As many of the winter and spring festival circuits begin to pass, one of the less talked about but still semi-relevant film festivals has just wrapped up, The Dallas International Film Festival. DIFF is home to many Texas-filmed and shot movies, with many of them, such as Mantis, having their full premieres there. The festival isn’t as huge as the Cannes or Sundances of the world but the titles for this year’s slate were definitely more intriguing.
Still, they tried their best to pull out as much as they could for 2026 given it’s the 20th anniversary of the festival’s existence and while it was relatively quaint in size, they managed to get their hands on more intriguing titles than last year’s lineup, and even lined up keynote speakers like CEO of Warner Brothers Mike Deluca, and director of Sing Sing, Greg Kwedar.
I managed to see 8 films over the course of the festival’s week-long run, with DFW thunderstorms impeding my journeys and all. I’ll go in chronological order of when each film was watched/played at the fest.
Misper
Misper is an interesting mash-up of dry, awkward comedy and atmospheric tension taking place in a quiet hotel that’s been rundown for several years now. Leonard (Samuel Blenkin) is an employee at the hotel, incredibly bored with his job and tired of the demands from the occasional customer and his boss, Gary (Daniel Ryan). Leonard has a friendship with his co-worker, Elle (Emily Carey), whom he’s had a major crush on, but Leonard has never had the courage to really make their friendship anything more. Then, out of nowhere on a random night, Elle disappears without a trace, leaving the entire hotel in a depressive spiral without her, especially Leonard.
Misper has a lot going for it and a plethora of thematic and genre touches that it barrels through in its brisk runtime. The dry British wit, explorations of loneliness, and light touches on the invasive nature of true crime implementation in today’s media give the film a compelling hook on how the effects of sudden loss impact the inner psyche of the real-life people surrounding it. However, in its mission to tackle so many interesting tones on paper, the film never fully has a distinct identity or focus by the time the credits roll, leaving the experience on the whole as a largely empty but fine debut feature for director Harry Sherriff. [Grade: C]
Obsession
Obsession has been a festival darling for quite a while since its big premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. It was acquired by Focus Features and is set for release later this month and, in a world where many horror releases tend to be hyped to no end, Obsession manages to live up to expectations in both expected and delightfully surprising ways. The logline is relatively simple: Bear (Michael Johnston) has had a crush on Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) for the longest time, but is too shy and nervous to ever express his feelings to her. This leads to him deciding to take a chance on hopeless fate by breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” in hopes that his wish of Nikki loving him more than anyone in the world would come true. Sure enough, his wish becomes reality with Nikki becoming increasingly obsessed with him, but Bear soon learns his wish will come at a great, sinister price he never could’ve imagined.
Director/Writer Curry Barker helms Obsession with such effortless confidence, blending pitch-black humor with insanely cruel subject matter so effectively, but Obsession truly hums when its unrelenting dread sets a truly terrifying tone within every scene of escalation. Barker has such patience with the way shots are framed in the shadows and how a scare isn’t released until the highest point of tension that you’ll be holding your breath throughout the film’s entirety. All of that on top of a star-making performance from Inde Navarrette makes Obsession easily the year’s best horror movie thus far. [Grade: A-]
Power Ballad
Anyone can tell from watching even a snippet of his work that John Carney adores dissecting the world of music, both within the art form and the industry revolving around it. Power Ballad is no exception to the filmmaker’s commonalities, even if it’s one of the weaker forays into these concepts we’ve seen.
The film follows Rick Power (Paul Rudd), a wedding singer in Ireland who had big dreams of being a music star before settling down with his family. During one of his gigs, Rick meets fading boy band star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) and the two have a late-night jam session together. Months later, however, when Rick overhears a song he wrote that he sang with Danny on the radio, he goes on a journey to fight to receive credit for the song, no matter how much it upends his life in the process.
Power Ballad, simply put, is a plain crowdpleaser through and through, which ends up working both for and against it. The film tends to rely often on saccharine melodrama when it comes to fights between characters at certain points that makes the story a bit aimless in structure within its middle section but the film won me (and likely most people) over through the consistent endless charm and emotional weight of Paul Rudd’s performance and a general ending that brings the whole film home making for a weaker but still cute Carney picture. [Grade: B]
The Furious
While great action films are still around in spades, it’s rare to find an action film that takes clear inspiration from the greats and evolves its own action into a relentless fury, in both bloodied knuckle-brawls and kinetic energy that has never been captured to this degree. The Furious is that action flick. Director Kenji Tanigaki’s martial arts extravaganza follows Wang Wei (Xie Miao), a mute man searching for his daughter, who was kidnapped by child traffickers. Wang teams up with journalist Navin (Joe Taslim), who is on his own search for his wife, to take down the criminal network and save their loved ones.
It will be easy to compare The Furious to other action greats like The Raid, but Tanigaki brings a brutality to every kick, punch, and mallet to the head that manages to be even more exhilarating. The choreography is perfectly synchronized to every camera movement and clean edit to craft an experiential event of a pure action onslaught that will cement The Furious as a new action classic for years to come. Pure, electric, “hell yeah” cinema and my favorite film of the festival. [Grade: A]
One In a Million
One in a Million is an emotionally powerful documentary that is able to capture a unique side to the concept of growing up within the refugee experience. The movie is filmed over 10 years, from 2015-2025, following Israa, a young girl who has to flee from Turkey with her family to Germany in search of a better and safer life. Once the family reaches Germany, we see Israa grow throughout the rest of her childhood and the beginnings of her adulthood as her dynamics between her mother and father begin to shift, and Israa struggles to find her identity in the midst of learning more about her two homes of Germany and Syria.
What makes the core of One In a Million so powerful is that directors Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes shift the focus of the film to the aftermath of the destruction, making the introspection on this family and Israa much more insightful in both family dynamics and tension. It ultimately culminates in an extravagantly filled journey of resilience that offers a different perspective to what we usually get from most documentaries, even if certain areas of making could leave you wanting more exploration. [Grade: B+]
Tuner
I am a pure sucker for a heist film, the slick presentation, the delightful back-and-forth of things going right and wrong. Sometimes, it can be the most exciting type of movie to watch when you’re in the mood, so when a movie like Tuner sharply executes on virtually every facet of the formula down to its baseline premise, I’ll always be engaged. What’s the hook? Niki White (Leo Woodall) is a piano tuner with a sensitive hearing condition working with his elder mentor, Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), to keep pianos at their right pitch. The heist portion of the film kicks in when Niki discovers his supernatural-esque hearing can also be applied to cracking safes, which sends him down a whirlwind of chaos, all while forming a potential romance with piano prodigy Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu).
Tuner is the definition of a film that knows its tropes and plays to all of them so perfectly, if you’ve seen a film in a similar vein, its formula won’t be difficult to follow, but it works so well thanks to its snappy editing and crackling jazz-centric score that craft an interesting cross between the elements of De Palama and Mann crime thrillers of the past to make an exquisitely slick heist movie that knows its strengths and delivers on them. [Grade: A-]
If I Go Will They Miss Me
The conceit of fatherhood has a heavy thematic prevalence within many films over the past years, but director Walter Thompson-Hernández is able to craft something truly transcendent with If I Go Will They Miss Me, capturing a poetic sincerity to both what binds a father and son and the honest truth of what can lie behind a broken relationship. Based on the short film of the same name, we open with Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell) about to see his father, Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), post his prison sentence, finally being over. As Big Ant starts to implement himself back into the family and wife Lozita (Danielle Brooks), he starts to see Lil Ant’s tendency to treat him as a god in his drawings as worrying, as he doesn’t want his son to treat him too highly.
If I Go Will They Miss Me captures a lyrical sense of wonder in its dynamics and relationships that feel otherworldly from both a narrative and filmmaking perspective. It’s the visual motifs of the images children see of their parents vs. the reality of where they stand that is handled with such poignant grace that one won’t be able to help being swept up in its majestic wonder and deeply human drama. [Grade: A-]
Poetic License
Poetic License was the closing night film for the festival, directed by Euphoria star Maude Apatow (daughter of Judd Apatow). Maude, like her father, excels in directing much of the loose conversational comedy here, but she also brings a certain cozy warmth to her own comedy, capturing heartfelt sincerity alongside its sharp wit. It centers on Liz (Leslie Mann), a lonely mom and former therapist who is struggling to connect more with her growing daughter (Nico Parker) while taking a new job as an auditor for a local poetry class. While there, she forms a friendship with her best friends Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman) and Ari (Cooper Hoffman), but what starts as a bond between the three becomes a war between Sam and Ari for Liz’s affection.
The banter between Hoffman, Feldman, and Mann carries nearly every scene, and the long-winded conversations live or die by how funny the material is, and all three manage to make even weaker line readings get a small snicker. The film tends to run a bit long and redundant in structure by the time it starts concluding, but Maude Apatow matches the comedy of Raffi Donatich’s screenplay so well, and I am more than interested to see where her directorial efforts go next. [Grade: B+]
