Cinema Year '26: June
Mare’s Nest / Power Ballad / Jackass: Best and Last / Backrooms
Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘26, our monthly review supplement. This month we travelled to Delillo’s end of history, uncovered a pop conspiracy, took a victory lap for one of America’s greatest institutions, and confronted Hollywood’s latest horror craze.
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Join us on 4th July for Wanted: Undead or Alive at The Cinema Museum. We have supplied a pair of duelling programme notes for a double bill presentation of Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) and Billy the Kid and The Green Baize Vampire (1986) to celebrate the latter’s 40th anniversary in a rare 35mm special screening.
Mare’s Nest (Ben Rivers, 2025, UK)
Set in an out-of-time-and-space dystopia, teenage Moon (Moon Guo Barker) crashes her car on a countryside road and starts her odyssey to revisit human history. Described by its director, Ben Rivers, as a ‘road movie on foot’, Mare’s Nest takes the audience to deep caves, distant shores, dense woods and remote shacks. During her journey, Moon wanders through ruins of ex-military bunkers, encountering remnants of the gone world. She visits a scholar and a translator, talks about time and language with them—which bores her—and meets a community of children living an isolated yet utopic life.
Partly based on Don DeLillo’s play The Word for Snow (2014), Rivers’ latest film suggests how our perception tends to rationalise everything around us—the eternal yearning to tame nature. Whereas the heroine in the film is on her quest to perceive nature as it is: an expanse that neither history nor language succeeds in wholly describing. What is important to Moon and might be good for us to look for too, is to try to give room for a sense of being beyond the conventions of our age: a quiet rebellion.
Typical of Rivers’ cinema, Mare’s Nest is ornamented with tender shots of nature, both in a warmly tinted colour palette and in a deep, grainy, and intimate black-and-white. With minimal dialogue, the film lets you immerse yourself in the vast landscapes it’s shot in. This film is a reading of the past in fragments. It might feel disorientating at first, but I invite you to follow Moon’s perspective when watching these segments: life exists somewhere between boredom and excitement. Mare’s Nest also has one of the best endings I’ve seen lately, where Moon looks into the camera with a bright smile that seems to tell us, ‘That’s all, folks!’ Farzad Azimbeik
Power Ballad (John Carney, 2026, Ireland/USA)
My English teacher was a bitter man. Mr Writtle claimed that he had written the then-hit single ‘Mercy’ by Welsh pop singer Duffy. They were from the same small town. He told us, often, that he had played bass in a pub band, and that their original version of the song had been a barnstormer. It even had the same hook. He once warned against urinating on electric fences, and was suing Walkers because he had found toenails at the bottom of a packet of Cheese & Onion.
In fact, ‘Mercy’ has often been accused of ripping off Aretha Franklin and Ben E. King. There is no shortage of backstories to hit singles where inspiration begets sampling begets plagiarism. John Carney’s Power Ballad moves through this phenomenon the same way he moves through the film’s corny pop songs, hitting each mark, almost entirely predictable, and yet emotionally satisfying. The audience shares washed up rocker Paul Rudd’s frustrations when the music industry closes ranks to exclude his claim to a song he played for superstar Danny Wilson (a Jonas brother-like played by Nick Jonas) at a jam session, which said purity ring wearing superstar takes to fuel his own comeback single. He might be a thief, but Jonas is constantly manipulated and stage managed by label execs who doubtless have orders coming down from on high.
It recalls conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Michael Jackson, who had owned The Beatles’ catalogue. They might get into this in Michael 2, when, it’s been promised, “his story continues.” The darker side of the biz is gestured to in Power Ballad, when Jonas beckons a pair of young models up to his jacuzzi at an afterparty. In 2020, Duffy herself was the victim of a kidnapping and human trafficking ordeal, which is due to be detailed in a Disney+ documentary. As much syrupy fun as it’s possible to have with Power Ballad, there’s a tension between the sweetness of Carney’s large, well characterised ensemble, and the powers behind each locked door they find. It reveals the same truths about the entertainment industry that Mr Writtle tried to warn us about. Ben Flanagan
Jackass: Best and Last (Jeff Tremaine, 2026, USA)
I went into Jackass: Best and Last under a misapprehension. Where I thought both adjectives were referring to the fifth (!) entry as a whole, they are, in fact, divisible. This is half the “best” and half the “last”, an equation that never really works either as a triumphant victory lap or as a more introspective swan song.
Far be it from me to take a Jackass film in bad faith by attempting to find some deeper thematic resonance. But there was at least a guiding spirit before! The first, second, and third entries strived to go bigger, better… 3D-er. Then Forever, a surprisingly warm passing of the torch from the old heads to the next gen, brought it all home. As for Best and Last, bar two moments that bookend the film of Knoxville tearing up, this is really no different from a TV reunion special. The aborted first attempt at the bull stunt in Forever is hard to watch because of what’s come before—we know Knoxville won’t be satisfied until he gets it right, and we know his body can’t handle “perfection” anymore. In Best and Last, we just watch him get a brain haemorrhage again and move on to the next skit.
Which, okay, who cares? Seeing Knoxville laugh at Bam getting absolutely clattered by a giant hand was electric then, and it’s electric now. But barring a credits montage that actually finds visual synergies between the ball-smacking, poop-spraying chaos of the past 26 years, this is never more than a jumble of the “best” and “last”. It’s hard not to see the clip-show format as a missed opportunity to play with the passage of time more directly—whether it was getting new cast members to remix old routines, or even just spending more time shooting the shit behind the scenes. Really, it’s only the unseen material that provides a hook, including a cut sketch with Bam from Forever—but how any of the cast feels about Bam still not being there is left a mystery. Let’s watch Poo Cocktail Supreme again instead. Blaise Radley
Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026, USA)
Summer 2026 may be looked back on as a monumental shift in theatrical release cinema. After years of films being shunted to online-only release and theatres hinging on blockbusters for their livelihood, turns out if you put the highly original work of an Internet filmmaker in cinemas, the younger audiences will come in their droves. Backrooms, distributed by A24 and directed by Kane Parsons, is testament to how trusting a creator’s throughline vision, even a greenhorn, can bring something as esoteric as online liminality to cinematic life.
Yung Parsons fleshes out his online series into the story of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a vaguely pathetic man who runs a failing furniture shop. Desperate to kickstart his business—a suitably 1990s pirate-themed TV spot aside—he finds renewed curiosity and purpose in a dimension beyond the basement wall. Parsons transplants what worked best in his Rolling Giant film in the The Oldest View series (2023-2024), creating a homunculus which struggles to fit within the frame, a genuine horror in its clumsiness. The film undoubtedly works best during its handheld found footage moments, when the crackled Blender visuals Parsons favours in his web series charge the unnerving expanse of the Backrooms.
Parsons’ web series deals with the pitfalls of human curiosity. With the addition of a wounded protagonist in Clark, who splits his time between the store, bitter nights drinking alone and resentful sessions with his therapist, (Renate Reinsve) the film proves to be a fascinating portrayal of Main Character Syndrome. Pixellated people filled with nutritious furniture stuffing and the aforementioned homunculus serve to necrotise Clark’s ego, revealing the Backrooms’ awful capacity. What’s more, the numerous esoteric easter eggs induce their own curiosity in the audience, who will no doubt keep coming back for more if the film becomes anthologised. Something’s been unlocked in the Backrooms. Kirsty Asher