Matador Bolero (2026) [Film review]

Matador Bolero Limited Release Notes: May 22, 2026 (NYC) · June 11, 2026 (LA) · Lucky American Films / Uncensored New York

A few thoughts on Matador Bolero

At some point in the last decade, Super 8 film stopped being the format you used when you could not afford anything better and became the format you chose when you wanted to make something that looked like it had been alive before you found it. The grain, the color shift, the specific softness around hard edges, the way the frame occasionally shudders like it is aware of its own mechanical nature: these qualities communicate a relationship to time that digital formats cannot simulate and have largely given up trying to.

When Jonathan Rosado shot Brutalist Couture entirely on Super 8 in 2024, it was a deliberate formal argument about what the image should feel like. Matador Bolero continues that argument with more ambition and more chaos and roughly the same commitment to making you feel like you are watching something that was already old when somebody found it in a film canister buried under a former 42nd Street grindhouse.

Talking about a movie I don’t have a full grip on

This is not a metaphor for the film’s aesthetic. This is very nearly the literal description. The B&S About Movies review of Matador Bolero describes it as something “unearthed when a modern excavation under a former 42nd Street grindhouse theater discovered it in a well-preserved film canister,” and while nobody actually excavated anything, the description is the most accurate available account of what the film feels like at the level of its surface.

Rosado has made a film that does not feel like a contemporary filmmaker’s tribute to 1970s exploitation cinema. It feels like 1970s exploitation cinema, which is either easier or harder to achieve depending on how honest you want to be about the specific combination of intention, constraint, and accident that produces that quality.

The official synopsis of Matador Bolero reads as follows: A New York nightclub, The Matador, becomes the site of a high-profile murder that attracts the attention of an obsessive detective, a TV news reporter, and an elusive being living outside the realms of time and space. Their stories converge with that of a new-age cult operating at the command of an ultra-intelligent supercomputer named Bolero.

How we talk about movies

This synopsis is accurate. It is also approximately as useful as a plot description of The Holy Mountain would be for someone trying to decide whether to watch The Holy Mountain. The narrative elements described are present in Matador Bolero in the same way that a grocery list is present in a dream about a grocery store: the objects are there, arranged in spatial proximity to each other, but the dream is not really about groceries.

What Matador Bolero is really about is harder to summarize, which is presumably why the synopsis defaults to its inventory of plot elements and leaves the rest for you to find.

What the film is, more accurately, is a series of vignettes: plot elements, yes, but also topless peep show performances, psychotropic visual patterns, sequences that function more like short films nested inside the feature than like scenes advancing a narrative, and the general sensation of a filmmaker who made exactly the film he envisioned without significant interference from anyone who might have suggested a different structure.

Whether this is a strength or a limitation depends on your relationship to films that operate this way, and Matador Bolero has no particular interest in converting people whose relationship to this kind of filmmaking is skeptical.

How I discovered Yves Tumor

Yves Tumor is in Matador Bolero. This is Yves Tumor’s first acting role, which is the piece of information about Matador Bolero that has generated the most attention, and it is worth thinking about why. Yves Tumor is an experimental musician who makes albums that defy genre categorization in ways that generate genuinely interesting critical writing, and whose live performances are known for the specific quality of refusing to let the audience feel comfortable about what they are watching. The albums (Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume, Mahal) exist somewhere between art rock and R&B and noise and something that does not have a name yet.

The performance quality that Tumor brings to recorded music, the willingness to inhabit discomfort as a creative position rather than resolve it into something more accommodating, is exactly the quality that a film like Matador Bolero needs from its central presence, and Rosado’s casting decision was a good one even if the performance that results is, by conventional acting standards, “head-scratching.” Head-scratching is what was called for.

Kansas Bowling is the film’s other recognizable name. Bowling directed BC Butcher at seventeen and has spent her career orbiting exactly the genre and subculture that Matador Bolero inhabits, which makes her presence here feel less like casting and more like natural gravity. When a film is indebted to 1970s exploitation cinema and you need someone who understands that debt from the inside rather than the outside, Bowling is the person whose presence communicates the authenticity of the claim.

She and Tumor are not giving the same kind of performance, but they are giving complementary ones: Tumor from outside the genre tradition looking in with genuine curiosity, Bowling from inside it looking at Tumor with something between assessment and amusement.

Bring it home

Jack Irv, Isla de Luca, Kitty Collins, and Stephee Bonifacio fill the remaining roles with the specific all-in quality that low-budget genre filmmaking requires from its cast. The performances range from head-scratching to good, which is the honest account of what you get when a filmmaker with a clear vision and limited resources assembles actors who are committed to the project rather than comfortable in the format. The discomfort is part of the texture.

The score by The Suede Hello, the Hoboken experimental music group in which Rosado also plays, is heavy on synthesizers and distorted electric guitar and is the film’s most consistently successful element. The relationship between Rosado as filmmaker and Rosado as musician producing the film’s score creates a formal integration that most films do not achieve between their visual and sonic identities: the score does not accompany the film so much as occupy the same body as it.

The synthesizer textures are not commenting on the visual action. They are part of it, and Rosado’s ability to inhabit both positions simultaneously without one compromising the other is worth noting as a specific creative achievement regardless of what else you think about Matador Bolero.

The comparisons to Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow are earned. What Cosmatos did with that film was take the specific visual and sonic language of a very narrow slice of 1980s science fiction and horror, the synthesizer-scored, slow-burn, practically-effects-driven aesthetic that existed between mainstream cinema and the experimental underground, and push it far enough past its own logic that it became something else: a film that felt like a memory of films that may not have fully existed.

Matador Bolero is doing a version of this with 1970s exploitation, but where Cosmatos was working with a kind of cold, controlled formalism, Rosado is working with something more ragged and more genuinely anarchic. The film does not feel like a controlled evocation of chaos. It feels like actual chaos that has been edited into something that occasionally coheres.

I really need to watch Santa Sangre more

The Jodorowsky comparison is also earned, though it requires the specific clarification that Matador Bolero is working at a fraction of Jodorowsky’s budget and without Jodorowsky’s specific talent for maintaining coherent visual logic inside a surrealist structure. What the comparison captures is the shared commitment to a kind of filmmaking that treats narrative as one available element among many rather than as the architecture that everything else hangs on. Both filmmakers are more interested in what the next image can make you feel than in whether the preceding images have built a foundation for it.

The question Matador Bolero leaves you with is not whether it succeeds by conventional measures, because it is not operating by conventional measures and would consider the question slightly beside the point. The question is whether the specific thing it is trying to do produces a genuine experience, something that changes the quality of your attention or your vision for the ninety-seven minutes you are in the room with it.

For some audiences, it will. The combination of Super 8 grain, Yves Tumor’s presence, The Suede Hello’s score, and Rosado’s genuine commitment to his own aesthetic vision creates a viewing experience that is distinctly its own, that does not feel like any other film currently in theaters, and that operates in a register that most American independent cinema in 2026 does not attempt. That is not a small thing. Films that exist only as themselves, that have no equivalent and no obvious market and no interest in acquiring one, are rarer than films that are good, and Matador Bolero is that kind of film regardless of whether it is also good by any other standard.

For other audiences it will be an endurance test. Both audiences exist. Both responses are reasonable. Matador Bolero knows which one it was made for and does not particularly mind about the other.

Matador Bolero is now playing in New York via Lucky American Films and Uncensored New York, with Los Angeles expansion June 11. The Roxy Cinema in NYC hosted Rosado for a post-film Q&A at the opening engagement.