye-singing orange. The colors of death—bruised purple, deoxygenated blue—are similarly vivid, giving shots of maggots writhing in a pool of decomposing flesh an undeniable Gothic beauty. Images of bones and blood and corpses abound, and the overall vibe is like a heavy-metal music video in the best way possible. This is accompanied by an emotional gravity that comes from the film’s real-world context. Poser and John Adams are a married couple, and Zelda their daughter; together with older daughter Lulu Adams (who plays a small role as a hotel clerk), they’ve been making movies together for over a decade, developing their style as they go. Mother Of Flies is a new high for this tight-knit unit, drawing power from their own story as a family: Both Poser and John Adams are cancer survivors, and they have transformed that painful experience into an awesome work of art. An Adams family production is an inherently DIY affair: The writing, directing, editing, producing, cinematography, sound design, camera operation. costume design, set design, and set building for Mother Of Flies were all handled by Poser, Adams, and their children, who also make up the film’s core cast. (Even the doom-rock soundtrack was composed in-house by H6LLB6ND6R, a contender for the world’s coolest family band.) Combined with a minimal budget, this does mean the film has a few technical limitations. But getting hung up on those moments where the sound mix or video compositing are rough around the edges is missing the point. In a world where film production is increasingly consolidated into the hands of a few risk-adverse corporate entities, the Adams family embodies the spirit of true independent filmmaking. That wouldn’t matter if they weren’t doing it well, however, and Mother Of Flies outdoes many of its more well-funded peers in terms of both audacity and emotion. This is no paean to witchcraft as pop-feminist empowerment: Solveig’s magic is dark and dangerous, and the film is unblinking in terms of its relationship with death. Midway through their ordeal, Mickey asks her father what he will do if Solveig’s…