CINE OF THE TIMES PRESENTS NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007) INCL. PRE SHOW
20 August 2026
Cine of the Times returns on August 20 after a sold-out first night. It’s the Celebrating Cinema spin-off where film critic Hugo Emmerzael and academic Dan Hassler-Forest take one film from the 21st century at a time: anything from arthouse to glorious pulp, as they examine how each movie reshaped cinema.
This time it’s the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, their Best Picture winner, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel. It withholds catharsis on purpose, and that refusal read like a verdict on where America was heading. Hugo and Dan get into the dread it saw coming: the slow slide into nihilism, toxic masculinity, and the way it denies us the thing we came for — resolution, a logic that pays off.
Together they go into far more detail in the accompanying Celebrating Cinema episode. The evening itself opens before the film: a preshow with an extended introduction, curated clips, and an open discussion that hands the floor to the audience.
Listen to the episode first, then join us in the cinema.
About the speakers
Hugo Emmerzael is an Amsterdam-based film critic and curator whose work sits at the intersection of cinema, music and culture at large. He’s an editor at Filmkrant and Deputy Digital Editor of the Locarno Pardo, with bylines at MUBI Notebook, Filmmaker Magazine and Little White Lies.
Dan Hassler-Forest is a media studies professor at Utrecht University whose work reads pop culture through a political lens — superheroes, transmedia franchises, the politics of fantasy. He’s best known for the 2019 Washington Post essay arguing that The Lion King is a fascist story.
