New Releases: The Fence (Claire Denis, 2025), Spiderman: Brand New Day (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026)

The Fence (Claire Denis, 2025):

Unceremoniously dropping on AMC+ later this month, Claire Denis’ The Fence is set on a construction site in an unnamed African country where Alboury (Isaach de Bankole) arrives in the dead of night to collect the body of his brother, who passed away on the job earlier that day. There, he confronts the foreman (Matt Dillon), his much younger wife who has just arrived from Europe (Mia McKenna Bruce), as well as the young British man who committed the murder (Tom Blyth). Unfolding as a series of conversations separated by the compound’s barbed wire fence, Denis stages a chamber play of purgatorial negotiations, using the blanket of darkness to create something of a black box theater in the middle of the desert.

There are sequences in this film that rank among Denis’ most beautiful, tapping into that penumbral, sensual charge that animates her best work. Best of all of them is the opening, which introduces the construction site through images of a woman walking through the desert, shrouded cattle, night watchmen drifting in and out of focus, dust in the wind, and a ravenous CGI dog. All of this makes The Fence’s highly theatrical nature all the more jarring. Early in the film, Alboury refuses to step into the bounds of the construction site, reasoning that his eyes are unfamiliar with the artificial fluorescent lighting, and indeed, more than the narrative, Denis’ is primarily interested in the space of this compound and its accursed gravitational force. At times, the film feels like might as well exist in outer space, reminiscent of the interstellar sex compound in High Life. That disorientation is only accentuated by the very stilted performances (especially Matt Dillon’s) and the very spare style. The heavy-handed symbolism of the fence then extends into form, separating the the cinematic and the theatrical, the sensual and the sterile.

As an extension of Denis’ career-long look at colonialism’s evolution through the turn of the century, The Fence tracks a transfer of power from the entitled white colonizers of White Material to faceless international corporations. The construction site is being purchased by a Chinese company, leaving everyone onscreen functionally obsolete from the perspective of the faceless international overlords. It’s hard not to detect a meta-textual element here too, where by splitting Denis mainstay Isaach de Bankole from these English-speaking newcomers, the film is also making a sideways commentary on the mechanisms of international coproduction funding.

I can’t say that the narrative or thematic particulars of The Fence are very rewarding, but I actually quite liked the film. Denis shooting de Bankole like a Pedro Costa character is inherently moving, and compared to her recent A24 films, which felt closer to the branded auteur projects pumped out by NEON and MUBI, this barebones production has a similar idiosyncrasy to recent Cronenberg or Ferrara. You can feel a singular artistic sensibility willing itself onto the screen, facing time in the cracks where the real world intrudes.

The Fence is distributed by IFC and streams on AMC+ August 21.

Spiderman: Brand New Day (Destin Daniel Cretton):

Spiderman: Brand New Day picks up over four years after the events of Homecoming. Having erased the world’s knowledge of his identity, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has lived in isolation, a new-grad “victim” of the male loneliness epidemic living in a dump of an apartment filled with empty takeout boxes. When he’s not pouring himself into his work as vigilante, he’s either dropping off flowers at his aunt’s grave or thinking about his friends Ned and MJ (Zendaya), who have just moved back to New York after graduating from MIT.

Brand New Day’s dual-pronged narrative concerns this conundrum of work-life balance. How is Peter to open himself to human relationships when a mysterious psychic named Jean Gray (Sadie Sink) is on a rampage through the “Department of Damage Control”? One of the strengths of the Spider-Man films has always been their comparatively humble stakes, and the portions of this film devoted to Peter “re-connecting” with his old friends are genuinely sweet, as are his interactions with surrogate father-figure The Punisher (Jon Bernthal). This is primarily driven by the easy chemistry between the ensemble, most of whom deliver their best work here. The appeal of more grounded drama makes the supernatural elements of Spiderman feel contrived, and indeed, the Jean Gray plotline is nonsense, contorted to align with Peter’s story and handicapped by the clear super-narrative setups that makes these films feel like hackwork at best, brazen money grabs at worst. There’s no way for Cretton and co. to setup Jean Gray’s trauma plot effectively, and the expository manner in which it happens, is unconvincing.

Brand New Day contains few true deviations from the Marvel formula, though as a soft reboot to the franchise after a year off, it does feature some welcome course correction. Brand New Day looks like it was shot in some real locations (confirmed when the flashbacks to previous Spiderman films looked straight out of The Polar Express), and features relationships relatively free from the spectacular burden of the Avengers plot. For the most part, I was willing to go along with it.

Spiderman: Brand New Day is distributed by Sony Pictures and is in theaters now.