Movies in 2026 109

 

Resurrection, (Bi Gan, 2025)

Guy Maddin's Only Dream Things oddly works very well as a precursor for the next film, although clearly that was not my plan. I just finished Bi Gan's 2025 film Resurrection. The Criterion Channel has started featuring films fresh out of the theaters (not Vermont theaters, sadly, but theaters in larger and more intellectually vibrant markets in New York and LA). They always start off with a specific date and time when you can begin to stream it, almost giving it a feeling of being in the theater with thousands of other film nerds across the world. However, after that you can watch it at any time. I've done both, although I have to admit that I really like syncing up that first viewing when I can. I discovered Bi Gan late last year, on the Criterion Channel, not surprisingly, and absolutely loved his first two films: Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018). He's known for including an extended - literally somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour - single, uninterrupted take, which dominates the second half of his movies. It's extraordinary, and speaks to his incredible imagination and cinematic chops. Having said all that, I definitely did not like Resurrection as much as his earlier two full-length films. It's staggeringly brilliant filmmaking, and features another long sequence at the end which beggars the imagination. However, the central theme is so opaquely delivered - or Bi Gan didn't feel that it needed one (which is fine, obviously) - that the film ends up depending entirely upon the cinematography. You end up not caring about the characters at all because you simply don't know anything about the characters. It's extremist instrumentalist filmmaking, which tends to work well in short art installations like Maddin's piece, but which borders on tedium in a two and a half hour movie. I'll definitely watch anything from Bi Gan, and I need to track down his earlier work, but in the end, while I was impressed by the technical wizardry of Resurrection, it simply left me cold. I absolutely felt a connection to the characters in his first two films, but every actor in Resurrection simply felt like prop to anchor a camera shot.