Tycoon

Official Selection, 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection, 2026 MoMA Doc Fortnight
Official Selection, 2026 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Flames reflected in a red sportscar door: the year is 2028. L.A. prepares for its Olympics with the traditional corruption and repression. A new pandemic in the food supply has made GMO cockroaches the best available source of protein, and of course they’re not cheap. Somebody’s got to break into a delivery truck—a great opportunity for the right pair of rise-and-grind bandits.

Charlotte Zhang’s debut feature follows two outlaw-entrepreneurs, played with a puppyish charm by Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes, as they scrounge, scam, and grift, just like the CEOs who control the cockroach supply. Zhang’s handmade, diaristic approach mixes political urgency with intimacy, capturing stray moments of care, bullshitting, and breakups. As Mini DV, iPhone, and grainy Xerox images cut against each other, frame rates shudder and whites get blown out.

LA films ranging from Lost Highway to Transformers have imagined the end of the world in a bonfire of rubber and chrome. Like them, Zhang sets her apocalypse to the music of roaring engines and thrumming interiors. But cars are also where romantic oldies play on the radio. They’re homes you take with you. The footage Zhang films at street takeovers, kids spinning out their cars in careening loops of speed and noise, aren’t signs of end times. They’re communal resistance to despair—joyrides.

– Lev Kalman