Editor’s Be aware: This overview was initially revealed throughout the 2025 Berlin Movie Pageant. Greenwich Leisure releases “Goals” in choose theaters Friday, February 27, 2026.
Michel Franco is again in a pissed-off register concerning the world we stay in along with his crisply directed class critique “Goals,” the place the Mexican author/director rails into the limousine liberal American one-percent identification with all of the subtlety of an influence drill. However the movie’s quietly disturbing energy lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with wealthy philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her younger ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a placing newcomer efficiency) standing in for every — into an addictive and damaging love story as sharply wrought because the film’s grander political considerations.
Chastain offers her riskiest efficiency in a while as a wealthy arts patron who encourages Fernando to cross the border illegally to ensure that her basis to provide an American showcase of his artwork. A lot of Chastain’s current films, together with her Oscar-winning “Eyes of Tammy Faye” and even Franco’s personal bittersweet dementia romance “Reminiscence,” have a feminist or at the very least redemptive streak. Not so along with her flip in “Goals” as a lady who invitations little sympathy (till she does within the movie’s harrowing conclusion) even whereas she’s being performed like a marionette by her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Good friend)
Franco took a short detour from angsty cross-cultural satire for “Reminiscence,” the place Chastain’s character invents a childhood abuse to maintain her distance from a person who seems to be stalking her at a highschool class reunion. There’s not lots of hope in “Goals,” and for that, it’s a film of our occasions and one which possibly can solely exist due to them. It’s about how the falsity of the American dream (a dream that is immigrants, in spite of everything) propels Mexican folks to make the unlawful harmful crossing in any respect, and about how the U.S. and Mexico want one another in all methods. Keep in mind that Franco is the man who lit up a nuclear class conflict in “New Order” and watched a father throw his daughter’s social media bully off a ship in “After Lucia,” and also you’ll have a way of the place the bitter, bruising “Goals” lands in his filmography. Franco works once more with cinematographer Yves Cape to cooly assemble lengthy takes the place whole scenes play out with out fast, successive chopping, giving “Goals” an at occasions documentary-like form significantly in its protection of Fernando’s ballet performances — and Jennifer’s chilly, cheerless day-to-day.
“Goals” opens unsettlingly with a scene of screaming migrants inside a truck on the Texas-American border in Laredo, and but it ends with a picture even worse. Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain) has lured Fernando to America, and particularly where-else-but socially liberal and tech-bubbled-out San Francisco, to meet the promise of a love affair she started throughout some not-long-ago “work journey” to Mexico. However Jennifer by no means appears to be doing a lot work in any respect, as an alternative procuring artists and discovering causes that profit her household fortune and hold its picture rightly facelifted locally and media. Her father is a type of tireless advocates of the humanities who loves to point out off his assortment. Jennifer, in the meantime, retains a pied-à-terre in a quickly Americanizing Mexico Metropolis, the place she goes in search of Fernando after they break up as a result of she’s ashamed to be seen with him round her father’s colleagues.
In case you didn’t already know that Hernández is an precise American Ballet Theatre-trained dancer, then you’ll from the balletic intercourse scenes he and Chastain have choreographed within the movie, which get about as graphic as you’ll be able to go with out hardcore nudity. What works about them (and makes them sizzling) is that they inform us extra concerning the dynamic of the characters, who’re mad in love however below immense pressure to make any good end result of {that a} functioning chance in Jennifer’s rigorously calibrated world. There’s an ideal scene, too, the place Jennifer, adrift over their breakup, imagines a time when she and Fernando exchanged intensely soiled discuss over a kitchen island, and if you happen to’ve by no means thought you’d get the possibility to listen to Jessica Chastain utter, “I’m going to suck your balls with out respiration in your cock,” right here it’s. Jennifer, in the meantime, can’t converse Spanish and makes use of Google Translate to work together with the invisible staff who are likely to her homes in both San Francisco or Mexico Metropolis. It doesn’t matter the place she goes; the loneliness follows her all over the place.
“I don’t assume you care what occurs to me,” Fernando tells Jennifer at one level, and he or she is freaking out over a possible new life he’s now forming in San Francisco with out her. Franco is the inheritor obvious to the Michael Haneke world of unsettled, austere psychological ache in opposition to geopolitical backdrops onscreen, and Chastain is extra sport than ever to play alongside along with his hopeless world. His final movie “Reminiscence” urged one thing candy afoot. Not so this time, as “Goals” shocks us again into Franco the darkish storyteller, solely ache and disappointment in retailer for his leads.
It’s no coincidence the workplace that Jennifer’s father runs resembles the within of a detention heart or jail. Because the noose of being unlawful in America tightens round Fernando, tighter, too, turn into the golden handcuffs placed on Jennifer by her household, as she turns into increasingly a ghost in a gilded cage. The digicam at occasions threatens to erase or make nameless Fernando, capturing him from the again (like when Jennifer lustily goes down on him in a stairwell) as if the lens itself is taking over the privileged place of energy. Jennifer clearly loves Fernando however defending her wealth and fame and place in her household orbit takes primacy, to her personal toxified detriment.
Chastain makes the masks that hides Jennifer’s ache translucent at simply the fitting punctuating moments, spectacular for a personality who lives behind a 24-7 entrance that by no means exudes company. What Jennifer says behind a automobile within the movie’s ultimate moments, the sound dropped to a whisper behind glass, will wreck your day, but it surely’s so disturbingly inevitable that if you happen to have been paying consideration, it received’t shock you in any respect, Jennifer’s desires decreased to a single tear, and Fernando’s by no means available in any respect.
Grade: A-
“Goals” premiered on the 2025 Berlin Movie Pageant.
Wish to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie opinions and demanding ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched e-newsletter, In Overview by David Ehrlich, through which our Chief Movie Critic and Head Evaluations Editor rounds up the very best new opinions and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely out there to subscribers.