Sophie Alexandra Elliott

This piece explores how Costa-Gavras’s Z treats politics not merely as a clash of physical power, but as a fight for narrative control. In Z, the struggle to explain an event becomes a struggle to define reality. Its ending, in withholding any sense of resolution, is what makes the film feel disturbingly modern. 

A scene in Luca Guadagnino’s newest feature After the Hunt rehearses a familiar confrontation. Yale professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) has been accused of sexually assaulting a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). To his colleague Alma (Julia Roberts), with whom he shares a romantic past, he deploys every well-worn defense: Maggie tried to seduce him; she plagiarized, so she is now lying to discredit him. He even admits it sounds like a cliché.  At this point, a quarter of the way in, I began to...