The young leads of “Coward” have two of the most Belgian faces ever put onscreen — catch them in Cancun or Calcutta, and you’d clock their origins in an instant. That’s not an idle thought, mind you, for Lukas Dhont has made an almost elementally straightforward war drama built around queer love and desire. Premiering at Cannes, spoken in French and Flemish, and all but certain to be Belgium’s Oscar submission, this heritage film waves its flag without apology. 

The filmmaker behind “Girl” and “Close” isn’t trying to “queer” history — how could he, when same-sex love on and off the battlefield has been so intrinsic to wartime that the very subject is a major plot point in “The Iliad?” Instead, Dhont offers a corrective to a much more recent attempt to erase what was already there, making his case with force, pageantry and outsized patriotic zeal. All the same, the film is rather subversive, moving away from trench-based misery to reimagine the front as a place of great freedom and romantic possibility. 

We follow young conscripts Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) and Francis (Valentin Campagne) as they arm themselves with art — putting on performances to boost morale, fighting the war on their own terms. An opening title explains the Belgian policy of rotating battalions: those on the frontlines one day would fall back the next to recuperate and rebuild, returning to the fight with diminished ranks.

From there, Dhont builds a world ever-so-adjacent to the slaughterhouse, where the artistically inclined could bloom. 

Chief among them is Francis — a slight tailor’s son who, born a few decades later, would almost certainly have become a cabaret performer or a Cannes-acclaimed director; in other words, John Cameron Mitchell. But we can’t pick our time, and luckily for this gifted actor, director and drag artist, the war has handed him the perfect stage to deploy his talents, and find love. 

His partner isn’t so fortunate: Pierre arrives with a fuller build, the kind that makes a body far more likely to be mangled when sent over the line. “Coward” takes its time, sketching out an ironic utopia where gender performers receive the kind of adulation unavailable in button-down civilian life — especially from a macho military corps for whom homophobia is second nature. That prejudice doesn’t fall away when everyone’s cramped together in close quarters, so for a while our two leads are forced into a very chaste flirtation. 

Dhont shot in academy ratio and frames shot after shot around eye-lines: for the first hour, we follow Pierre and Francis as they appraise one another, stealing glances that grow ever bolder. A body-strewn trip up the ladder returns Pierre emboldened to finally act — with Eros never far from Thanatos, as “Coward” tracks teenage sex and death at a very different camp. 

From the first scene, Dhont leans on period songs and military chants, to the point where the film could qualify as a musical, given its reliance on a cappella numbers and war hymns. That dovetails with his unambiguous perspective on Francis as the greatest of true believers, an “each according to his ability” hardliner determined to support the effort by any means available. Betrayed by his body, Pierre becomes the titular coward once he decides — understandably — that with love in his life he’d rather not die. But the larger narrative never quite gets under his skin as intuitively as it does his partner’s.

 And that’s pretty much it for a film closer in nature to a scrapbook than a novel. It plays as an oral, musical history, rich in period research and detail, laying out its narrative and thematic concerns early and never really moving beyond them. At some point, dreaming up his next revue, Francis says, “If they want patriotism, then we’ll give them patriotism” — without cynicism, and neither from the filmmaker. 

Looking back a century, this very 2026 film is a clear product of its moment and its growing rightward shift. “Coward” doesn’t frame the artist — or the queer perspective, though here the two are intrinsically linked — as a counterweight to militarism, but as a complement, arguing for inclusion on rah-rah terms. That’s less a critique than an appraisal, and a distinction that speaks to the present as much as the past.

Stephen Colbert is saying goodbye to The Late Show after over ten years and more than 1,800 episodes.

The comedian kicked off the show with an earnest piece to camera (and the audience).

“This show… I want you to know this show has been a joy for us to do for you. In fact, we call this show The Joy Machine. We call it The Joy Machine because to do this many shows it has to be a machine, but the thing is, if you choose to do with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears, and I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other, and how much we mean to each other,” he said.

He referenced his old show on Comedy Central. “On night one of The Colbert Report, back in the day, I said, ‘Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you’. And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here was different. We were here to feel the news with you, and I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt [the news] and I just want to let all y’all know, in here and out there, how important you’ve been to what we have done. The energy that you’ve given us, we sincerely need that to have done the best possible show we could have for you for the last 11 years.”

Before joking about OnlyFans, he noted the history of the Ed Sullivan Theater. “We’ve been honored to have been just a small part of it, Nichols and May played on the stage. The Beatles made their American debut here, and, backstage, Elvis used the bathroom and didn’t die,” he added.

It comes as Colbert has lined up a star-studded finale with Paul McCartney, who famously played the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1964 with The Beatles, as musical guest and A-listers including Bryan Cranston, Ryan Reynolds and Paul Rudd appearing throughout the show. Follow along below through the course of the “extended” episode.

Colbert has been on an elongated goodbye tour since CBS made the decision to axe his show and the entire late-night franchise ten months ago.

Canceled three weeks before David Ellison officially took control of Paramount, the network stressed that it was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” and “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

But since the cancelation came days after Colbert called Paramount Global’s $16M settlement of Donald Trump’s lawsuit a “big fat bribe”, it’s been hard for many to believe the two things were unrelated.

The Late Show began in August 1993 with David Letterman as host, having moved over from NBC after he didn’t get The Tonight Show gig. Letterman retired from the show in May 2015, and Colbert, who had previously starred on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, took over in September 2015.

IMAX is exploring a possible sale, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which sent the stock price surging as shares rose over 10% to $37.50.

An insider with knowledge of the talks said that they were just that: talks. The insider shared that IMAX is in very preliminary discussions with various groups to gauge interest in a sale and that no serious talks have begun.

IMAX has become a growing cornerstone of the box office for various blockbusters not just in Hollywood, but worldwide. The premium format was key to the release of recent Chinese hit sequels like “Ne Zha 2” and “Pegasus 3,” and the company is making a foray into India with top budget upcoming titles like, “Ramayana” and S.S. Rajamouli’s “Varanasi.”

In a December earnings call, CEO Rich Gelfond noted that IMAX would be a valuable theatrical player “either as a wholly differentiated publicly traded company or as part of a larger company with the keys to unlock even greater value from our strong business worldwide.”

Last month, the company reported $81.4 million in revenue, a drop from the $86.7 million in the first quarter of 2025, and earnings of 17 cents per share. Those beat consensus Wall Street projections of $80 million in revenue and 15 cents per share.

Overall box office grosses for IMAX reached $260 million for the quarter, with Christmas holdover “Avatar: Fire and Ash” being the top grosser followed by “Project Hail Mary” and the aforementioned Chinese blockbuster, “Pegasus 3.”