It’s a wrap! Here are my final reviews for the 2026 festival. Hopefully you’ll be able to catch most of these films streaming or at a theater near you…
Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero (6/8)
I remember those days around 2011–12 when a man dressed as a superhero and calling himself Phoenix Jones was out “fighting crime” in Seattle. The media and public were intrigued, and you had to give props to a man who cared enough about his community to put himself in harm’s way to break up fights and stop drug deals… as long as he didn’t make things worse. This stylish documentary, with the graphics and pace of a superhero movie, is an intriguing look at Phoenix Jones, aka Ben Fodor, the man behind the mask: He’s a Black man, an MMA fighter, a foster-system adoptee, and a proud dad. The film asks, what kind of person would put on a superhero costume in the first place? Let’s just say Fodor’s a fascinating, engaging, and absolutely unreliable narrator—something he openly acknowledges, almost as if he’s creating his own mythology. Through interviews with friends, allies (including another masked “hero,” Midnight Jack, who wears a loaded handgun on his belt during a warehouse interview), and others (including a Seattle police officer from the time) it becomes clear that Jones is a complicated character: often well-meaning, somewhat messed up, and frequently out of his depth. Still, he gets the last word, and it’s hard not to wish him well.
Lady (6/8)
Sian Clifford owns this mockumentary as Isabella, the titular lady of a British countryside manor—a woman whose isolated world is one raccoon infestation away from Grey Gardens. She smugly proclaims that she’s “the aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians” while presenting her house, draping herself coyly across the furniture, and barking at her one hapless servant, Becky. The film crew, initially intrigued and smugly entertained, soon becomes alarmed when Isabella literally starts to disappear, beginning with her hands turning invisible. The film gets a lot of mileage out of treating this as more of an irritation than a crisis, as Isabella still insists on practicing her many artistic “talents” with the goal of winning the talent show she hosts for local children. The mockumentary ultimately surprises by becoming genuinely endearing, as the overly-cocky director and the eccentric Lady gradually find common ground while their carefully constructed personas begin to fall away.
Balandrau, Where the Fierce Wind Blew (6/8)
What starts as a sunny cross-country ski hike on a local mountain in the Catalan Pyrenees becomes a terrifying disaster within minutes when a group of five friends is engulfed by a surprise blizzard. Based on a true story from 2000, the search for the five (along with a separate group of three snowshoers) unfolded into one of the worst tragedies in the region’s history. The film follows both the stranded friends fighting for survival and the local mountain rescue team desperately trying to find the missing hikers. The “whump” of the storm literally knocking people off their feet is terrifying in its sudden intensity, as are the blinding snow and the deafening roar of the wind. The filmmakers do a fine job recreating this deadly ordeal, making you want to tuck your nose into your jacket for warmth, while actors like Álvaro Cervantes (as hiker Josep Maria) and Marc Martínez (as mountain rescue leader Siscu) give you some much-needed humanity to hold onto as Mother Nature overwhelms with her ferocity.
Hanging by a Wire (5/8)
In 2023, deep in the remote Himalayan countryside of Pakistan, a cable car malfunction leaves a tram carrying teenage boys on their way to school dangling precariously nearly 1,000 feet above a gorge. It’s the stuff of nightmares for the villagers—especially the parents—all the more so because they live in a region often ignored by the media. Despite the remoteness, people in the village have cellphones, and startling images of the tram hanging by a single remaining cable quickly shock and grip the nation as officials and locals scramble to find a way to save the boys. The talking-head interviews focus mainly on police rescue teams and the boys’ fathers, playing on viewers’ uncertainty about how the crisis ultimately unfolded. For the most part, this approach works. Cut together like an action thriller, the film is punctuated by an often overpowering soundtrack that eventually becomes distracting. The footage comes almost entirely from locals, including astonishingly crisp drone shots of the boys clutching the interior of the dangerously tilted cable car. But the true stars are the resourceful locals themselves, especially a low-tech cable car repairman and a muscular zip-line guide, who rise to the challenge of an extraordinarily dangerous rescue.
Jaripeo (4/8)
As a bull-riding fan, I was intrigued by this exploration of queerness within the hyper-masculine rodeo culture of Mexico’s Michoacán region. The film centers on the jaripeo, a small-town bull-riding event steeped in hard drinking and even harder partying. Several local gay men are profiled, all of whom look forward to the jaripeo in their own way. Noé, a burly cowboy, quietly hooks up with other men on the down-low, while Joseph, a flamboyant hairdresser, camps it up openly while lamenting that all the men he dates are “straight.” Meanwhile, co-director Efraín Mojica serves as both interviewer and subject, speaking candidly about how difficult it was to grow up gay in small-town Mexico. Though the film is relatively short for a feature, it still somehow feels padded. Between the dreamlike visual interludes, the extremely shaky camerawork, and the use of multiple film stocks like Super 8, I found myself wishing the documentary spent more time with its subjects instead of leaning so heavily on visual contrasts with the bull-riding cowboys. Aside from the implied queerness of a smaller young rider mocked for refusing to ride a rank bull, the cowboys are used mainly as symbolic contrast rather than explored as nuanced subjects in their own right.
Part of Moviepie’s coverage of the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.
