Moonglow (2026)
There is a gorgeous-looking film in Moonglow, Isabel Sandoval's neo-noir, and almost nothing else that lives up to it. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and for all its considerable visual beauty I found it a frankly boring watch, undone by a story I was always a step ahead of and writing that never rises above the basic. Two stars, and most of that is for the cinematography.
The premise promises a lot. Set in 1970s Manila and styled as a classic noir, it follows a jaded police detective, played by Sandoval herself, who is secretly the mastermind behind a successful heist, only to be partnered with her former lover, an obsessive truth-seeker, to investigate the very crime she committed. It is a cracking hook, the sort of double-bind set-up that should crackle with tension and buried feeling, and on paper it could have been something special.
In practice, the execution lets it down at almost every turn. The story is thuddingly predictable, telegraphing its beats long before they arrive, and the screenplay is so basic that the intrigue never tightens into anything gripping. The performances do not help, feeling flat where the material cries out for smouldering, and I will admit I had that familiar thought you so often have with films where the director is also the lead, that a little more distance, and a director able to push the central performance from the outside, might have served the whole thing better.
What I absolutely cannot deny is how beautiful it is. The cinematography is genuinely lovely, all warm lamplight, deep shadow and smeary neon, and it conjures the smoky, period-noir atmosphere with real skill. In purely visual terms it is a treat, and you can see why its images have drawn praise even from those, like me, who were cold on the rest.
But a film cannot run on its look alone, and Moonglow leans so heavily on noir convention that it tips over into outright cliche, even by the forgiving standards of a genre built on familiar moves. Two stars. Sandoval is clearly a film-maker with a real eye, and I remain an admirer of her ambition, but this is a ravishing surface stretched over a story too predictable and a script too thin to hold it up. All mood and moonlight, and not nearly enough underneath.
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