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Another Summer with Eric Rohmer

David Hudson — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:11:00 +0000

Eric Rohmer

Maurice Schérer was teaching Greek and Latin literature and presiding over the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin when, in 1950, having cofounded La Gazette du cinéma, the future editor of Cahiers du cinéma took on a pseudonym: Eric Rohmer. “His mother disapproved of the cinema and preferred to think of her elder son as a moderately successful classics teacher since he had not succeeded in the university system in the way [his brother] René had,” writes Jaspreet Singh Boparai in the Lamp. “She died at the age of eighty-four in 1970, never realizing that her academic failure of a son was an internationally renowned film director.”

Before becoming Eric Rohmer, Schérer tried his hand at a career in literature, writing his first and only novel, Élisabeth, under the name Gilbert Cordier. Begun in 1939, when Rohmer was eighteen, Élisabeth was completed in 1944 and published—and promptly ignored—in 1946. McNally Editions has just released a new translation by Aaron Kerner, and in his review for the New Yorker, Richard Brody writes that “Rohmer’s fame as a director sparks automatic curiosity about his novel, but Élisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar . . . Though the story of Élisabeth is simple, the novel is something of a cubistic puzzle.”

The story plays out “over the course of three sweltering days in August of 1939,” writes Nick Pinkerton in Metrograph’s Journal, and it revolves around a country home that Pinkerton surmises must be around “thirty or forty miles” east of Paris. Élisabeth Roby, a doctor’s wife, hosts Michel, a man in his twenties engaged to a somewhat older woman, Irène; Bernard, the Robys’ son, about the same age as Michel; and Bernard’s cousin, Claire.

“No irrevocable harm will come to anyone in the course of Rohmer’s novel, but the possibility of it hangs over every page, like muggy late summer air,” writes Pinkerton, adding that “in the manner of its telling, Élisabeth strays very far from what one might expect from Eric Rohmer . . . [T]aken as a whole, it is a work of surprising stylistic promiscuity.”

The new edition arrives with a foreword by André Aciman, the novelist best known for Call Me by Your Name. “If one can isolate a feature of Élisabeth later inscribed in so many of Rohmer’s films, it is that everyone has been put on time-out,” writes Aciman. “As Huguette, a character in the novel, remarks, it’s a world where ‘everything just devolves into flirtation.’ That the Second World War is merely a month away is the furthest thing from their thoughts.”

Writing for Zona Motel, Mesha Maren vehemently disagrees. Rohmer “has not created a world in which the war will never happen, he has created the intense hothouse environment of a world in which the war is always and forever just about to happen—a story set on a precipice, a story where the reader’s knowledge of the after exerts tremendous pressure on the just before.”

In 1949, three years after Élisabeth came and went without many noticing, Rohmer submitted a collection of stories he was calling Moral Tales to his publisher, who turned him down. In 2014, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, the authors of a widely admired Rohmer biography, edited a new edition of the collection.

“Neither bad nor brilliant,” wrote Serge Kaganski in a brief review that ran in Film Comment, “these little, dialogue-heavy stories were written in a classical, formal, and precise idiom, and they’re compartmentalized and not without a certain coolness. But if you don’t come to them expecting to discover a lost literary classic, they’re nonetheless fascinating insofar as they reveal the genealogy of a large part of Rohmer’s filmography.”

Here we find what Kaganski called “the first drafts” of the cycle of films known as Six Moral Tales, which Ginette Vincendeau has described as “cerebral yet humorous variations on the theme of love and deception in which male narrators are faced with the ethical dilemma of having to choose between women.” A series of all six films is currently playing at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles through the end of the month and has just opened at New York’s Metrograph before heading to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on July 24, and to the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career, both from 1963 and shot in black-and-white 16 mm, “herald Rohmer’s unparalleled ability to construct complex and absorbing stories out of seemingly banal characters and undramatic situations,” wrote Vincendeau. “Although he said, ‘We must show what is beyond behavior, while knowing that we can only show behavior,’ his is a cinema of behavior that also delves into psychological complexity. For Rohmer, the ‘moral tale’ was ‘not a moralistic tale but a story that describes not just what people do but what goes through people’s minds while they do it.’”

“The tales of Six Moral Tales do not have ‘morals,’” wrote Kent Jones in his 2006 essay on My Night at Maud’s (1969). “Rather, they are stories of people in the process of making choices that may or may not be moral, examining the basis on which those choices are made, and trying to divine the distance between the real and the ideal in the process.” “Filmed in lush, crisp black and white, during a snowy Parisian winter, by the great Nestor Almendros,” My Night at Maud’s “is the most beautiful of Rohmer’s films,” declared programmer David Schwartz in 2008.

La collectionneuse (1967) is “a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste,” wrote Phillip Lopate in 2006. “The sense of contrast in an earthly paradise in which the loveliest landscapes serve as ironic background for the pettiest exchanges is heightened by Almendros’s extraordinary color photography, with its warm brown tones and deep, rich blues; its translation of the phenomenon of heat into light through the use of natural instead of artificial illumination and mirrors for softening; its pushing of film stocks to the limit in night scenes and shade shooting during the day to avoid the sun’s dramatic changes—all these techniques, which would become hallmarks of Almendros’s, and Rohmer’s, later styles, were worked out for the first time in La collectionneuse, which the cinematographer, not surprisingly, came to regard as his favorite film.”

Of all six tales, “none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee (1970),” wrote Molly Haskell. The crux here is the image of “a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male. Of all the (mostly European, or non-American) directors truly interested in women—that is, who put them repeatedly at the center of their work—none has been so fascinated by the spectrum of womankind, and girlkind (a separate breed in Rohmer, and rightly so), and examined our sex with such a fine mixture of dispassion and empathy.”

“As if proving the thesis tested throughout Six Moral Tales,” wrote Armond White in his essay on Love in the Afternoon (1972), “Rohmer closes the series with an optimistic view of the ways in which women and men eternally negotiate their trust and companionship, seeking a resolution to their spiritual foundering on their quest toward the divine.”

Anyone unable to catch these films in these four cities will want to know that all of them are part of a program of fourteen Rohmer films now up on the Criterion Channel. And that includes The Green Ray (1986), whose fortieth anniversary Eleanor Brady is celebrating at Little White Lies as “an enduring portrait of loneliness amid life’s ever changing seasons.”

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Sam Neill’s Brilliant Career

David Hudson — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:12:00 +0000

Sam Neill in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979)

One of the themes running through the vast outpouring of genuine affection for Sam Neill since his passing was announced on Monday is an appreciation for his eagerness to cede the spotlight to his costars. And more often than not, those costars were women: Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979), Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), or Holly Hunter in The Piano (1993). In scene after scene, his modest yet firm grip on his own character would not only allow but encourage his partner to take flight.

A few years ago, Neill sat down in his home in New Zealand, where he ran a respected winery, Two Paddocks, and started jotting down a few stories. In short order, those pages were steering toward a memoir: “The thing is, I’m crook. Possibly dying. I may have to speed this up.”

Neill had been diagnosed with a type of blood cancer that would require chemotherapy for the rest of his life. By the time Did I Ever Tell You This? was published in 2023, he could happily announce on his endearing Instagram account—where he often posed with the farm animals he’d named after friends such as Helena Bonham Carter (a cow) or Meryl Streep (a chicken)—that doctors had declared his body cancer-free.

“I’m not afraid to die,” Neill told Lucy Clark in a 2023 Guardian interview, “but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big. But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.” His death at the age of seventy-eight was, as his family put it, “sudden and unexpected.”

The son of an Englishwoman and a New Zealander, Nigel John Dermot Neill was born in Northern Ireland, and when he was seven, the family moved to New Zealand. By the time he was eleven, he’d ditched his name and posh accent. “To land in a pretty rough playground in a New Zealand primary school with a plum in the voice and Nigel for a name was asking for trouble,” he wrote in his memoir. He decided to go by Sam because he liked westerns, and besides, it “sounds friendly.”

A projected career in law went nowhere, but while studying at universities in Christchurch and Wellington, where he was cast in drama school productions, he discovered that acting thrilled him. Working with the New Zealand National Film Unit, he directed short documentaries for television and appeared in Paul Maunder’s Landfall (1975) as a member of an unraveling rural commune.

Roger Donaldson cast Neill as a loner in Sleeping Dogs (1977), one of the first features produced entirely in New Zealand. The action-spiked political thriller “has a litany of reasons for why it is one of the most important Kiwi films ever made,” writes Abid Rahman in the Hollywood Reporter, “but Neill’s performance as the rebellious Smith, who fights back against fascist forces looking to take over his country, earned rave notices from critics, including Janet Maslin in the New York Times.”

The springboard to international recognition and eventually more than 150 on-screen credits was My Brilliant Career, the 1979 adaptation of Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel directed by Gillian Armstrong. Judy Davis stars as Sybylla, a headstrong woman determined to become a writer once she overcomes poverty and her unwanted feelings for her well-to-do childhood friend.

“The man in question is the fetching (and did I say rich?) Harry Beecham (Neill), he of the James Mason voice and hungry eyes that ravish Sybylla and not a few moviegoers,” wrote Carrie Rickey in 2019. “In 1980, I found Neill particularly attractive, and he is lovingly and lingeringly shot in this film. In other words, like the girl in most movies. In retrospect, I realize this was an early experience for me of seeing a male lust object through the eyes of a female director. In any event, never again was Neill quite so delicious.”

Whatever the opposite of delicious is, Neill imbued it in Mark, the Cold War–era spy he played in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. Mark returns to his home in Berlin to discover that his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), seems utterly preoccupied by someone—or something—else.

“Adjani’s volcanic performance may be the film’s most famous element,” writes the Playlist’s Rodrigo Perez, “but Neill matches her hysteria with a different, equally terrifying form of psychic collapse: Mark begins as a devastated husband clinging to rational explanations and gradually becomes sweaty, bug-eyed, abusive, and barely recognizable. Neill makes the character frightening because his need to possess Anna remains emotionally legible even as the movie descends into grotesque, apocalyptic lunacy.”

In Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm, Neill is a navy captain vacationing on his yacht with his young wife (Nicole Kidman) when they take on board a distressed survivor of a schooner disaster who turns out to be a murderous psychopath (Billy Zane). “Part Cary Grant, part MacGyver,” writes Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times, “Neill gives a great physical performance, which he parlayed into well-paying Hollywood action roles for the rest of his career. None came close, though, to his flare-gun theatrics here.”

Playing a Russian officer, Neill joined the all-star cast of John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990) before becoming part of another sprawling ensemble in Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991). Narrating the globe-spanning sci-fi drama, Neill plays Eugene, whose lover, Claire (Solveig Dommartin), is drifting away.

“His melancholy voice provides the film with a steady emotional current, grounding its vast geographical and philosophical ambitions in the sadness of a man watching someone he loves slip beyond his reach,” writes Nicholas Laskin at the Playlist. “Neill’s hauntingly subdued performance demonstrates how much he could contribute to a film through stillness, observation, and quiet emotional ache.”

In the summer of 1993, Jane Campion’s The Piano premiered in Cannes just one month before Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film released worldwide, beating Spielberg’s own record set with E.T. (1982) and holding it until Batman Forever came along in 1995. The stars of Jurassic Park were, of course, the dinosaurs, but as the Telegraph’s Tim Robey points out, if Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant “couldn’t persuade an audience the dinosaurs were real, the entire film would have failed: it rested on his shoulders more than is often recognized.”

Talking with Brian Davids about the blockbuster in the Hollywood Reporter in 2022, Neill recalled that he’d “suggested something, which is an illustration of how I was never an action hero. [Laughs.] I said to Steven, ‘Look, after a lifetime of imagining dinosaurs, to actually see a dinosaur, Alan Grant just might flat out faint.’ [Laughs.] And Steven said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So that’s why you see me stagger around and I have to sit down and put my head between my legs. [Laughs.] I thought, ‘That’s actually a human reaction,’ so I’m glad he was open to that.”

Campion became the first female director to win the Palme d’Or, and The Piano would go on to win three Oscars, including one for Holly Hunter, who plays Ana, a willfully mute Scottish woman who expresses herself through her piano. Neill’s Alisdair Stewart is a nineteenth-century settler in New Zealand, and because he’s arranged to have Ana, her young daughter (Anna Paquin, who was eleven when she won her Oscar), and the piano transported to him, he’s furious when Ana refuses to give him what he sees by the rights of their arranged marriage to be his to take.

“Sam was kind, committed, and supportive,” says Campion. “He looked after me and actually everyone on the set. He stomped through mud, organized dinners, bossed me around at rushes, and told me off if he thought I was letting the lighting get too dark. I loved him as Stewart. I can remember gasping as he pulled Holly out of his hut, into the streaming rain and mud, with a force I had not expected but at once realized the story needed. He already knew, Stewart’s jealousy was terrifying.”

“We hate him,” writes Glenn Whipp. “Which was fine by Neill, as he wrote in his 2023 memoir: ‘There is honor to be found in the second fiddle. Or fourth. No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things. But you served. I was there in an important feminist film. It’s a work of art. And look, that tiny little figure in the fabric—see down there on the right—that’s me. It’s a film that will always have a place in cinema history. And I served in it.”

“His voice was magical (it’s unsurprising that he played Merlin for a 1998 miniseries) and his exterior so composed that it became a thrill any time we saw him get ruffled,” writes Tim Robey. With his quietly dry humor and somewhat reserved comportment, Neill could throw us off when he let it rip as he did when playing the driven Dr. William Weir in Paul Anderson’s sci-fi horror movie Event Horizon (1997).

Ranking twenty of his favorite Neill performances in the Guardian, Luke Buckmaster places Neill’s leading turn in John Carpenter’s “sensationally loud and Lovecraftian” In the Mouth of Madness (1994) at the top. Neill plays John Trent, “an insurance investigator convinced that a mass hysteria event surrounding the release of a new horror novel is a PR trick. The hardened cynic who becomes a true believer is a classic trajectory, and our man runs with it to hell and back, the protagonist’s sanity erupting like a burst blood vessel.”

Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) “takes a troika of familiar story types—the plucky kid, the crusty geezer, the nurturing bosom—and strips them of cliché,” wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him.” Neill plays that someone—who also happens to be the geezer. Earlier this year, Neill got “a bit teary” at a tenth-anniversary screening of one of the films he’d made during a career that spanned half a century that turned out to mean the most to him.

“It’s worth pondering why Sam Neill wasn’t a bigger star,” writes Ty Burr. “He worked for major directors, in major projects, and he clearly was in demand throughout his career . . . He was handsome enough, but in a slightly generic and slightly slippery way—a handsomeness that with an invisible twist of some inner dial could become threatening or weak or bitter. Above all, he never really had what every true movie star needs, which is a persona, some connective sense of who he was offscreen, whether that was true or not. Offscreen, I think he was more interested in just being a person, while onscreen he could be anybody but himself. We call such people actors, and we don’t really appreciate them until they’re gone.”

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Karlovy Vary 60/80 Awards

David Hudson — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:44:00 +0000

Nandar Myat Aung in Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering (2026)

In 1959, Soviet authorities decided that the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, founded in 1946, would be held every other year. This would allow Moscow’s fledgling festival to take the spotlight in the alternate years—until, of course, the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s. That’s why KVIFF’s sixtieth edition, which wrapped over the weekend, was also a celebration of eighty years as one of the main annual cultural events in Central Europe.

Among the many highlights of KVIFF 60/80 were the world premiere of a new restoration of Věra Chytilová’s Tainted Horseplay (1988); conversations with awardees, including Dustin Hoffman, Juliette Binoche, Jesse Eisenberg, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeffrey Wright, and Harvey Keitel; and Saturday evening’s presentation of the awards.

Crystal Globe Competition

The festival’s top prize, the Crystal Globe, went to Fruit Gathering, the first feature from Aung Phyoe, whose shorts have screened at festivals in Locarno and Singapore. San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung) is toiling away in a textile factory in Myanmar and keeping pretty much to herself when an outgoing new coworker, Theint Theint Oo (Nandar Myint Lwin), catches her eye.

“Fruit Gathering is most artful,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “and most moving, when it interrogates the terms of this relationship through silent, pregnant gazes and gestures, shot with dreamy stillness in summery light by DP Thaiddhi, unaccompanied by any score: an image of one woman looking quizzically into the mirror where the other is brushing her hair; the subtly increasing pastel matchiness of Akari Diraki’s beautifully tailored costumes; the outwardly platonic but internally loaded significance of holding hands in a public place. Any greater eroticism is largely kept off screen, but such scenes crackle with sensual possibility.”

Another first feature, Mads Mengel’s The Guest, won both the Special Jury Prize and the Best Director Award. New parents Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) have invited just a few close family members to a seaside hotel in Denmark, where they will celebrate the naming of their newborn son. Definitely not invited is Karl’s mother, Vibeke (Trine Dyrholm). Karl hasn’t spoken to her in years, but his sister, Rikke (Josephine Park), clearly has. She’s the one responsible for Vibeke making a surprise appearance at the party.

“Clean-lined and sharp-edged,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety, “with David Bauer’s cinematography washed in cool-toned summer light and line-dried under pale Scandinavian skies, the film has many hallmarks of the current Nordic drama wave: parental estrangement, familial resentments, the pained politeness of the middle-class in response to social discomfort, blondeness. But in a virtuosic yet restrained performance of volatility from actress Trine Dyrholm, it also shows a steely tensile strength that distinguishes it from its softer contemporaries.”

“The most audacious move here,” suggests Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter, “may be Mengel and cowriter Christian Bengtson’s choice to write something that will inevitably invite comparisons with Festen (The Celebration), arguably the most notorious Danish-language film of the last thirty years, which similarly revolved around a bougie gathering disrupted by angry revelations. But there’s a savvy 2026 vibe about the way the film refuses to create florid melodrama out of quotidian crisis, and instead observes with generosity as the characters grope awkwardly toward emotional détente and mutual forgiveness.”

In Jan-Eric Mack’s A Happy Family, Anna Schinz, the winner of the Best Actress Award, “impresses from the get-go as Nicole ‘Niki’ Hofer, a single mother of two already struggling to satisfy child protection services in the film’s opening scene,” writes Elena Lazic for Variety. “Anna was actually the head writer,” Mack tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai. “She started this project and, since we are a couple, the film was living with us for about five years. During the process, we added two cowriters to the project. The four of us wrote it, which is very unusual, but we are very close. Later, Anna needed to change perspective from an analytical view as a writer to an emotional approach as an actress to become the main character.”

Jurors Justin Chang, Amanda Nell Eu, Pavel Rejholec, Nadia Turincev, and Eskil Vogt presented the Best Actor Award to Ghassan Saad “for fully inhabiting the role of a longtime village plumber who greets every setback with surprising warmth and gruff good humor” in Pipes, the fifth feature Karim Kassem has directed in the past five years.

Proxima Competition

With its Proxima Competition, KVIFF aims to give “space to the world’s new voices from across the vast cinematic spectrum.” Lover, Not a Fighter, the first feature from Slovakian director Martina Buchelová, won the Grand Prix. Adam Kubala stars as twenty-year-old Andrej, who is trying to dry out—with only a limited degree of success—while summering with his grandmother. As he clicks with and eventually falls for Miša (Michaela Kostková), Buchelová widens her scope to draw in a winningly eclectic array of supporting players.

“Structured as a patchwork of loosely connected, inconsistently chronological episodes,” writes Guy Lodge, Buchelová’s “hugely appealing” film “feels rhythmically shaggy in a way that reflects the insecurities, anxieties and liberties of GenZ living, without patronizing its drifting characters.”

A Special Jury Prize went to Shuntaro Uchida’s Incinerator, which jurors Estrella Araiza, Dirk Decker, Jakub Felcman, Devika Girish, and Marija Kavtaradze call “a film of deceptive simplicity—its subtlety and lightness bely layers of poetry and profundity. The director beautifully adopts the perspective of an unusual young girl who says little, but senses everything; like a Richter scale her face records the unspoken tensions and tremulations of everyone around her.”

Efthimis Kosemund-Sanidis won the Proxima Best Director Award for A Whole Person Almost, the story of a young man’s trip to a remote island to claim his late father’s inheritance. “Even after almost twenty years, the so-called Greek Weird Wave still appears to be going strong,” writes Marko Stojiljković for Cineuropa. “Here, the setting of an unnamed island—one that lives by its own rules, at once rigid and ever-changing—serves that purpose perfectly, as the filmmaker and his cowriter, Elizampetta Ilia Georgiadou, explore not just the setting itself, but also the characters’ inner lives and psychology.”

A Proxima Special Mention went to Anna and Šimon Domček’s 33 Steps, a blend of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on Milan Daniel, a Roma man who was attacked near the Czech-Slovak border. “In a deep, raw voice-over, he tells us how he saw both the devil and God while he was in a coma, and that the latter warned him not to seek revenge,” notes Vladan Petkovic at Cineuropa. The jury calls 33 Steps “an audacious film—one that, though inspired by an incident of brutal bigotry, goes beyond the simple narratives of victimizer and victims.”

Further Awards

The Ecumenical Jury singled out Tonia Mishiali’s The Lion at My Back. Stella (Elena Kallinikou), a Cypriot woman in her forties with a dark past, takes in Mariama (Sokhna Diallo), a Senegalese immigrant who has just turned eighteen. For David Jenkins at Little White Lies, this is “a story which seems jerry-rigged for either depressive disaster or overwrought sentimentality, and props to Mishiali for locating a satisfying third route which leaves things at a point of authentic continuity.” The Lion at My Back is “a powerful work about the necessity of female solidarity and mutual care in an environment that is rife with repellent male operators.”

The Europa Cinemas Label Award went to Miroslav Terzić’s 3 Weeks After. Two dozen Serbian high schoolers board a bus set to take them on a field trip. One of these students is the best friend of another who has killed himself, and he’s now the target of his classmates’ merciless bullying. “Little wonder, given Terzić’s long background in commercial work, that the craft work delivers such pleasurable polish,” writes Sonya Vseliubska at In Review Online. Terzić “retains the tact not to turn an already painful finale into a spectacle of violence under the microscope. That less obvious gesture, rarer for the subgenre and its subject, refuses easy answers by retreating to an extreme long shot, while paradoxically drawing emotionally closer. Here the film wins most: in a dramaturgical evolution generous enough to offset how little 3 Weeks After adds to the savage cruelty of adolescence, cinema’s inexhaustible resource.”

The International Federation of Film Critics awarded two FIPRESCI Prizes. The jury found that Ivan Ostrochovský’s Only Beautiful Things to Look At, a Crystal Globe contender, “blows the lid off a very touchy topic for bygone Czechoslovakia—the ethical implications of the state-sponsored sterilization campaign of Roma women.” And through “rich atmosphere, lingering observation, and a seductive sense of mystery,” Mate Ugrin, the director of Proxima entry Petty Thieves, “crafts a quietly universal portrait of a generation caught between economic hardship, fractured human connections, and the search for belonging and dignity.”

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Being There

David Hudson — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:26:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Harry Dean Stanton in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984)

The Criterion Mobile Closet is back in Los Angeles this weekend as we take part in Music from the Films of Wes Anderson, a series of three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, all of them hosted by Bill Murray. Among the many artists slated to perform are Devo, Jackson Browne, Karen O, and Jeff Goldblum. “I was surprised how many things we did have to leave out,” Anderson tells Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. “We could do a whole other round of this, but let’s see how it goes on this first one.”

Cinephiles around the world, in the meantime, are mourning the loss of critic, programmer, and translator Tony Rayns, who has passed away at the age of seventy-seven. “Widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in film culture, Rayns helped introduce generations of Western audiences to filmmakers from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan,” writes Sam Wigley for the BFI, which is passing along remembrances from Bong Joon Ho, Wong Kar Wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and John Woo. “Dear Tony, I didn’t get the chance to say ‘thank you,’” writes Jia Zhang-Ke in a tribute republished in Variety.

Over the years, Rayns wrote for us on the work of Yasujiro Ozu, Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, and others. Sight and Sound has gathered his many contributions to the magazine, which include essays on Edward Yang, Lino Brocka, Zhang Yimou, and Park Chan-wook. “For me, as for many others, he was not only a hugely valued colleague but a friend and, to some degree, something of a mentor,” writes former BFI programmer Geoff Andrew. Rayns’s dedication to cinema “knew no geographical or aesthetic boundaries,” writes programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht. “Alongside his unrivaled knowledge of Asian cinema, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Roger Corman and often spoke of his wish to curate a John Farrow retrospective for Il Cinema Ritrovato.”

This week’s highlights:

“Are you asking me if the whole concept of trying to film a version of your own reality is no longer a valid pursuit?” Ross McElwee raises this question toward the end of Matt Zoller Seitz’s moving conversation with him for RogerEbert.com. The occasion is today’s launch of a theatrical run for Remake, the first film in fourteen years from McElwee, the documentarian who has been tracking his own reality in films ranging from Sherman’s March (1986) through Bright Leaves (2004) to Photographic Memory (2012). As Alissa Wilkinson puts it in the New York Times, Remake, which focuses on McElwee’s son Adrian, who died of a drug overdose in 2016, is “possibly his masterpiece.” Touring with the film has not been easy, he tells Seitz: “I think what I’m bringing to people is a sense of solace. I can never make the pain go away, any more than they can make it go away from their own lives. But the film gives them the sense that they’re not alone, that there are other people who’ve been through this, too. All of that, I think, is worth doing.”

Set at the turn of the millennium, Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998) stars Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei as strangers defying government orders to evacuate Taipei during a virus outbreak. For J. Hoberman, writing in the NYT, The Hole brings to mind “a pared-down combination of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and one of Pina Bausch’s splashy water dances.” As a newly struck, Tsai-approved 35 mm print opens in New York before heading out to theaters across North America, the director tells Nick Newman at the Film Stage that much of the film is rooted in his own experience. He once lived in a public housing unit where there actually was a hole in his floor through which he could peer down into his neighbor’s apartment below. Tsai also tells Newman that he’s developing a “semi-narrative” project that should “reunite all the actors I have worked with in the past.”

For e-flux, Vadim Rizov talks with Douglas Fogle—who has curated Bruce Conner / Recording Angel, an exhibition which brings together seven of the late artist’s landmark films at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles and is now on view through July 18—and Michelle Silva, Conner’s assistant and editor. Silva tells Rizov that Conner resisted digitization of his work for years, but once the technology had advanced to the point that it allowed maximum control over the presentation, “He called me up one day and said, ‘I declare myself a video maker.’” “There’s a purist argument to be made against the decoupling of the work from its medium-specific origins,” writes Rizov, “and it’s an argument I would theoretically be the first to make; the whole premise of the show initially filled me with unease. I entered as a Conner agnostic and exited, if not a convert, at least as an evangelist for this show.”

“Centuries from now, historians of our era will study footage of Vincent Cassel breakdancing through the Villa Borghese and wonder what was going on with us,” writes Jackson Arn in a terrifically entertaining piece for Art in America on novels and movies centering on art heists. Besides Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve (2004), other titles under consideration here include Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962), William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966), John Woo’s Once a Thief (1991), Vasilis Katsoupis’s Inside (2023), and of course, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025).

This coming Tuesday will mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Harry Dean Stanton. We’re celebrating with a robust program on the Criterion Channel, and from Sunday through July 19, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will present The Stanton Rule: A Harry Dean Stanton Centennial. “With his concave, craggy cheeks and haunted eyes, Harry Dean Stanton was nobody’s idea of a movie star,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR. “He looked like hard living personified. Just watching some of his films makes the theater smell like cigarettes. Whether called upon to act kindly, terrifying, or just plain exhausted, Stanton was always effortlessly authentic in ways that made other actors seem phony. ‘He’s there,’ said his friend and frequent collaborator David Lynch in the 2012 documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, adding, ‘Whatever “there” needs to be, he’s there.’”

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Il Cinema Ritrovato at Forty

David Hudson — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:25:00 +0000

Jacqueline Vandal in Paula Delsol’s La dérive (1964)

It takes a while to gather some perspective on a program of around five hundred films. While some—such as Geoff Gardner, chair of the Organizing Committee of Cinema Reborn—managed to keep daily diaries during the fortieth edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 20 through 28), Bologna’s festival of restorations and rediscoveries, most have taken a few days to gather their thoughts.

Ehsan Khoshbakht, one of the festival’s four directors, notes that 145,000 people attended this year, and he’s asked 170 of them to name a favorite film and a major discovery from the bounteous 2026 lineup. Gian Luca Farinelli, the director of the Cineteca di Bologna and a cofounder of the festival, tells Angela Giuffrida in the Guardian that Il Cinema Ritrovato “has grown while maintaining its principles—that is, to go in-depth and show films but also the [complexity], richness, and contradictions of the history of cinema.”

This year’s XL edition opened with the San Francisco Film Preserve’s restoration of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), which is, of course, widely regarded as one of the greatest films of the silent era. Variety’s Nick Vivarelli reports that the screening—accompanied by a new score performed live by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna orchestra—drew a crowd of around seven thousand to Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore.

“All week there were three questions on everyone’s lips,” writes Pamela Hutchinson. “Did you see Sunrise? Wasn’t it wonderful? Did you get a fan? SFFP has strong merch game.”

Hutchinson also caught “the comprehensive, beautiful Agnès Varda exhibition in the Modernissimo gallery (her 1980s classic Vagabond played the Piazza Maggiore), and one of my favorite films in the festival was directed by one of her New Wave peers: Paula Delsol. La dérive (1964) offers a small-town Cléo (a feline Jacqueline Vandal) drifting from lover to lover, a fugitive femme on a quest for independence and love—in that order.” The film is “so strikingly modern, so gorgeous, that I was delighted to see it in a new restoration from the Cinémathèque française. La dérive was garlanded at Cannes but had since fallen out of circulation. I highly recommend you catch it when you can.”

The “unquestionable highlight” of the festival for Forrest Cardamenis was Léonce Perret’s L’enfant de Paris (1913), a two-hour silent feature that tells the story of an orphaned girl who escapes her boarding school only to be kidnapped by an an alcoholic cobbler whose young son is determined to help her escape. Perret’s “naivety vis-à-vis Griffith and cinematic technique is part of what makes the emotional core of this film work,” writes Cardamenis. “And work it does: the climax is certainly the most moving that I’ve seen in early (pre-Intolerance, say) cinema, and among the most moving in all of silent cinema. Its structure may be dramatically unusual, but it is emotionally intuitive.”

Further observations on the 2026 edition come from Notebook contributors in the form of seven-word reviews; Alex Petrescu, who focuses on the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective at In Review Online; and Screen Slate, which has posted dispatches from Joshua Bogatin, Bernardo Rondeau, and Stephen Fisk. “One of the most wonderful things about watching a program dedicated to a year like 1906 is discovering how little movies actually needed to be ossified into the standards of classical film grammar in order to achieve a beautiful expressive potential,” writes Bogatin.

“In previous editions,” Bogatin continues, “the presenters at the festival have described early cinema as a pre-bourgeois cinema, a form focused on vulgar visual pleasures over narrative and the moralism that comes with it. What one often finds in these movies is the pure joy of seeing; when watching them, I often feel a will to naïveté, a desire to put aside all that I’ve come to expect from films in order to sit in simple jaw-dropping wonder.”

“In the festival’s Recovered & Restored section, individual titles hang suspended, set apart from thematic groupings or retrospectives,” writes Rondeau. “One of the festival’s selections with perhaps the most harrowing preservation backstory, Yuri Ilyenko’s A Spring for the Thirsty (1965) was scanned during wartime in Kyiv with equipment provided by Poland's FixaFilm, running on generators as power cuts plagued the capital.” Ilyenko is probably best known internationally for shooting Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), and his directorial debut is “a total masterpiece—one which, due to so-called ‘ideological deviations,’ was banned and unavailable to audiences until the dawn of Perestroika in the mid-1980s—now preserved to entrance audiences anew.”

“Mitchell Leisen remains, seemingly forever, one of classic Hollywood’s best kept secrets, an underdog auteur who gets respectable retrospectives in certain cinephilic cities once a decade and, in the interim, devotion from a small group of slightly overzealous fans (myself among them),” writes Fisk. Cradle Song (1933), “usually billed as Leisen’s ‘directorial debut,’ has never had any official (or even bootleg) release at all. As it is otherwise completely unavailable and has been very rarely screened in the decades since Leisen’s death in 1972, it was, on its own, reason enough for at least a handful of we devotees to justify a trip to Bologna.”

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Japan Cuts 2026

David Hudson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:16:00 +0000

Suzu Hirose in Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills (2025)

Suzu Hirose was sixteen going on seventeen when her career took off. She’d done some modeling and appeared in a few films that didn’t make much of a splash before Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister premiered in competition in Cannes. Hirose played the title character, a thirteen-year-old who has cared for the dying man who fathered her and, by another mother, three half-sisters she has never met. After their father dies, these three young women take in their “new” younger sister.

Kore-eda’s tenth feature went on to score four Japanese Academy Awards, including Picture of the Year, Director of the Year, and a Newcomer of the Year award for Hirose. Our Little Sister “may not have the power of Kore-eda’s earlier movie I Wish,” wrote the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “but it is sure-footed in the way his child-swap drama Like Father Like Son was not. It is impossible not to be touched and beguiled by it.”

Hirose will introduce a screening of Our Little Sister in New York on Sunday during the nineteenth edition of Japan Cuts, which opens tomorrow and runs through July 19. Japan Society will present a Cut Above Award to Hirose, who will introduce this year’s Centerpiece Film on Monday. Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills (2025) is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, “and quite a good one,” finds Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. At first, Schilling wondered “why it had taken so long” to turn this story into a film, but then “third-act developments made it clear that this would be no conventionally weepy drama about mother-daughter reconciliation.”

Kore-eda will be in town as well to take part in a Q&A following the presentation of the festival’s Closing Film, Sheep in the Box, the director’s latest Cannes competition entry. Initial critical response was not great back in May, but not everyone is ready to unceremoniously dismiss this story of Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto), parents who have lost their young son and sign up to take on a substitute, an AI-powered “humanoid.”

“Sheep in the Box isn’t blazing new territory here in terms of premise,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “The difference is that, due to . . . the Kore-eda of it all, Sheep in the Box exudes a melancholy resignation about the idea that humanity is going to do this rather than being driven to explore whether humanity should. It’s a movie that, in terms of sentiment, feels of a kind with his past work about abandoned children living on their own in Nobody Knows, a ragtag found family in Shoplifters, and an inflatable doll that comes to life in Air Doll. In other words, Sheep in the Box regards AI creations as just more things for society to fail, even if the Komotos do their best to be kind.”

Japan Cuts 2026 will open with Tokyo Taxi (2025), the ninety-first feature from ninety-four-year-old director Yoji Yamada. As Jordan Mintzer points out in the Hollywood Reporter, Yamada and eighty-five-year-old Chieko Basho have made “dozens upon dozens of Tora-san comedy movies” together, and their “century-and-a-half of combined experience is certainly on display in this slick, senior-skewed crowd-pleaser, about a beleaguered cabbie taking an aging passenger on one last ride through her hometown metropolis, during which she reflects on her long and sometimes shocking life.”

More than thirty features are screening in this year’s program, and at the Film Stage, Soham Gadre and Nick Newman have written up notes on fifteen of them. Gadre recommends Yukari Sakamoto’s White Flowers and Fruits, a debut feature that “transfers the elements of horror into adolescent drama à la Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.” For Newman, Ryuichi Iwakura’s first feature, Brand New Love, is “a mini-masterpiece of mise-en-scène,” while Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s Sai: Disaster is “an everything-at-once cross-cut nightmare, foregrounding both the killer initially revealed after the first hour and a detective narrative.”

But Shinichiro Sawai’s W’s Tragedy (1984) just might be “the best film in Japan Cuts’ 2026 lineup,” suggests Newman. This film is “terror-tinged in its depiction of a performer’s life mirroring their art; the stage has rarely proven a more malevolent site in cinema. For those who know it, W’s Tragedy has long seemed just two steps from cult canonization. This world premiere of a 4K restoration is at least the first.”

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Věra Chytilová’s Tainted Horseplay

David Hudson — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:23:00 +0000

David Vávra in Věra Chytilová’s Tainted Horseplay (1988)

It’s easy to imagine that Věra Chytilová and her editor, Ivana Kačírková, might have cut an inconsequential scene from Tainted Horseplay if it weren’t guaranteed to draw a laugh in 1988. A Czech bureaucrat is dully outlining a vision of the glorious socialist future at an under-attended meeting when a squealing woman races through the drab hall. Never mind why, but she’s cowering under a huge American flag she’s draped over herself. When they dreamed up this visual gag, Chytilová and her cowriter, Pavel Skapík, could not have known that within about a year’s time, the Berlin Wall would fall, the Warsaw Pact would be unraveling, and the Velvet Revolution would eventually lead to the splitting of Czechoslovakia into two sovereign states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The scene plays differently in 2026, but it still sparked a hearty round of laughter in Karlovy Vary on Sunday when the festival hosted the world premiere of a new restoration of Tainted Horseplay, the film that wrapped Chytilová’s “infantile libertine” cycle—after The Apple Game (1976) and The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (1983)—and was known for a while in the English-speaking world as A Hoof Here, a Hoof There. It is an awfully goofy movie for most of its first half, but it takes a turn, lobbing a few emotionally gutting twists before raising spirits at least halfway again by the end.

Before Sunday’s screening, Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och brought out a parade of restoration funders and surviving cast and crew members, and the three leading players immediately stole the show. Nearly forty years on, Tomáš Hanák, Milan Šteindler, and David Vávra—who star as three friends in their thirties who booze it up, womanize, and stage elaborate practical jokes together—still know how to win over a crowd.

The actors’ antics were all in good harmless fun, but that does not necessarily go for what their characters got up to during the era of Communist Party rule. When one of their bosses is tempted to allow himself to be maybe just a little bit seduced by the men’s rowdy rebelliousness, he says something to the effect of being all for thinking differently—as long as we all think differently in the same way.

When all 1,131 seats in the Grand Hall were filled and the lights came down, it was time for one of the festival’s justifiably famous trailers. Since 2008, Ivan Zachariáš has been shooting these black-and-white comedic shorts featuring such stars as Helen Mirren, Harvey Keitel, and John Malkovich or directors like Miloš Forman, all of them recipients of the festival’s unwieldy award, a statuette of a woman holding high a hefty crystal sphere. The joke at the heart of all these trailers is that the awardee has no idea what to do with this thing.

For the Tainted Horseplay screening, the festival naturally chose the trailer shot for its 2008 edition. A frustrated Věra Chytilová tries to piece together the shards of her shattered crystal globe with glue and Scotch tape. Six years later, Chytilová would be gone, but a few years before agreeing to appear in the trailer, she took a long and ruminative look back on her life and career in Jasmina Blaževič’s Journey: A Portrait of Vera Chytilová, an hour-long 2004 documentary available on the Criterion Channel. At one point, Chytilová grumbles that she’s tired of being asked why she doesn’t make another Daisies (1966).

Before that international breakthrough—Carmen Gray calls Daisies “the most formally radical and one of the most politically subversive films of what is now known as the Czechoslovak New Wave”—Chytilová made intricate and incisive studies of outsiders in such shorts as A Bagful of Fleas (1962) and The Restaurant the World, her contribution to the 1966 anthology film Pearls of the Deep, as well as in her first feature, Something Different (1963). Daisies may be formally playful and thematically provocative, but cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera’s camera remains respectful of right angles. The upper and lower borders of the frame are steadily leveled.

Tainted Horseplay is giddy with Dutch angles. One of the costars is Karlovy Vary itself, the spa city where the film was shot, taking in the pastel-hued nineteenth-century architecture that somehow flirts with wedding-cake ornamentation while remaining just this side of majestic. Jaroslav Brabec’s camera is thrilled and woozy with each of the three friends’ moves to conquer nearly every woman they meet only to discover that another friend has already staked his flag.

“I think most of Věra Chytilová’s body of work can be categorized as moral farces,” wrote Boris Nelepo on the occasion of a 2017 retrospective. “The aesthetics of buffoonery is so apt for Chytilová’s works, making the agitated camera spin from character to character as they chase each other for sex, profit, or pleasure, yelling and gesticulating in a Tom-and-Jerry-like frenzy.”

All the party balloons pop when one of them falls ill. It’s the late 1980s, and so, it is decided—in a rather fumbling, almost accidental manner—that the friends’ entire circle is to be tested for AIDS. And that circle is wide. The tests are anonymous, and when just one turns up positive, there’s suddenly a mystery to be solved, and camaraderie gives way to recriminations.

“Not even an alien invasion [in 1987’s Wolf’s Hole] can bring people together in solidarity,” noted Nelepo. “Can we call Chytilová a misanthrope, though? Absolutely not. For many years, she watched the abiding human comedy unfold. She once called Something Different ‘a drama about the eternal struggle for immortality amidst the finality of human powers.’ If we replaced ‘drama’ with ‘comedy,’ this definition would apply to all of her films without exception.”

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Plucked from Obscurity

David Hudson — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:03:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner (1967)

Tonight in London, the Liberated Film Club welcomes the Otolith Group and Light Industry to the Close-Up Film Centre, while the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Divided Publishing present Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1996) followed by a conversation between director Isaac Julien and Françoise Vergès. Over the weekend, Cinema Mentiré will roll out Salome, Salome, Salome, a program of “three radically different queer incarnations of the biblical princess across Brazil, Mexico, and the UK.” André Antônio’s Salomé (2024) screens tomorrow, followed by Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988) on Saturday and Teo Hernández’s Salomé (1976) on Sunday.

New York’s Spectacle Theater is presenting a rare screening of Michael Jacobs’s Audience of One (2007) this evening. The doc chronicles Pastor Richard Gazowsky’s attempt to make a biblical epic, Gravity: Shadow of Joseph, which J. Hoberman noted in the Village Voice was “worthy of the hubristic monuments detailed in Stuart Klawans’s Film Follies—except that those lunatic extravaganzas, ‘filmmaking pushed beyond all rational limits,’ actually got made. In three years, Jacobs reveals, Gazowsky has completed only two shots (but what shots—if only we could see them!) and is being sued by the city of San Francisco. Still, he perseveres: ‘God doesn’t change his mind.’”

Some Nostalgic Place: The Films of Isao Takahata opens tonight in Berkeley, and from tomorrow through August 4, the free streaming platform Le Cinéma Club will present a Summer Music Festival, beginning with Nicolas Roeg and Peter Neals’s Glastonbury Fayre (1972), a “time capsule of the hippie experiment replete with frenzied dancing, mud-bathing, and sun meditations.”

On September 1, the day before Venice opens, the festival will premiere a new restoration of Tinto Brass’s Deadly Sweet (1967), a pop thriller shot in London and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. Venice will announce its lineup on July 23, and Locarno will announce its lineup next Thursday. Karlovy Vary, in the meantime, opens tomorrow.

We begin this week’s round of highlights with a couple of sad goodbyes:

On the final episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest, Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner revisit the first topic they discussed in their inaugural outing, Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007), and one of the many questions raised is whether such an ultimately winning little comedy could be made in 2026—and if so, would it have to be taffy-pulled out into a streaming series? Last Friday, 4Columns wrapped up an outstanding run of nearly ten years. In her farewell review, Melissa Anderson observes that both Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash (1973), featuring the late David Hockney at a crucial turning point in his life, and Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles (2025) advance “the idea that erotic energy, constantly waxing and waning, is itself a mystical power, drawing from and feeding into other invisible currents.” Reverse Shot is running Ricky D’Ambrose’s brief but rich conversation with Castro.

One of the films opening the Museum of Modern Art series Immigrant Nation: People in Transit tomorrow evening will be Alice Guy Blaché’s Making an American Citizen (1912), a comedy about a Russian learning four lessons in his newly adopted country. For MoMA’s Magazine, curatorial assistant Francisco Valente briskly traces the life of Guy, who in the early twentieth century was “one of the most talented and prolific filmmakers in the world—and likely the only woman director in the industry. She was also one of the few people to have attended the first-ever film screening, when Auguste and Louis Lumière showed their one-minute-long Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory on March 22, 1895, to a select crowd of Parisian inventors and industrialists. Louis Gaumont was also in attendance, an experience that led him to transition from a business selling photographic equipment to what became one of the world's largest film production and distribution companies. About that day, Guy, then Gaumont’s personal secretary, would write: ‘I was bitten by the demon of cinema.’”

“A man is driven crazy by a woman who is compelled, by real or purported supernatural forces, to play a male-scripted role.” Writing for Notebook, Katherine Kadue points out that this premise propels Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); more than a few films by Brian De Palma, Park Chan-wook, and Christian Petzold; and most recently, Curry Barker’s debut feature and smash hit Obsession. “Whether or not Barker has ever seen Vertigo,” writes Kadue, “it seems as though he’s made a confusing wish to become Hitchcock and Madeleine at once: possessed by his cinematic ancestor’s spirit, compelled to repeat his thematic itinerary in a trance.” On an entirely different note, Obsession has prompted John Kidwell to ask at In Review Online: “If face-smashing has graduated from trope to cliché, why do filmmakers keep resorting to it?”

“Video art has a bad rep,” writes Kathy Ou in the Brooklyn Rail as she takes in moving-image work on view in New Humans: Memories of the Future, the exhibition that’s opened the New Museum’s expanded building. “Dispersed throughout the massive exhibition featuring over seven hundred objects across three floors, the videos, most of which were given the proper treatment of a full wall projection in a dimly lit room with seats, felt like necessary reprieves in the grand experience of the show.” The new BR also features A. M. Gittlitz on the role Howard Beale’s “mad as hell” outburst in Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976) plays in the history of the New York Mets. And Weiting Liu talks with Kent Jones about Late Fame (2025). When Jones read Samy Burch’s screenplay, “I immediately connected to something from my years writing criticism: the impulse to rescue buried geniuses—to champion good work that had been destined for obscurity.”

The Prisoner (1967), starring Patrick McGoohan as a British intelligence agent whisked off to a disturbingly idyllic Village, is “still pretty outré for 2026,” writes Brian Tallerico at the A.V. Club, “which explains why the single-season show has been a secret handshake among multiple generations of the hip and in-the-know, who understand The Prisoner’s essential place in TV history—whether or not they’ve actually seen it. Futilely remade by AMC, parodied by The Simpsons, and name-dropped by the ‘professional appreciators’ of High Fidelity, it has seen its legacy grow as more and more acclaimed series adopted its artful and elliptical ways. The surreal new reality of Pluribus, the trapped survivors of Lost, and even the existential dread of Twin Peaks owe a debt to the show’s general refusal to explain nearly anything.” The complete series is now up on the Criterion Channel, and it’s “immediately fun and thematically ahead of its time.”

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It’s All a BIG Conspiracy

David Hudson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:40:00 +0000

Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992)

It’s telling that a good number of the film series and lists that aim to take a hard and honest look at 250 years of American history include work by Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing (1989), set on a hot summer day in Brooklyn that will end with the death of a Black man at the hands of a white cop, tops Anthony Breznican’s ranked list of the twenty-five “Most American Movies of All Time” at Esquire. And while the Los Angeles Times critics’ list of ten “must-watch movies that capture America in times of profound change” is not ranked, Do the Right Thing is in there.

“For a moment,” writes the LAT’s Glenn Whipp, “the Black Lives Matter movement signaled a willingness to grapple with the past. But the pendulum swung and we’re back to days of Driving Miss Daisy denial. But Do the Right Thing remains with us, its urgency and relevance undiminished, waiting for an America open to listen and live up to its idealized aspirations.”

Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) is one of ten films set to screen on 70 mm as part of the Film at Lincoln Center series It’s All a BIG Conspiracy, which opens today and runs through July 9. Drawing from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the screenplay passed through several hands—James Baldwin, Arnold Perl, David Mamet—for two decades before Lee took over the project from Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night). Lee rewrote the screenplay and cast Denzel Washington as Malcolm Little, a hard-partying low-level criminal who gets arrested, meets a member of the Nation of Islam in prison, and eventually becomes Malcolm X.

“Malcolm’s dismissal of the John F. Kennedy assassination as ‘the chickens coming home to roost,’ his subsequent suspension from the Nation of Islam, his life-changing pilgrimage to Mecca (where he became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), his electrifyingly moving salat at a mosque in Cairo, the CIA’s dogged surveillance of him during his time in Mecca and Africa, are signposts of a life in flux,” wrote the late Barry Michael Cooper in 2022.

“However,” Cooper continued, “it was the earnest determination of Lee and his collaborators that turned Malcolm X into not just a film but also a chance to actually inhabit an iconic life. From the firebombing of Malcolm’s family home in Queens (a cinematic bookend with the incineration of his childhood home) to his tragic assassination inside the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Malcolm X is in and of itself a pilgrimage of the human spirit, and a study of what happens when that spirit is denied full access to freedom.”

The FLC series will open this evening with Batman (1989), which even director Tim Burton called “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie.” The marketing drumroll leading up to the film’s release on June 23—one week before Do the Right Thing—was all-pervading. “You couldn’t turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere,” filmmaker Kevin Smith later recalled.

Michael Keaton would later work through his identification in the public eye with the Caped Crusader in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), and as the Joker—who terrorizes Gotham with toxic products that cause consumers to die laughing—Jack Nicholson wrings every drop of seductive evil from a line like “You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?” Nicholson’s reading became one of more than two dozen samples from the movie that Prince worked into “Batdance,” a number-one hit from the soundtrack album that became a double-platinum bestseller.

Capping the night is Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), which will screen again on 70 mm in August as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s ongoing series De Palma: Summer of Suspense. Aiming to bring down Al Capone (Robert De Niro), Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) teams up with Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery), an Irish cop and “a weary, steady man, very clearly seen by an actor whose every gesture is wryly informed by the humorous, and uncynical knowledge of a lifetime,” as Richard Schickel described him in Time. “What is true of Connery’s work applies to the whole movie.”

Tomorrow brings Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as OJ and Em, siblings and descendants of the Black jockey seen in The Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 series of photos often hailed as “the world’s first bit of cinema.” OJ and Em are struggling horse-wranglers for Hollywood productions when a UFO makes its presence known, and they set out to save their ranch by selling footage of their discovery.

Nope is “a strange amalgam of various genres yoked together under the framework of an alien abduction movie,” wrote Blair McClendon for Notebook. “Peele’s project in Nope, and throughout his career, has pushed the question of representation further than mere presence. His form of revisionism tries to discern whether it is possible for Black cinema to be integrated into the idioms of American cinema.”

Starring John David Washington as a CIA agent recruited into a secret organization to track down objects traveling backward through time, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020), screening first on Friday, is essentially an “espionage adventure,” wrote Jonathan Romney for the Los Angeles Times, “but with a science fiction backbone: Nolan ups the ante on Mission: Impossible by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly, and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.”

In James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), we learn that not only has Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley survived Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) but also that Paul Reiser’s soulless corporate rep Burke is still around, too. Aliens is “a tale of the struggle between macho bluster and the maternal instinct, between teamwork and corporatism,” wrote Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri when he placed the film at the top of his ranked list of Cameron’s features: “And it’s still one of the most exciting films ever made.”

FLC’s long Friday wraps with David Lynch’s Dune (1984), which arrived “like the anti-Star Wars, undoing everything [George] Lucas's trilogy did to make sci-fi a friendly place,” as Daniel D. Snyder put it in the Atlantic in 2014. “If the movie's goal was to create, like the book, a world that felt utterly alien, then Lynch and his surreal style were the right choice. With its bizarre dream sequences, rife with images of unborn fetuses and shimmering energies, and unsettling scenery like the industrial hell of the Harkonnen homeworld, the film’s actually closer to Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey) than Lucas. It seeks to put the viewer somewhere unfamiliar while hinting at a greater, hidden story.”

Saturday, July 4, offers Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), featuring Philip Seymour Hoffmann as the founding leader of a cultish movement with an immediately recognizable similarity to Scientology and Joaquin Phoenix as a WWII vet returning home damaged and ready and willing to be molded—up to a point. “Beautifully textured, richly nuanced,” wrote the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, “The Master probes at the shadows cast by the spotlight of American supremacy. It identifies a strain of self-doubt in an otherwise triumphant 1950s and paints a compelling picture of a postwar prosperity built on the backs of a confused and traumatized people.”

Afternoons on Sunday and Monday are given over to Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), the first film version to stage the complete and unabridged text. Taking the lead himself, Branagh cast Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude, and Kate Winslet as Ophelia, and he called on an almost absurdly comedic hodgepodge of celebrities to pop up as supporting characters: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Gérard Depardieu, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, John Gielgud, and Judi Dench.

“The full Hamlet has a different specific gravity, a density which makes it seem like the first great English novel,” wrote Geoffrey O’Brien in an outstanding 1997 piece for the New York Review of Books on what was then an unexpectedly rich crop of Shakespeare adaptations. “With all the rests restored, it becomes possible to look beyond the intrusive shocks of the plot and get a feeling for the life they have interrupted.” Hamlet is “a much more interesting and surprising work—and, with its roundabout strategies and gradual buildups and contradictions of tone, a more realistic one—when all of it is allowed to be heard, and it is bold of Branagh to have gambled on this more ambitious dramatic arc.”

The tenth film in the series is Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), and looking back on it in 2009, Time Out’s Dave Calhoun wrote that this “sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant-like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, the film’s sharply dressed ad exec who is sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity, certainly wouldn’t be out of place in Mad Men. But there’s nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent, from Hitchcock and Grant to writer Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success), costars James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, composer Bernard Herrmann, and even designer Saul Bass, whose opening-credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine.”

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Spectres, Devils, and Bad Blood

David Hudson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:18:00 +0000

Diahann Carroll in Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997)

Saturday will mark 250 years since the birth of our nation, and while IndieCollect and IFC Center celebrate the independent spirit that revitalized American cinema in the 1980s, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has found a different story to tell. “America is a haunted place,” write the programmers. “Born out of the horrors of colonial genocide and chattel slavery, the brutal reality of this country’s history has manifested itself through legends, witches, demons, and hidden places.” BAM’s thirteen-film series Spectres, Devils, and Bad Blood in the Old America will open this evening and run through July 9.

In terms of historical chronology, the story begins with the great and powerful singer and activist Paul Robeson making his on-screen debut in Oscar Micheaux’s independently produced Body and Soul (1925), “and the only word to describe his screen presence is ‘blazing,’” wrote New York Times critic Stephen Holden in 2000. Robeson plays an escaped convict who passes himself off as Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins, “a traditional hissable villain who drinks, gambles, steals, lusts, and uses his man-of-the-cloth status to destroy a forlorn young woman named Isabelle (Mercedes Gilbert).”

Body and Soul is “critical of the Black church, and that’s something that’s been sustained in subsequent eras of Black art,” notes filmmaker A. V. Rockwell (A Thousand and One). “It’s fascinating to see the kernels of that critique during a time when our voice and point of view were so greatly stifled.” Micheaux is “the best example of what it means to get your stories out into the world by any means necessary.”

D. W. Griffith’s first sound film and second-to-last feature, Abraham Lincoln (1930), “bears scant resemblance to the silent monuments on which his reputation is founded,” wrote Jaime N. Christley for Slant in 2012. Starring Walter Huston as the sixteenth president, the film “stands as one of Griffith’s greatest achievements. His compositions are subtly intricate, modest at first glance, surprising and complex on closer inspection . . . Both a ‘creaky’ talkie and, paradoxically, anything but, the film seems unhinged from what Hollywood was doing in 1930: It exists in the Venn diagram overlap between the visual expressiveness of the silent era and the as-yet-unmastered sync-sound technology, and its attendant awkwardness. Neither mode is rejected; Griffith has room for both.”

Huston stars in William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941) as Mr. Scratch, the top-ranking demon of the underworld who reappears before an exceedingly wealthy man who once made an ill-considered deal when he was a poor farmer. Seven years on, Mr. Scratch has come to collect.

All That Money Can Buy is “a hallucinatory tour de force in which marvelous, evocative effects, and extraordinary performances combine on-screen in ways sophisticated and sometimes not,” wrote Tom Piazza in 2003. “Out of this mix comes a fascinating allegory, filmed on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War II, of a society gone mad with materialism, a premonition of the opportunities and dangers awaiting the nation as it recovered from the Great Depression.”

Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) is “an unsentimental yet compassionate view of a world belonging to show business as surely as Broadway hoofers did,” writes Farran Smith Nehme. “The so-called freaks of the film function as a family, distrustful of outsiders, protective of their own—just how protective being something you don’t want to find out the hard way.”

In Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (1948), Danny (Dane Clark) has been bullied all his life for being the son of a man tried and convicted of murder. One night, Danny snaps and kills his cruelest tormenter. “Noir, in which protagonists are typically trapped by fate and/or predestination, scarcely comes more despairing,” writes Philip Kemp. “And knowing Borzage’s attachment to the theme of redemption through love, it’s hard to imagine how the tussle of style and content will play out. All the more so since throughout most of the film its protagonist, Danny, seems stubbornly determined to reject love and any redemption it might bring him. Yet as we’ll see, Borzage does finally succeed in reconciling these competing forces, in this, his final masterpiece.”

Of all one-and-done directorial outings, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) is widely recognized as one of best—if not the best. It’s also “among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in 2010. “It’s about those venerable American subjects fear, sex, money, and religion, and for the beleaguered children who are its heroes, salvation comes at the end of a long, drifting journey down a river: our old native idea of finding the way to someplace better.”

In his first starring role, Christopher Plummer plays Walt, a conservationist facing off against a gang of poachers led by Cottonmouth (Burl Ives) in Wind Across the Everglades (1958). Toward the end of the production, director Nicholas Ray was fired and shooed away from the editing table by screenwriter Budd Schulberg, but Ray had left his mark. “Ray’s masterful use of color and mystical sense of equality between the antagonists (also evident in Rebel Without a Cause and Bitter Victory) are made all the more piquant here by his feeling for folklore and outlaw ethics as well as his cadenced mise-en-scène,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. “The result is somewhat choppy (one gets a sense of subplots being truncated), yet the film builds to a powerful encounter between Plummer and Ives, and Ray’s personal touches are unmistakable.”

Danny Glover stars in Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) as an old friend of a middle-class family in South Central Los Angeles. He drops by, steps in, and stays. The film is shot through with “allusions to Black folkloric and oral storytelling traditions of the Old South,” writes Ashley Clark. “Being from the South,” Burnett told Clark in a 2016 Film Comment interview, “my mother and grandma had these superstitions . . . Some people they wouldn’t even let in the house. They would sense this bad karma about people. A lot of this stuff I considered at one time kind of silly and ‘country,’ but as I grew up . . . I began to change my mind and respect them.”

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) is “a film of visionary power conceived with a passion for pure research,” wrote Greg Tate in the Village Voice in 1991. “Ostensibly about a Gullah family whose younger generation are making plans to leave their ancestral islands for mainland U.S.A. at the crest of the twentieth century, Daughters is also an interrogation of Black America’s cleft soul, split between the quest for modernity and a hunger for the replenishment of roots.”

Candyman (1992) stars Virginia Madsen as a grad student working on a thesis about urban legends. Writing for Slant, Eric Henderson finds that director Bernard Rose’s “dizzy romanticism (shades of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever) is juxtaposed against a cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman’s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. The filmmaker creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.”

Set in 1962 Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997) focuses on the Batistes, “a bourgeois Black Creole family who are descendants of Eve, a formerly enslaved woman, and Jean Paul Batiste, the military general who freed her,” as Kara Keeling wrote a few years ago. Lemmons advances “a critique of the patriarchal order, by valorizing the experiences, the ways of knowing, and the desires of Black women and girls . . . Her narrative poses questions that still resonate today, about gender and gender roles, bourgeois family norms, sexuality, sexual violence, and memory—and its form offers responses to those questions.”

BAM’s timeline leads to two horror movies whose fresh and innovative approaches to the genre led to phenomenal box-office success. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) “was not the first film of its kind, nor was it necessarily the most technically accomplished,” wrote Nicholas Russell for Reverse Shot in 2023. “That it forever altered the cinematic language of found footage by tying a genre that had been largely connected to cinema vérité and psychological explorations—such as Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961) and Robert Jan Westdjik’s Little Sister (1995)—to horror, is a shift its filmmakers couldn’t have anticipated. And yet it makes sense that found footage became one of horror’s best-realized materials, rendering the otherworldly and terrible as believable, plausible, real.”

Among the richest of the countless interviews with Ryan Coogler about Sinners (2025) is the one Franklin Leonard conducted for the Ankler in February. “The audience, myself included, has read this film as a lot of things,” Leonard told Coogler. “It’s an anti-capitalist treatise, a parable about cultural appropriation, and a meditation on the afterlife of slavery and Jim Crow.”

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Declaration of Independents!

David Hudson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:55:00 +0000

Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988)

As the United States of America tumbles headlong into its semiquincentennial, three New York venues are offering a wide range of prompts for celebration and reflection in the form of three film series, all opening on Wednesday and running through July 9. We’ll take a look at the programs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Film at Lincoln Center tomorrow and Wednesday, but today our focus will be on Declaration of Independents!, a series of twenty films copresented by IndieCollect and IFC Center.

All twenty were made between 1979 and 1989, and at least one screening of most of them will feature personal appearances by an artist who has had a hand in their making. Ashley Clark, our curatorial director, will moderate a discussion with Spike Lee after Wednesday’s screening of School Daze (1988), a musical comedy featuring Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Tisha Campbell, and Lee himself. We should note here that from July 8 through 22, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will present its own salute to the great director, By Any Means Necessary: Spike Lee, American Provocateur.

Charlie Ahearn is “the first filmmaker to fully bring hip-hop to the big screen,” notes Craig D. Lindsey, and on Thursday, Ahearn will take part in a Q&A following a screening of Wild Style (1983). Dominique Jenkins, daughter of director Horace Jenkins, will be on hand for Sunday’s presentation of Cane River (1982). Writing for the Baffler in 2020, A. S. Hamrah noted that “Jenkins combines an Americana sensibility reminiscent of King Vidor’s early 1930s films with a class consciousness unique in the film’s setting: African American red-clay Louisiana.”

On separate evenings, Lizzie Borden and Bette Gordon will talk about their 1983 films, Born in Flames and Variety. In her outstanding 2024 Notebook profile of Gordon, Saffron Maeve noted that the work of both women could conjure “the gritty anarcha-feminism” of the period. Before laying a cultural milestone in 1992 with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fran Rubel Kuzui made Tokyo Pop (1988), which the New York Times’ Walter Goodman called “a wedding of American and Japanese youth cultures as seen through a fun-house mirror.” Kuzui will be taking questions on Friday.

Producer and cowriter Manuel Arce will introduce the July 9 screening of El Súper (1979), the story of a Cuban exile who lands a job in New York as a superintendent of the building he lives in. Codirected by Orlando Jiménez Leal and the late Leon Ichaso and adapted from a play by Iván Acosta, El Súper “becomes an instance of perceiving the universal through the particular, and as a result, is a genuinely American film,” wrote Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times.

Along with new restorations of two documentaries—Jim Klein and Julia Reichert’s Seeing Red (1983) revisits the heyday of the American Communist Party and Paula De Koenigsberg and Lucy Winer’s Rate It X (1986) probes the sexist exploitation of women in American media and culture—the program also features such landmarks as Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation (1980), Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing (1982), Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple (1984), Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1985), Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989), and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989).

The series will wrap with Jessie Maple’s Twice as Nice (1989), starring real-life twins Pamela and Paula McGee as sisters competing to become the first-draft pick in a women’s professional basketball league. Twice as Nice will screen with Aarin Burch’s newly restored Dreams of Passion (1989), a five-minute exploration of desire set in a dance studio.

More American Movies

Culture Wars!, the Museum of the Moving Image’s series of American films targeted by the religious right in the late 1980s and early ’90s, is on through July 11. And on Sunday, MoMI will wrap its series By the People, For the People: Real American Tales with an afternoon screening of Salt of the Earth (1956), which Jonathan Rosenbaum has called “the only major American independent feature made by communists. A fiction film about the strike by Mexican-American zinc miners in New Mexico against their Anglo management, informed by feminist attitudes that are quite uncharacteristic of this period, it was inspired by the blacklisting of director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Michael Wilson (A Place in the Sun), producer and former screenwriter Paul Jarrico, and composer Sol Kaplan, among others. As Jarrico later reasoned, since they’d been drummed out of Hollywood for being subversives, they’d commit a ‘crime to fit the punishment’ by making a subversive film.”

Starting Friday, Film Forum will present a weeklong run of a new restoration of Ross McElwee’s classic documentary Sherman’s March (1986). Writing for the A.V. Club in 2020, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky noted that the film offers “less a trenchant perspective on life in the Reagan-era American South than a rambling series of droll observations that accumulate into something more compelling than a self-portrait.”

David Alvarado’s American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, a portrait of the playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor best known for his 1979 play Zoot Suit and his 1987 film La Bamba, opens at Film Forum on July 17. “Timeliness is a poor metric for evaluating nonfiction,” writes Jake Cole at IndieWire, “and in most respects American Pachuco is a boilerplate American Masters–style overview of an artist’s life. But in a moment of revanchist white supremacy, Valdez’s lifelong thesis—that Chicano culture is not a sideshow of interlopers in America but an expression of identity that stretches back long before Anglos landed on these shores—and his undiminished assertion that Chicano art is as American as it gets is difficult not to find rousing and as defiant as it was in the 1960s.”

Universal Westerns, a series showcasing the impact of one Hollywood studio on the most American of genres, is on at the Museum of Modern Art through Friday. Then starting on Friday, Anthology Film Archives will present a summerlong two-part series of Experimental Westerns and Metrograph will spotlight the reach of American soft power with The Worldwide Western, a wide-ranging selection of films that apply a few durable templates to stories set around the globe.

On the other coast, patrons of the Los Angeles Filmforum can spend all day Sunday with Star Spangled to Death, a project begun in the mid-1950s and completed in 2004 by the late Ken Jacobs. “Call it cultural dumpster diving or bricolage,” wrote J. Hoberman in the New York Times earlier this year. “Throughout, Star Spangled marshals painful evidence of institutionalized racism, military mobilization, and instrumentalized piety. Jacobs, however, is a master filmmaker whose dynamic compositions continuously delight the eye and whose use of montage can be laugh out loud funny.”

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Streams of Narrative

David Hudson — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 06:09:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait (2006)

One of the finest appreciations of television director James Burrows is a piece on his recurring role—as a television director—on the HBO comedy series The Comeback. When he wrote it in April, Slate’s Sam Adams couldn’t have known that we would lose Burrows just two months later. He was eighty-five.

Before delving into the poignancy of Burrows’s performance in the sitcom starring and cocreated by Lisa Kudrow, Adams lays the groundwork: “A sitcom veteran whose credits stretch all the way back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he was, with one exception, nominated for an Emmy every year between 1980 and 2005—a period during which he directed 237 episodes of Cheers and shot the pilots for Friends, Frasier, and Will & Grace. His 2022 memoir, Directed by James Burrows, overflows with casually dispensed bits of wisdom—it’s the multicamera equivalent of Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies—and reveals him to be not just one of the most successful but one of the most thoughtful craftsmen the television medium has ever known.”

As Il Cinema Ritrovato heads into the final weekend of its fortieth edition, Karlovy Vary (July 3 through 11) is preparing to celebrate its sixtieth edition and eighty-year run. This past week, KVIFF has announced awards and special screenings honoring Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate), Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy, Three Colors: Blue, In-I in Motion), Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat), and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Jana Hojdová’s Robert Richardson: The White Devil). Other special guests include Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets) and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who will present Family Movie, a horror-comedy they’ve codirected that stars their kids, Travis and Sosie Bacon.

Another guest KVIFF was hoping to invite is Jafar Panahi, who has coproduced and edited Nader Saeivar’s main-competition entry, Hijamat. But when an Iranian court upheld a verdict finding Panahi guilty of “propaganda against the regime” earlier this month, those plans fell through. Facing a sentence of one year in prison and a two-year travel ban, Panahi can appeal but not yet leave the country. “Obviously, we’re very sad,” KVIFF artistic director Karel Och tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai. “We just can’t stop admiring this man, not just for his artistry, but also for his human approach and his courage, which is just jaw-dropping.”

The New York Asian Film Festival (July 10 through 26) will host the North American premiere of Na Hong-jin’s Hope and present its Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema to Na on July 20. In Locarno (August 5 through 15), Virginie Efira will receive the Leopard Club Award, and the extraordinary make-up artist Rick Baker will be honored with the Vision Award. And Venice (September 2 through 12) has named the jurors who will join president Maggie Gyllenhaal.

This week’s highlights:

Sabzian is running transcripts of Pedro Costa’s introductions to three films he’s selected recently for programs in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Flame of My Love (1949) reminds him that Jean-Marie Straub “always hinted that he considered Mizoguchi the greatest of all filmmakers. Even greater than Renoir or Ford.” While discussing Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950), Costa tells the story of how, in the mid-1990s, he decided that he needed to stay and work in Fontainhas for a while. And in The Fearmakers (1958), Tourneur was working with “a broken man, with what was left of Dana Andrews . . . one feels that Jacques and Dana were really scared of what was coming. Maybe what they were afraid of is finally here; it’s among us now.”

Throughout this year’s World Cup, the Guggenheim is presenting Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait (2006), a two-channel video projection tracking Zinédine Zidane, the outstanding midfielder, as Real Madrid faced off against Villarreal in a 2005 La Liga match. Seventeen cameras remained trained on Zidane exclusively throughout the game while “the droning score by Scottish prog band Mogwai swells or, eerily, drops out entirely,” as Mark Asch writes for Screen Slate. “Zidane has setbacks (Juan Román Riquelme gives Villarreal a first-half lead after the referee awards a dubious penalty), comebacks (Zidane is involved in the buildup for Real’s two second-half goals), and a shocking final twist; it’s also full of stars, as befitting the peak of Real’s galactico era.” For Samuel Brodsky at Film Comment, the film’s “transcendental power . . . lies in the moments when we see Zidane simply observing, waiting.” For further World Cup–related viewing, see the lists put together by Carlos Aguilar for the New York Times and Alexandre Koberidze for Metrograph’s Journal.

Playwright and poet Dan O’Brien has a beautiful piece in the new Film Quarterly on Carson Lund’s Eephus (2024), “a perfect little film: ‘perfect’ because I enjoyed watching it without reservation, and ‘perfect’ because it seems to be wholly the film it wants to be; ‘little’ because nothing much happens, and what does happen is happening at a community baseball field in small-town Massachusetts. (Gilles Deleuze praises ‘minor literature,’ and Eephus surely qualifies as ‘minor cinema,’ in the most positive sense.) Two teams composed of mostly middle-aged white men, the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, convene to play one last game before the field will be demolished to make way for the construction of a new school. That’s about it, in terms of plot . . . How can a film that disregards so many so-called principles of dramatic writing still manage to be so compelling? Since I happen to write plays, and this film reminds me of one, I thought I might try to answer this question for myself.”

“If there’s anything that could be said to characterize ‘A film by Louise Weard,’ it’s everything,” writes Frank Falisi at the top of his interview with the director of the ongoing series Castration Movie for In Review Online. “We’re now over 120 years into cinema’s life as an art form,” says Weard, “which kind of coincides with the modernist novel, right? And so yes, I do view these movies as trying to do something literary with the film format. I’m definitely approaching what a modernist cinema can look like. Every shooting choice, all of the editing decisions, the structural choices of the storytelling, the dialogue . . . It’s all meant to push cinema in this way. I think you could find some comparisons to stream-of-consciousness writing, like Mrs. Dalloway, in how we handle some of our dialogue and party scenes in Castration Movie.”

For the New York Times, Milana Mazaeva and Neil MacFarquhar profile Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark), who won the Golden Lion in Venice for Faust (2011). Sokurov has been openly critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but for some exiled Russian artists, not critical enough. They managed to pressure the Venice Biennale to drop Sokurov from its list of guest speakers. “In many ways his fate is the fate of a talented loner,” Anton Dolin, a prominent Russian film critic living in exile, tells Mazaeva and MacFarquhar. “That explains both the cult around him and the hostility toward him. On the one hand, his films are banned in Russia. On the other hand, he remains highly respected and continues to participate in state councils and institutions.” And Sokurov, who turned seventy-five earlier this month, has no plans to leave the country: “I am sitting in this boat, and if it starts to sink, I will go down with it.”

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Three by Elaine May

David Hudson — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:09:00 +0000

Elaine May and John Cassavetes during the making of Mikey and Nicky (1976)

Elaine May hadn’t seen her third feature, Mikey and Nicky (1976), in twenty years when she introduced a screening at the Harvard Film Archive in 2010. “I hope I enjoy it,” she told the audience, and naturally, her delivery drew appreciative laughter. “The milieu, the people in this movie, are actually my milieu. I’m a Chicago, sort of gangster girl. And the events aren’t exactly true, but they have happened. So it’s sort of a kind of a true story, but nobody knows this about me except you guys, and I’m afraid you all have to die.”

Peter Falk and John Cassavetes star as small-time mobsters and lifelong friends. When Cassavetes’s Nicky hears that a hit has been put out on him, he reaches out to Falk’s Mikey for protection. The two spend a long night roaming city streets and bickering as only the closest of friends can. Mikey tries to convince Nicky that he’s not a target, but over time, it becomes clear that his reassurances are merely a delay tactic.

“Seemingly improvised by two Method actors, Mikey and Nicky was totally scripted,” noted J. Hoberman in the New York Times 2019. “To watch Cassavetes and Falk inhabit their roles is to watch two great jazz musicians riffing on a score.” Cassavetes “begins the film in a place of weary, scared, wired, vibrating intensity that he maintains to the bitter end,” wrote Nathan Rabin that same year. “He’s burning with desperation even in his most hushed moments.” In Mikey, Falk “has the less showy but arguably more challenging role, as a nurturer who cannot show his true face to his old friend without exposing the simultaneously deadly and banal betrayal at the film’s core.”

As the film turns fifty, Muscle Distribution is sending the 2019 restoration out to theaters across North America, and on Friday, May and producer Julian Schlossberg will take part in a Q&A after an evening screening at Film at Lincoln Center in New York. Todd Berliner, the author of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece, will introduce Tuesday’s screening, and during the weeklong run, FLC will also present May’s first feature, A New Leaf (1971), and her fourth and last, Ishtar (1987).

A New Leaf is “one of the best romantic comedies ever made,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody a few years ago. Walter Matthau stars as Henry, “a Manhattan trust-fund princeling” who has frittered away his wealth and aims to marry back into it. His mark is Henrietta, a clumsy but brilliant botanist played by May herself. Once he’s cashed in, Henry plans to kill his new wife.

“The keen depravity of May’s comedy of murder is all the sharper for the outrageous precision of its humor,” wrote Brody. “Matthau adds Henry to his unique gallery of the pompous and the orotund,” and “May brings enormous pathos to Henrietta—the true-hearted innocent who finally finds love, but with the wrong man—and centers on the character (and on her own performance) some of the most inventive humor of modern cinema.”

“With A New Leaf,” wrote 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson in 2019, “May established a theme that runs through the quartet of films she’s directed: the derangements of coupledom, whether sexual or platonic, with a breezy but still biting focus on the pitiful vanities and obtuseness of men.”

Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman star in Ishtar as Rogers and Clarke, a ludicrously untalented team of songwriting performers who get caught up in a bit of Cold War intrigue in Morocco. May spent more time and money making Ishtar than the press at the time deemed acceptable for a female director, and the film suffered both commercially and critically from the verdict handed down long before the movie was released.

“I didn’t catch up with this film maudit until 2013,” Anderson recalled. “That screening remains one of the most memorable of my life, an event that provided the rare opportunity to discover a wildly unpredictable movie more than a quarter century removed from its initial ignominy. Ishtar’s genius operates on many levels: the painfully inept, unfailingly hilarious lyrics Rogers and Clarke concoct, several written by May (‘Water! / My lips are on fire / with my desire / for you’); the bumbling twosome’s deluded but touching belief in their talent and each other (the pair of putatively straight guys are easily the most loving couple in May’s oeuvre); the scathing satire of Reagan-era foreign policy.”

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Guy Maddin’s Careful Returns

David Hudson — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:43:00 +0000

Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992)

In Tolzbad, the fictional Alpine village that serves as the setting of Guy Maddin’s third feature, Careful (1992), citizens speak in a near-whisper and swallow any potential outburst of emotion for fear of setting off an avalanche. This is a “community of apple-cheeked villagers whose scrubbed faces belie a Freudian wasp’s nest of incestuous desire and sibling rivalry,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times when Careful screened at the New York Film Festival. “From its portentous between-scenes titles to the way the director bathes whole scenes in garish oranges and blues, Careful is one long and amusing pun on German Expressionistic film imagery, Freudian psychology, and quasi-Wagnerian storytelling, all carried to absurdist lengths.”

Starting Friday, New York’s Film Forum will present a weeklong run of a new restoration, and Maddin will be there on Friday and Saturday to talk about it. After Saturday’s Q&A, he’ll introduce Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), his Maddinized documentation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s interpretive performance of Bram Stoker’s immortal novel. Careful will also screen in Chicago before heading to Los Angeles and more cities throughout the summer.

“Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history,” wrote Dennis Lim in 2008. “His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed.” Careful “takes his penchant for artifice to an extreme.” Maddin “says he started out intending to make a ‘pro-incest’ movie and ended up with a ‘pro-repression’ one—it’s precisely this ambivalence about forbidden and frustrated desires, the recognition that repression is deranging and also its own kind of turn-on, that undergirds the erotic logic of Maddin’s films.”

“The restoration of Careful is wonderfully done, bringing out the at-once hyper-artificial and softly organic textures of his mise-en-scène, from plastic roses to moose antlers to mysterious aqua potions in glistening beakers,” writes Payton McCarty-Simas in the Brooklyn Rail. Dracula “takes artistic license to follow in the footsteps of silent feminist polemics like Häxan—down to the brood of horn-tailed demons twerking on Victorian bedposts. Most of the runtime is devoted to the vampiric seduction of Lucy Westenra (an effervescent and ferocious Tara Birtwhistle), whose libidinal repression drives her eagerly into the arms of the Prince of the Night. In the face of all this corseting, Maddin’s conclusion is a resounding, ‘No wonder!’”

Film Forum will also screen Maddin’s first two features, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990). In Tales, the friendship between two patients during a smallpox epidemic turns to rivalry as they compete for their nurses’ attention. Their enmity only intensifies when they learn that their paths have previously crossed in gruesome ways. Maddin “self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch,” wrote Noel Murray at the A.V. Club in 2002.

Archangel is also the name of a Russian town where a Canadian soldier who has lost a leg in the First World War arrives to mistake a woman for his deceased lover. She’s married to a Belgian who can’t remember he’s married to anyone at all. Archangel “offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema,” wrote Jake Cole for Slant a couple of years ago. “There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Reviewing Archangel for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful.”

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Vital Signs in Oakland

David Hudson — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:55:00 +0000

Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest (2025)

Back in May, critic and filmmaker Jonathan Kiefer (Woodshedders, Around the Sun) launched the Vital Signs Film Series at Shapeshifters Cinema, an artist-run space in Oakland, California, with a forty-seat theater and a café serving house-made beer. Programs at Shapeshifters lean toward the experimental, but Kiefer is bringing a monthly event featuring what he describes to KQED’s Sarah Hotchkiss as “adventurous stuff that is kind of indie, art-house, slightly strange, noncommercial, very boutique offerings. Maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll wind up on the streaming platforms. But then with this type of film especially, it’s not as good just to watch it at home as it is to be in even a small room with just a few people.”

Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You (2025) opened the series, and June’s selection was Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love (2025). July 5 brings Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest (2025). It’s a vision of a postapocalyptic world in which the only survivors are children and a road movie following nine-year-old Moon (Moon Guo Barker, the daughter of novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo) over the course of eight chapters.

In one of those chapters, a cluster of children deliver a faithful rendering of The Word for Snow, a one-act play by Don DeLillo—a fan of Rivers’s work, as the filmmaker was surprised to discover a few years ago. As Rivers tells Steve Rose in the Guardian, DeLillo wrote a note of appreciation after seeing The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), and the writer and director have kept up an occasional correspondence ever since.

DeLillo had no idea how Rivers would handle The Word for Snow, but he gladly gave the go-ahead. The children deliver their lines “with such straight faces, all you’re paying attention to is the words,” says Rivers. “They’re nine years old. I didn’t expect them to understand everything. But then again, I don’t understand everything either. I read it many times over and it still remains kind of abstract and sometimes absurd.” DeLillo “said he was impressed with what I did with it—that was a huge relief.”

Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud screens on August 2. Starring Blake Draper as the restless French poet, the film “inspires the attentive viewer to find different ways to tell the history of a people, a movement, poetry, memory, and the intersection between colonialism and the emergence of the individual,” writes Carlos Valladares at the top of his interview with Wang for BOMB.

Auditioning the relatively unknown Draper, Wang found that “he had focused on what I think is maybe the most narratively interesting part of my script: not ‘Why did Rimbaud stop writing poetry?’ but ‘Did he ever stop being a poet?’ He saw that. He saw it in the ending. I think that’s why the ending means a lot to him as an actor, and why it shows in the final portrayal.”

Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s Removal of the Eye (2024), screening on September 6, stars the directors as Kallia and Ram, a couple coping with a new baby and Kallia’s Greek mother, who has set out to protect the family from the evil eye. “Building on the absurdist tone and improvisatory style of New Strains [2023],” writes Caroline Golum for Screen Slate, “Shaw and Kamalakanthan pull no punches skewering the millennia-old business of care and feeding, plus our own twenty-first-century obsession with ‘Building a Better Baby’ (to borrow from the film’s creepy fake publication). This ripe satire of the nanny state offers a bit of nap-time solace to the screaming, teething toddler in all of us.”

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Catching Up with The Currents

David Hudson — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:11:00 +0000

Ernestina Gatti and Isabel Aimé González Sola in Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents (2025)

Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents was one of the quiet highlights of last fall’s festival season, and it has since opened theatrically in New York and will be touring theaters across North America through the end of July. The film’s next stop will be in Knoxville this Wednesday, and the artistic director of Film Fest Knox, Darren Hughes, has offered the audience some words of introduction: “Mumenthaler’s style might be compared to ‘magical realism,’ in that she works within straight-ahead narrative conventions but does so in a world of unexplainable flights of fancy. I find it all totally mesmerizing.”

“The Currents exhibits a rare kind of formal invention, such that each new shot hits your consciousness as a kind of cognitive surprise,” writes Michael Sicinski. “At the same time, the film hangs together perfectly as an aesthetic object. That’s because Mumenthaler has entirely aligned our point of view with Catalina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), whose identity is in such disarray that she perceives the world as if it were some strange text she cannot decipher . . . This slip into whatever Catalina is undergoing—psychosis? a fugue state? PTSD?—would be illegible to the viewer were it not for Mumenthaler’s absolute formal control.”

Mumenthaler’s first feature, Back to Stay (2011)—the winner of both the Golden Leopard and the FIPRESCI Prize in Locarno—focuses on three sisters raising themselves after the death of their grandmother. In The Idea of a Lake (2016), a photographer comes to grips with the absence of her father, who disappeared in 1976 after the Argentine coup d’état. Born in Argentina, Mumenthaler was raised in Geneva, which is where we find Catalina in the opening sequence of Mumenthaler’s third feature.

Lina, as her friends call her, is a fashion designer of considerable renown, and she’s in Switzerland to be honored with an award. Having accepted, she steps into the restroom, dumps the glass trophy in the trash, and wanders the city alone before leaping into the icy waters of the Rhône. Rescued, she returns to Buenos Aires, where her husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and five-year-old daughter (Emma Fayo Duarte) will have to come to terms with Lina’s new phobia: water. She can’t even bring herself to open a tap, never mind bathe.

For 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson, The Currents is “fitfully compelling,” but Anderson finds “little in Mumenthaler’s film that rivets and deranges like those by two of her compatriots, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008) and Laura Citarella’s Dog Lady (2015), both of which also feature female protagonists who have broken with reality.”

The Currents is “both fascinating and intractable,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “an entry in cinema’s rich tradition of deconstructed feminine portraiture that skids ambitiously along a tonal and stylistic spectrum between Hitchcock’s Marnie and Todd Haynes’s Safe. Not all of Mumenthaler’s sideways turns yield satisfying discoveries, and The Currents gets less interesting when it seeks out tidier interior motivations toward its third act. But this is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction.”

“Mumenthaler beautifully portrays Lina’s life adrift and especially her relationships with women who offer assorted versions of being in the world, from her young assistant to her mother-in-law to a shop seamstress,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “The filmmaker’s absorbing audiovisual approach culminates in a virtuosic scored montage involving the famous searchlight atop the Palacio Barolo.”

Writing for Reverse Shot, Lawrence Garcia notes that The Currents “eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition.”

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Enduring Portraits

David Hudson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:29:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016)

Gene Shalit, who delivered punny movie reviews on NBC’s Today Show from 1973 through 2010, passed away last week. He’d turned one hundred in March. “With his handlebar mustache, bushy hair, black horn-rimmed glasses, and extravagant bow ties, he was one of the nation’s most recognizable characters, a composite caricature of Groucho Marx, William Howard Taft, and a Jim Henson puppet,” writes Robert D. McFadden in the New York Times.

A few years into his gig at Today, Shalit hired his first full-time writer, Kurt Anderson, who would go on to write novels and nonfiction and cofounded Spy magazine. Shalit’s “smart no-brow approach to culture was a new thing on TV,” writes Anderson for Vulture. “He was a cultural omnivore, enjoying and celebrating high and low but distinguishing, often bluntly, between smart and stupid, good and bad. His reviews and their jokey wordplay were packed with all sorts of literary, musical, cinematic, and historical references . . . He was a TV performer with a signature shtick and look who was also entirely authentic, with a genuine eccentricity that viewers found endearing and fun. He was an unusually kind jester, radiating joie de vivre, infectiously happy to be here now.”

In festival news, Il Cinema Ritrovato, which opens on Saturday and runs through June 28, is introducing a new initiative. It’s called Extended, and it will offer those in Bologna a chance to sample this year’s fortieth edition from June 29 through July 5. Munich (June 26 through July 5) and Karlovy Vary (July 3 through 11) have unveiled their lineups, and in August, Asia Argento will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Locarno.

This week’s highlights:

Last December, Documentary Magazine polled contributors and members of the International Documentary Association to come up with a ranked and annotated list of the twenty-five greatest nonfiction films of the twenty-first century as well as a string of “singular picks,” films with just one vote. The pairing of the two lists “offers an ongoing dialectic between center and margin,” suggests Winnie Wang in one of two new pieces reflecting on the results. “The documentarian as skillful portraitist, one who doesn’t merely capture, but embellishes in order to get at a deeper truth, who understands performance not as anathema to authenticity but as integral to it, is precisely the type found throughout the [first] list,” writes Manuel Betancourt. A portrait captures “a connection between the sitter and the one capturing their likeness. Look no further than Cameraperson to find a documentary that turns that friction into its very thesis. Made up of sequences shot for a number of projects she worked on as a cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson’s fragmented self-portrait is a film about the dignity of the documentary gaze—of her gaze, in fact.”

In a recent newsletter, Jamelle Bouie points us to Lovia Gyarkye’s excellent profile of Raoul Peck for Hammer & Hope. Peck has been making films for decades, and he’s probably best known for I Am Not Your Negro (2016), a historical essay film drawn from James Baldwin’s writing, and Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025), which compels viewers to “confront the parallels between our fascist reality and the English writer’s dystopian visions,” as Gyarkye puts it. “But calling Peck just a political director minimizes his achievement, allowing people to ignore the artistic merits and intellectual rigor of the work. Peck is more like a modern griot, a filmmaker who has made an art of his archival excavations. He reconstitutes the past in order to combat historical erasure, and in his films—like the work of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman—the archives are a contested site, an arena in which power can be reclaimed.”

It’s Black Writers Week at RogerEbert.com, and Robert Daniels, who is overseeing this year’s sixth edition, talks with Maya Cade, who founded the Black Film Archive in the summer of 2021 and will soon be both the owner and president of Milestone Films. For Cade, “one of the joys has been being an archivist for Black directors. I help them with their own archives by gathering their material. So, the Black Film Archive is not just the digital archive that you see. A lot of the work is tangible, like ensuring that another generation can learn from the papers and materials, the physicality of what these directors have to offer.”

Earlier this month, the Tehran Revolutionary Court upheld an in-absentia verdict against Jafar Panahi, sentencing him to one year in prison. Charged with propagandizing against the Islamic Republic, Panahi can now appeal to another court. In Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025), a group of former political prisoners kidnap and confront a man they believe was their torturer. “Panahi draws on the two dominant realist tendencies in contemporary Iranian cinema, associated with Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, while forging a distinctive style of his own,” writes Mehrdad Babadi in the Point. “From Kiarostami he adopts two familiar motifs: the car and the road trip.” And “he draws on Farhadi’s model of interpersonal and social drama to create a mystery thriller in which conversation does not clarify the situation but complicates it . . . More than any other Iranian director, [Panahi] registers the condition of Iranians under an authoritarian regime with unusual precision.”

It’s Screwball Summer at the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden, and in the new London Review of Books, Ruby Hamilton notes that the seventeen-film program running through August 18 includes “nearly all the classics of the genre, among them the first, the fastest, and the truest: It Happened One Night (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), The Awful Truth (1937). Not all of the choices fit in—Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) is a black comedy, but is it a screwball?—but then you end up quibbling about the Broadway farce vs. the populist comedy vs. the Lubitsch picture, and it’s not long before you begin to sound like Gary Cooper’s po-faced grammarian in Ball of Fire (1941), a grade-A hair-splitter.”

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June Books

David Hudson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:43:00 +0000

David Bowie

From June 26 through July 12, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will present Culture Wars!, a series of American films targeted by the religious right in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The series is pegged to next week’s publication of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, the new book from Isaac Butler, who wowed us a few years ago with The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.

Butler will be at MoMI on June 27 to talk about The Perfect Moment with New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson following a screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel depicting Jesus’s struggles with his dual nature, both human and divine. “The screenplay, which [writer Paul] Schrader described as ‘a plexiglass layer cake,’ built out of Kazantzakis’s Greek Orthodoxy, Schrader’s Calvinism, and Scorsese’s Catholicism, shifts beguilingly among the mystical, the mundane, and the surprisingly funny,” writes Butler in an excerpt from The Perfect Moment running in the New Yorker.

When word got out that Scorsese was making this movie, conservative Christians pounced. Butler outlines the tense meetings, tentative agreements, and broken promises that led to an all-out brawl in the media between complex networks of studio representatives and Moral Majority–backed political players. For a while, it looked as if the evangelicals had the upper hand. But then some of the most outlandish of the widespread protests “made Last Temptation—still unfinished, seen by at most a few dozen people, and months away from its theatrical release—into a national news story, one in which the noble free-speech warriors of Hollywood were beset by a horde of antisemites and Bible-thumping lunatics.”

Universal, which bankrolled and distributed Last Temptation, “spent far more than usual to guarantee the security of screenings, assuming responsibility for damages, hiring guards to escort every print of the film, and sweeping movie theaters for bombs,” writes Butler. The studio was rewarded by a pretty solid opening weekend, but interest in the film and the controversy it had sparked tapered off quickly. “Although the brethren would claim credit for the film flopping,” writes Butler, “it actually broke even.”

Art and Design

Karl Ove Knausgård—who wrote the essay for our recent release of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and of course, more famously, My Struggle, the widely acclaimed series of six autobiographical novels—curated an exhibition of paintings by Edvard Munch for the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2017. Trier and his brother Emil made a film about it, The Other Munch (2018).

Now the Paris Review is running Ingvild Burkey’s translation of Knausgård’s contribution to Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art, the catalogue for an exhibition curated by von Trier and on view at Willumsen’s Museum in Denmark through September 20 before it heads to Stockholm. Von Trier’s selection includes works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, August Strindberg, Paul Gauguin, and naturally, Munch.

Knausgård opens with reflections on Munch’s The Sick Child, a painting first exhibited in 1886 and “an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist.” He eventually winds his way to “the effect [von] Trier’s films had when they came out, on myself and on the milieu I was part of—they were important, they were controversial, they were discussed, they left a mark.”

Von Trier’s films are “wildly manipulative,” writes Knausgård, “and the manipulation is obvious and yet impossible to guard oneself against—at least for me. Feelings trump intellect. And isn’t that what happens at every level in his films, actually? And which makes them so provocative for many viewers? Not only are you given an exposition of a moral philosophical question about the nature of the good in Breaking the Waves, you are forced to experience it, and the conflict which the good stirs up everywhere it appears is suddenly brought near to you, to your own emotions, your own morality. This is especially the case with The Idiots, to my mind [von] Trier’s masterpiece.”

At Talkhouse, filmmaker Mark Rappaport (From the Journals of Jean Seberg) introduces his new Book of Dreams, a collection of more than eighty collages in which we find, for example, Marlene Dietrich’s Catherine the Great from Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) attempting to seduce Ivan the Terrible (Nikolai Cherkasov) as he appeared in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 film. Are these images “an intentionally subtle commentary on social mores?” asks Rappaport. “I doubt it. Are they a Rorschach test? I seriously doubt that, too. Why do you make them? I have no idea except that they are all film-related, taking elements from here, taking elements from there, and smacking them together so that they become something else. And what are the viewers supposed to make of them? Whatever they like.”

Artist and designer John Coulthart walks us through a history of cover designs for Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, and as you might expect, they took a turn after David Bowie starred in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 adaptation.

Lives and Works

After making the entirety of his 2022 book Intimate Impressions: The Cinema of James Gray freely available online, Collin Brinkmann began writing about the late-career work of Howard Hawks. He toyed with the idea of turning those thoughts into a book, but eventually dropped it. Then Paul Cronin of Sticking Place Books picked it back up again, offering to publish Late Style in Film. This “year-plus, nights-and-weekends kind of labor of love” offers Brinkmann’s insights into the evolving dialogue between auteurism and debates on the very idea of “late style” as well as three in-depth chapters on Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Back in the summer of 2024, we put together an overview of the first enthusiastic reviews of Carrie Rickey’s biography A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda. Writing for the London Review of Books, Lili Owen Rowlands finds that the Varda “who emerges is obstinate and evasive.” Rowlands reruns the life story with a particular emphasis on its darker passages.

Before he left for MGM, where he would make Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), John Sturges worked his way up at Columbia. In “An Extended Apprenticeship,” an essay that first appeared in The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959, Farran Smith Nehme tells that story, pausing now and then to dwell on a few outstanding titles such as The Walking Hills (1949), “a modern western, with a set of deceitful and back-biting characters that could easily have fit in a heist-driven noir.”

R. Emmet Sweeney talks with Henry Nicolella about his latest book, You Have to Run Fast: The Feature Films of Edward L. Cahn. Sweeney describes Cahn as “a promising director of fatalistic noirs at Universal (Afraid to Talk, Laughter in Hell) before spinning his wheels for MGM short subjects in the late ’30s. He reemerged as a pathologically prolific director of B-Westerns, sci-fi, and gangster films in the 1940s and ’50s.” Nicolella recommends a few favorites from each decade.

Before winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, Daniel Kraus wrote Whalefall (2023), a survival thriller that he and director Brian Duffield have adapted for a film to be released in October. In 2020, Kraus completed the novel that George A. Romero was working on when he died, The Living Dead. And March saw the release of Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World, a deeply researched history and a close personal reading of Romero’s 1968 classic. Talking to Dan Mecca at Letterboxd about Romero and more, Kraus says that “I have this document of what I’d like to put into a second edition, and it grows by the day. I keep learning new things about it. I’ll never be finished with it.”

On the latest episode of Writers on Film, John Bleasdale talks with Laura Horak, the founding director of the Transgender Media Portal, about her new book, Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds. And today in Milan, the Museo del Novecento will host a presentation of Italian Female Filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies: Lives, Histories, and Identities, a Fondazione In Between Art Film project edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, and Maria Alicata.

Critical Collections

Last Friday, we noted that J. Hoberman’s new collection, Across the Movie-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, a survey of his work since he and the Village Voice parted ways, will be out in August. Stuart Klawans, the film critic for the Nation from 1988 through 2020, has a collection out now, My Strange Love: Selected Film Reviews and Essays, 2001–2021. And Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, with a foreword by Kristin Thompson and a preface by Damien Chazelle, will be out in December.

Bright Lights Film Journal is running an excerpt from Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism in which editor Joseph McBride writes about Footlight Parade (1933), a pre-Code musical starring James Cagney, directed by Lloyd Bacon, and featuring musical numbers overseen by Busby Berkeley. “By a Waterfall” is an “incredible number, one of the most ambitious in the history of the musical,” writes McBride, who quotes Berkeley recalling, “The day I had the idea, I let Jack Warner know about it and he told me I would ruin even the Bank of America.”

Historical Perspectives

Liz Helfgott, our editorial director, introduces her conversation with Peter Cowie, who has written a new memoir, Flashbacks: A Passion for Film. “As a pioneering film critic, historian, publisher, festivalgoer, and commentator,” she writes, “Cowie helped introduce legendary film artists—including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Louise Brooks, Satyajit Ray, and Alain Resnais—to audiences all over the world, creating the foundations for a widespread cinephilia that is exploding again in the twenty-first century.”

Reviewing the third edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film for the New York Times in 2002, Sarah Kerr wrote that critic and author David Thomson “proves anew that he is irreplaceable.” Thomson’s publisher is calling his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, “a career capstone of sorts.” On July 12, Thomson will be in Berkeley to launch the book and present Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).

Thomas Doherty has written books on pre-Code Hollywood, World War II–era cinema, and the Blacklist, and he tells Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network about his latest, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America.

In The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920–1980, author Amy Murphy “doesn’t just throw a heaping helping of film titles at us, substituting lists and anecdote for real analysis,” writes John Talbird for Film International. “Instead, each chapter takes a deep dive into one specific movie, contextualizing the film with the real-world effects of white flight, government abandonment of urban locales, urban renewal destruction, and the vanishing career options for young people and families—mostly of color—in the new environment.”

Three Novels

Priya Parmar’s The Original “draws on the many existing biographies of [Katharine] Hepburn to explore, in a lightly fictionalized way, the actress’s tempestuous first decade as a newly fledged Hollywood star,” writes the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. In the New York Times, Alida Becker suggests that “anyone interested in Hepburn’s early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona.” Parmar’s “depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s is particularly adroit: ‘In this town, the air is curdled with sex. Here, anything can happen, and anything happens every night.’”

Benjamin Myers’s tenth novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, toggles between the night in 1971 when Klaus Kinski set out to perform a text he’d written, Jesus Christus Erlöser, prompting a mutiny in the audience at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, and what Jon Day, writing for the London Review of Books, calls “a meandering autofictional essay.” In the view of the nameless narrator, “Kinski’s performance was ‘every bit as potent as any mythologized rock’n’roll performance or art happening,’ whereas today art has lost its shock value.”

James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has a new novel out, called Red Sheet, a crime thriller set in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Introducing his interview with the author, Seth Abramovitch warns Hollywood Reporter readers that Ellroy truly “believes a genuine Moscow-controlled espionage network was operating in Hollywood back in the 1950s, that the Soviet threat was grave, and that history has gotten the era’s heroes and villains exactly backwards.”

“I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L.A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw,” writes William T. Vollmann in the New York Times. “In place of the twentieth-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.”

Your Show of Shows

“Television was an immersive media which divided the world into a before and after in a manner that no technology had since Guttenberg’s printing press,” writes Ed Simon in the Baffler. “Though the history of broadcasting is a global one—any fair appraisal is going to consider Programme One in the USSR or the BBC as much as CBS, ABC, and NBC—the television is not just an invention, but indeed is only matched in the United States by the automobile as a perspective, ideology, and lifestyle. In that way, it was unavoidable that my new book, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States, would have to fumble for the remote.”

Over the course of four seasons appearing intermittently since 2015, Documentary Now! has presented itself as a straight-faced PBS-style news magazine with episodes—narrated by Helen Mirren!—parodying classics of the genre directed by the likes of Albert and David Maysles, Werner Herzog, and Robert Flaherty. Documentary Now!: Fourth Edition (Revised and Expanded) is “a gorgeous coffee table book that parrots the show’s deadpan conceit of pretending it’s a real, long-running, widely revered television institution,” writes Scott Tobias at the Reveal. “Even the foreword, by critic Matt Zoller Seitz, is a parody of what Matt Zoller Seitz might have to say about its place in the cultural firmament.”

For his interview with showrunners Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono, Tobias decided to “focus on a single episode to demonstrate the amount of detail that figures into the direction of the show. To that end, we chose Mr. Runner Up: My Life as an Oscar Bridesmaid, the two-part finale of Season Two, which parodies Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.”

Endnotes

June 30 will see a Zine Launch Party in Toronto for the second volume of The Journal of Stoogeological Studies. “One of my motivations for launching this semi-regular Three Stooges journal in 2023 was that I thought it would be funny,” writes editor Will Sloan. “The idea of soliciting a bunch of millennials (with some representatives of Gens X and Z on either end) to write about a lowbrow comedy team that was famous during the Depression and whose core members were all dead by the Carter administration . . . I thought that was a good bit. But during the full-body immersion of assembling the submissions and revisiting so much of the Stooges’ work, I realized I had a deeper motivation. I love these guys.”

On the New Books Network, Pete Kunze asks Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence about editing The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, and our curatorial director, Ashley Clark, is a recent guest on Guide for the Film Fanatic, chatting with hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull about Perry Henzell’s reggae gangster classic, The Harder They Come (1972), and his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films.

We’ll wrap with Christopher Schobert’s latest books roundup for the Film Stage, where he recommends David F. Walker’s Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies as well as new titles on Hitchcock, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, and Audrey Hepburn.

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Masahiro Shinoda: From Pop to Kabuki

David Hudson — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:32:00 +0000

Kayoko Honoo in Masahiro Shinoda’s The Burning Sunset (1961)

Back in March, we took a look at Sixties Shinoda, a Harvard Film Archive series of films that the late Masahiro Shinoda, a key figure in the Japanese New Wave, directed during the first decade of his long and prolific career. The program included Dry Lake (1960), Pale Flower (1964), Assassination (1964), Samurai Spy (1965), and Double Suicide (1969), and starting Friday, all five films—plus seven more—will screen in New York as part of a Brooklyn Academy of Music retrospective copresented with the Japan Foundation.

BAM programmer Jesse Trussell has selected two films from the 1960s that the HFA passed over, The Burning Sunset (a.k.a. Killers on Parade, 1961) and A Flame at the Pier (a.k.a. Tears on the Lion’s Mane, 1962). Writing for Film Comment in 2017, Marc Walkow called The Burning Sunset “a madcap, candy-colored, pop-art nonsense comedy following a group of assassins, members of the ‘Killer’s Association,’ who devolve to infighting when a nonaccredited hit man turns out to be a better marksman than any of them. It’s Frank Tashlin meets Mr. Freedom, filtered through the eye of Seijun Suzuki, and it’s one of the most brilliant satires Japan ever produced. A Flame at the Pier takes a more serious tone as it riffs on On the Waterfront in its monochrome tale of a rebellious rock-and-roller put to work as muscle for the yakuza strikebreakers who control the Yokohama docks in cahoots with corrupt corporate bosses.”

Silence (1971) is the first of three adaptations of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel about two Portuguese Jesuit priests sent to seventeenth-century Japan, where Christianity is forbidden and its practitioners are persecuted. The second version, Os Olhos da Ásia (1996), was directed by Portuguese filmmaker and writer João Mário Grilo, and the third, of course, was Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). “While Scorsese’s version is more internal and less preoccupied with violence, it speaks to much of the visual language that was established [in 1971], even going so far as to share a number of virtually identical shots,” wrote IndieWire’s David Ehrlich in 2016. Shinoda’s version is “a lurid, tortured examination of faith as a physical crisis,” and as such, it’s “an invaluable religious epic.”

On Sunday, BAM will present a 35 mm print of Himiko (1974) imported from Japan. Shima Iwashita, Shinoda’s wife and frequent collaborator who also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Masaki Kobayashi, stars as the shaman queen and prophet of the Sun God in ancient Japan. Made in collaboration with the avant-garde production company Art Theater Guild, Himiko is “the kind of experimental cinema that no studio would have financed, complete with a discordant [Toru] Takemitsu score, extreme violence, and butoh dancers gamboling in wild costumes and various states of undress,” wrote Walkow. “Himiko is, surprisingly, a perfect flip-side to Silence, with both equally about political power and religious faith, and a pair of cultures colliding violently over the two.”

Kimberly Lindbergs has called Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975) “a strange amalgam of traditional Japanese theater, folktales, ghost stories, social commentary, antiwar sentiment, dark humor, and existential philosophy.” Based on Ango Sakaguchi’s story about a grisly affair between a bandit (Tomisaburo Wakayama of the Lone Wolf and Cub series) and the wife of the man he’s killed, “Shinoda’s film avoids typical horror movie tropes in favor of psychological dread and startling imagery that unnerves and arouses the senses.”

Drawing from a play by Izumi Kyoka and featuring Tamasaburo Bando, renowned for his portrayal of women, Demon Pond (1979) is “still a shock to any Western viewer’s system—a jolt of delicious weirdness that may have seemed as throwback-wacky when it was released in its home country as it has felt outrageous everywhere else,” writes Michael Atkinson. “Maybe more than any other film, Shinoda’s mythopoeic bugout builds a bridge between what the West perceives as ‘realism’ and hellzapoppin’ Kabuki dream-time, the way a rainbow might connect a mundane nursery life to a neverland oasis.”

A new restoration of Gonza the Spearman (1986), based on the 1717 play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, opens the series and screens through next Thursday. It’s a film “filled with historical imagination, social comment, and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty,” wrote Walter Goodman in the New York Times when Gonza arrived in the States in 1988. “Kazuo Miyagawa’s camera finds the beauty in stone walls, sliding panels, simple gardens, rich gowns, women’s faces. When the action resumes, the strangely powerful music of Toru Takemitsu keeps us on edge.”

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Chabrol & Huppert: Doing Wrong

David Hudson — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:25:00 +0000

Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie (1995)

Throughout the twenty-two minutes of Isabelle Huppert and Claude Chabrol: Crossed Portraits, a program Jean-Pierre Devillers directed for French television in 1998 (and now available on the Criterion Channel), the actor and director are playfully testy with each other as they reflect on the characters they have cocreated, beginning with Violette Nozière (1978). Plain and demure at home, eighteen-year-old Violette vamps it up when she heads out to turn tricks. She tries poisoning her parents (Jean Carmet and Stéphane Audran) more than once and eventually succeeds in killing her father.

After his death, the real-life Violette Nozière partied for a week in Montmartre before she was arrested, and the trial dominated headlines in French papers for weeks in the early 1930s. Huppert was twenty-four when she played Violette, but she pulled off a feat twice as astonishing in the flashbacks.

When asked in the 1998 program if there was a particular moment that stood out in what was by then a twenty-year collaboration, Chabrol recalls one that tops a list of many: discovering that Huppert could play a twelve-year-old girl. “And mine is when he asked me to do it,” says Huppert with a proud smile. Chabrol: “At the beginning we thought, ‘This can’t be her, that’s a little girl.’ And no, it was her. This feeling of joy happened several times.”

Writing about Chabrol’s “darkest film” in a dispatch from Cannes, Roger Ebert spotted Huppert as an early frontrunner for the Best Actress award, and his prediction turned out to be at least half right. Huppert tied with Jill Clayburgh, who was also recognized that year for her performance in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.

Tomorrow at L’Alliance New York, Violette Nozière will open Chabrol & Huppert: Doing Wrong, a six-film series running on Tuesdays through July 28. Next week brings Story of Women (1988), another disturbing tale drawn from actual events. In 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud was guillotined for having performed more than two dozen abortions while her husband was being held in a German POW camp. “Huppert is the perfect Chabrol actress,” wrote Darragh O’Donoghue in Senses of Cinema in 2017, “capable at once of immersion and irony, emotional warmth and watchful intelligence, high comedy and harrowing tragedy, fearless physicality and spiritual torment.”

A couple of years ago, B. Panther surveyed Chabrol and Huppert’s collaborations for Paste, and when it came to Madame Bovary (1991), Panther naturally noted that there are “many, many film versions of the canonical Flaubert novel. What makes this one exciting to watch is how Chabrol’s observational style mirrors Emma’s vantage as an outsider . . . Few people have run down a hill with more drama and inflamed passion than Huppert in Madame Bovary. When she drops her shawl, she leaves behind the last of any actorly pretense. As she comes careening to her epic conclusion, her sudden poisoning feels impulsive, almost improvised in a way that breathes new vitality into a classic text.”

“To watch a Chabrol film is to feel your mind bend slowly, slowly, then all at once,” writes Sarah Weinman. “Nowhere is this quality more apparent than in La cérémonie.” Huppert costars with Sandrine Bonnaire in the 1995 adaptation of Judgement in Stone, Ruth Rendell’s 1977 novel about two working-class friends whose simmering resentment of an upper bourgeois family eventually boils over. Rendell, “who herself called La cérémonie the best adaptation of her work,” as Weinman notes, “proved the best literary match with Chabrol’s style and thought.”

The Swindle (1997) stars Huppert and Michel Serrault as Betty and Victor, a team of low-level scammers who steal from businessmen—but without cleaning them out entirely. All’s well until Betty sets her sights on a fatter loot. The nature of the relationship between Betty and Victor remains intentionally unclear throughout Chabrol’s fiftieth feature.

“Husband and wife?” wondered Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You in 2007. “Lovers, former or otherwise? Partners in crime, and nothing more? Or even father and daughter?” Johnston noted that “Huppert’s own theory is that The Swindle reflects the relationship between a director and his female star, in the way desire and eroticism form part of that relationship even without it becoming a sexual one. There are also within the director-actress relationship issues of control and the will to escape from that control . . . But in a film that plays in some ways as Chabrol’s To Catch a Thief (though one should always be careful not to overplay the Hitchcock connection in a director for whom Fritz Lang is equally if not more important), it’s Chabrol the wry comic who predominates in The Swindle.”

In Merci pour le chocolat (2000), Huppert plays Mika Muller, a Swiss chocolate factory heiress married to a renowned concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc), whom Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) believes may be her biological father. “Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film,” wrote J. Hoberman in the Village Voice in 2002. “Chabrol has always enjoyed puncturing the balloon of bourgeois complacency, and as his creatures jump to ever quicker conclusions, the movie’s edge of campy self-reflection grows increasingly pronounced. The more one suspects, the funnier Merci becomes. Mika brings her injured stepson a pair of videos—Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door and Jean Renoir’s La nuit du carrefour—which would alert any habitué of the Paris Cinémathèque to where Chabrol is going.”

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