<![CDATA[The Daily | The Criterion Collection]]> en-US Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000 <![CDATA[The Act of Watching]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9138-the-act-of-watching Did You See This?

Maurice Pialat’s La maison des bois (1971)

Two weeks after the big lineup announcement and just under three weeks before opening its seventy-ninth edition, Cannes has completed its Official Selection. As widely expected, James Gray’s Piper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller, will join twenty-one other contenders for the Palme d’Or in the main competition.

The festival has also added four films to its Un Certain Regard section, including Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho and Judith Godrèche’s A Girl’s Story, which draws from Annie Ernaux’s 2016 memoir; five films to its noncompetitive Cannes Premiere program, including Christophe Honoré’s Mariage au goût d’orange and Maria Martinez Bayona’s The End of It, starring Rebecca Hall, Noomi Rapace, Gael García Bernal, and Beanie Feldstein; one family screening, Olivier Clert’s Lucy Lost; and five special screenings, including Diego Luna’s Ashes.

Cannes has also lined up its Short Films Competition, featuring new work from Phạm Thiên Ân (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell), Theo Montoya (Anhell69), and Federico Luis (Simon of the Mountain); unveiled its 2026 poster, a flashback to a shot of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis on the set of Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991); and set an Un Certain Regard Jury to be presided over by Leïla Bekhti.

The independent sidebars in Cannes have had a few announcements to make as well. Directors’ Fortnight has added a special screening of Red Rocks, which Bruno Dumont shot with a cast of young kids on the French Riviera, and Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light) will head up the jury for Critics’ Week. And another jury president was named on Thursday: Maggie Gyllenhaal will serve in Venice from September 2 through 12.

From July 3 through 11, Karlovy Vary will celebrate two anniversaries, its sixtieth edition and eighty years since its first. The retrospective program Out of the Past: KVIFF 60/80 will spotlight twenty films that, as artistic director Karel Och says, “are firmly linked to its history as milestones key to the KVIFF’s identity and reputation.” These include Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Emilio Fernández’s Río Escondido (1948), and Ken Loach’s Kes (1970). Another highlight will be the world premiere of a new restoration of Tainted Horseplay, a group portrait of friends in their thirties which Věra Chytilová shot in Karlovy Vary in 1988.

Dean Tavoularis, the production designer who worked closely with Francis Ford Coppola on thirteen films as well as with Michelangelo Antonioni, William Friedkin, Wim Wenders, and Arthur Penn, has died. He was ninety-three. Mike Barnes’s obituary for the Hollywood Reporter is a recommended read, peppered with stories about the challenges of realizing such unusual productions as Apocalypse Now (1979) and One from the Heart (1982). “I would be unable to list the many ways he benefited my work and my personal life,” writes Coppola. “He was a beloved uncle to my children. He was a great artist, a great friend, a great production designer, and a great man.”

This week’s highlights:

  • Through Tuesday, Film at Lincoln Center is currently launching the first U.S. theatrical run of Maurice Pialat’s seven-episode series La maison des bois (1971). Pialat himself takes a small role as Testard, a teacher overseeing a class of young boys, three of whom are staying at a gamekeeper’s house in the woods near a village far from the front where their fathers are fighting in the First World War. “Scenes of Testard’s students celebrating the signing of the armistice or of a gaggle of boys in motion—whether running, playing, marching in step with armed combatants, or gawping while rushing past an ambulance carrying those wounded in battle—crackle with unpredictability,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. The series is “a massive achievement, but pointedly not an epic,” writes Steve Macfarlane at Screen Slate. “Like any great film, it teaches you how to better watch it as it goes along . . . Taken as a whole, La maison des bois is an impassioned interrogation of childhood memory, a solemn acknowledgment of the spoils of wartime, and one of the most rewarding (and devastating) experiences a moviegoer can have.”

  • The recent passing of Joy Harmon, who shot to fame (albeit briefly) when she washed a car in Cool Hand Luke, happens to coincide with Angelica Jade Bastién’s deeply felt appreciation of Paul Newman, and in particular, his turn in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 film. “Witnessing a star-auteur in motion, in full command of voice, gaze, and what their body communicates has reached spiritual heights for me,” she writes. “By star-auteur, I’m not primarily referring to the fact that Newman was also a director. What I’m addressing is that his artistic identity formation in public, tending to his own cinematic image, the greatness of his performances, and the care he put into the work renders him an auteur of his films alongside and sometimes even superseding that of the director or writer.”

  • In an essay from the latest issue of Outskirts, “Real Graps: Luchadores, Kaijus, and Wrestling as Folk Poetry,” Alonso Aguilar writes about how such mid-twentieth-century heroes as Santo in Mexico and Godzilla in Japan came to embody the ideals of their respective nations. “These tales were unequivocally a part of industrial capitalist reproduction, with their rushed outputs and erratic quality control,” writes Aguilar. “And yet, at least during this period of postwar existential uncertainty and national reconstruction, they seemed to transcend those characteristics and genuinely exist as popular expressions: reclaimed, repurposed, and resignified without an ounce of whatever cynical intent came from the studio structures.”

  • As Sean Gilman has noted, in 2005, Johnnie To named Throw Down (2004), screening tomorrow and Sunday at New York’s Metrograph, as his favorite of the dozens of features the director had yet made. Bruce Bennett in Metrograph’s Journal: “Presenting as a triumph-over-adversity sports melodrama that ends in, at best, a draw; a romantic comedy without the slightest hint of rivalry, ardor, or sexuality; a violent crime picture absent clear-cut villainy, coherent heist film process, or sustained conflict; and a ‘vibes’ movie that restlessly keeps its characters in frantic and erratic motion for most of its running time, Throw Down continually subverts casual expectations.” And yet “the sights and sounds of Throw Down pull you in seductively while logical plot correlatives wriggle away.”

  • “Is it actually possible to make a decapitalized film?” asks Sophie Mellor, who, with fellow artist Simon Poulter and seventy collaborators recruited through Instagram, have realized We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher “with no budget, no studio backing, and no institutional permissions.” Fisher, the late cultural critic and theorist, is best known for his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and as Tim Burrows writes at the Quietus, “the effervescence of his prose and online persona reflected the playful, explorative discourse of the internet in the 2000s.” In the Guardian, Lauren Kelly notes the film  has been travelling to “universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms, and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden. The collective endeavor to undermine capitalism continues, the feature concludes: ‘We are making a film about Mark Fisher and, now that you are watching, so are you.’”

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000 <![CDATA[First Look, First Weekend]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9136-first-look-first-weekend
Bella Boonsang in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Morte Cucina (2025)

Two films that premiered in Rotterdam bookend this year’s First Look, the annual showcase of “adventurous new cinema” presented by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Director James N. Kienitz Wilkins and producer Emily Davis as well as a gaggle of cast and crew will open the fifteenth edition with The Misconceived, and the first half of the festival will run through Sunday. First Look 2026 then returns next Thursday before wrapping on May 3 with Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow.

At the Film Stage, Rory O’Connor has called The Misconceived an “incisive, inventive movie about the anxieties faced by the never-quite-made-it creative class.” Now in his forties, Tyler (John Magary) had hoped to be directing movies by this point in his life. Instead, he finds himself doing renovation work for an old college friend, Tobin (Jesse Wakeman), a sculptor successful enough to be campaigning to have his work invited to the Whitney Biennial.

That’s a fine set-up for discomfiting drama, but here’s the thing. As Kienitz Wilkins explains to Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw, he’s aiming to conjure something “authentic” via “inauthentic” means. The world of The Misconceived was built with Unreal Engine, a source-available commercial software driving such video games as Hogwarts Legacy and creating virtual sets for live-action shows like The Mandalorian.

“As was the case with its spiritual predecessor, The Plagiarists (2019), in which Kienitz Wilkins turned digital editing and awkward social interactions into dialectical exercises,” writes Chris Cassingham at In Review Online, “The Misconceived’s obvious accoutrements—3D animation, motion capture, stock music—obscure the more nuanced trickery simmering underneath their surfaces.” And the result is “a wildly entertaining film.”

“The Misconceived is, on its face, a surrealistic nightmare,” writes Chloe Lizotte at Reverse Shot, “and that feels right for the state of affairs it’s describing. But Wilkins and co. have found a way for the surrealistic nightmare to convey something personal and homegrown. The Misconceived is about the layers upon layers of human-made artifice that always stand between the maker and the viewer,” ultimately “transcending its status as a single film to expand on a self-referential, deeply idiosyncratic body of work.”

Friday

The first showcase screening of the festival offers another set of fortysomething adults at a crossroads. Noah (Chris Pine), a divorced single dad, and Rebecca (Jenny Slate), high-school teacher and debate coach, were once teenage sweethearts. And now they’ve walked back into each other’s lives. “Whether playing sexy comedy or hostility, raw emotional agita or hollowness, Chris Pine and Jenny Slate are so damn fine in Carousel that you keep wondering why we seldom get to see these gifted actors bite into characters of such substance and complexity,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Rachel Lambert’s latest is a strange and beguilingly lovely relationship drama. Eventually. But first, the writer-director needs to get out of her own way.”

In 2024, Damian McCarthy’s Oddity won audience awards at SXSW and the Overlook Film Festival, “and while it was topping year-end horror lists left and right, I was a bit less enthusiastic,” writes J. Hurtado at ScreenAnarchy. McCarthy has now cast Adam Scott as a reclusive and rather rude novelist who travels to an isolated Irish inn with, legend has it, a haunted honeymoon suite. “Whatever it was that was missing from Oddity for me is here in spades with Hokum, a nonstop fright factory that immediately bumps McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers,” writes Hurtado. “It’s a gripping story that unrelentingly ramps up the tension while simultaneously delivering some of the year’s best jump scares.”

Saturday

Kunsang Kyirong’s 100 Sunset is rooted in a Tibetan community in Toronto, where eighteen-year-old Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) steals a camera and befriends Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a recent immigrant. Kunsel’s “burgeoning fascination” with Passang “catalyzes a narrative charged with a sense of everyday enigma, with characters trying to get to the bottom of their own impulses and desires,” writes Adam Nayman in the Toronto Star. “At once precise and suggestive, 100 Sunset vibrates on dual frequencies of intimacy and unease that make it one of the most accomplished Canadian debuts in recent memory.”

Programmed by Genevieve Yue and David Schwartz, Little Stabs is a selection of avant-garde shorts that opens with a four-minute film by Alexandre Koberidze (Dry Leaf). Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and Kyath Battie will be on hand to say a few words about their latest works. Filmmaker, writer, and former researcher Erin Espelie will then present Ideas of Order, a rumination on cyanobacteria, the first organisms known to have produced oxygen. Experimental filmmaker Stephanie Barber narrates.

It Goes That Quick, the first feature codirected by editor Joe Stankus and cinematographer Ashley Connor, will see its world premiere at MoMI on Saturday. “A fittingly personal collaboration, it charts their extended family over a decade-long period with Mekas-esque intimacy,” writes Jordan Raup at the Film Stage.

Ramzi Bashour’s road movie Hot Water is “mellow, laid-back, and lived-in, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” wrote Jason Bailey in a dispatch from Sundance. Lubna Azabal plays a Lebanese single mom traveling from Indiana to California with her Americanized teenage son (Daniel Zolghadri). “The story beats don’t go anywhere unexpected,” notes Bailey, “but the performances are winners; Azabal turns a purely reactive character into something active and alive, Dale Dickey is (as ever) a joy in  her brief but memorable appearance, and Zolghadri is a real find; his mixture of charisma, restlessness, and recklessness legit recalls Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me.”

Shot in Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine over a stop-and-go period of nine years, We Put the World to Sleep stars director Adrian Țofei and cowriter Duru Yücel as fictionalized versions of themselves, filmmakers trying to make a movie about the end of the world and then deciding that they should just go ahead and actually end the world. Part of a trilogy that began with Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) and will conclude with Pure, We Put the World to Sleep won the Best Midnight Feature award at last year’s Nightmares Film Festival.

Sunday

The day begins at noon with two films running about half an hour each. Mohamed Mesbah—who will be taking part in a panel discussion about Muslim and SSWANA lives on-screen later in the afternoon—will present Still Playing, which centers on a Palestinian video-game developer whose work reflects the struggle of trying to raise two sons in Gaza as the war rages. And with L’mina, Randa Maroufi works with coal miners in Jerada, Morocco, to reconstruct an underworld in a living room with the aid of 3D scans and intimate Super 8 footage.

Ken Jacobs’s A Date with Shirley (2025), which MoMI calls a “colorful and cubist record of a Chinatown haircut,” will screen as part of The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, New York’s monthlong salute to one of the community’s most beloved couples. Shirley will be preceded by two shorts, Ana Vaz’s The Tree (2022) and Friedl vom Gröller’s Veronique (2025).

Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory!, set in Ukraine in some hopefully near future when the Russians have gone back home, won the Platform Award in Toronto. “Taking the acting lead, Vasyanovych and his crew run a Symbiopsychotaxiplasm playbook for scenes that repeatedly undercut and draw attention to their own construction,” wrote Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker last fall. “The mode is black comedy, with lots and lots of drinking, and whether or not you’ll like it depends as much on your tolerance for Ukrainian men getting hammered and skanking to Madness as your interest in master-shot compositional excellence. I found it all very funny and sharp.”

Nonfiction filmmaker Robb Moss’s “most remarkable work is his trilogy of ‘river films,’” writes Scott Macdonald at the top of his interview for Documentary Magazine, “beginning with the idyll, Riverdogs [1982], and continuing with The Same River Twice (2003), a feature during which several of Moss’s friends and Moss himself revisit Riverdogs, from their now-middle-aged perspective.” The Bend in the River (2025) returns again. “Together, the three films are as intimate and thoughtful an evocation of the process of aging as can be found in modern cinema.”

For Morte Cucina, his first feature since 2017’s Samui Song, Thai New Wave filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang reunites with actor Tadanobu Asano and cinematographer Christopher Doyle to tell the story of Sao (Bella Boonsang), an aspiring chef who recognizes in one the diners at the restaurant where she’s working the man who sexually abused her when she was a teen. “I won’t spoil it here,” wrote Katie Rife in a dispatch to RogerEbert.com from Tokyo, “but Pen-ek’s film speaks to the codependent nature of love and hate, and it makes a highly compelling argument for getting some Thai food after the movie.”

Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes won the Directing Award and an audience award when One in a Million premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance. The codirectors first spotted Israa, a Syrian refugee, in 2015, when she was eleven. She was selling cigarettes on a bustling street in Izmir, Turkey. The filmmakers followed the journey of Israa and her family—by bus, boat, train, and too often on foot—to Cologne, Germany, shooting over a period of ten years.

“Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders—truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage—but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “And despite all the history swirling around her, Israa remains at the center of this film. The unique achievement of One in a Million lies in the way it allows us to know this young woman while it preserves the mystery of a human soul.”

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:12:00 +0000 <![CDATA[IFFBoston 2026]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9135-iffboston-2026
Robert Christgau in Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic (2026)

“Only in Boston will you find a major movie festival that unspools everywhere except within the municipal boundaries of the city for which it’s named,” writes Ty Burr. The forty features and eleven short film programs lined up for this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston will be screening at the Brattle in Cambridge, the Coolidge Corner in Brookline, and the Somerville Theatre in Somerville.

Both Burr and Sean Burns, who previews IFFBoston 2026 for WBUR, have plenty of recommendations with a special emphasis on local talent. In Pourya Azerbayjani Dow’s As I Am, a sixty-year-old Iranian stations himself in an Airbnb in Hingham, Massachusetts, to stake out a house where an old friend from the Iran-Iraq War is now living with his wife and grandson. “This one’s a find,” writes Burr, “with flashes of meta-awareness that recall the greats of the Iranian New Wave.”

“Local film critic and music scene veteran Tim Jackson would have been at IFFBoston anyway as a spectator,” writes Burns, “but he’s here as a director this year with Marblehead Morning: 50 Years in Harmony, a profile of New England folk duo Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl, who have been performing together for half a century.” As it happens, Daring was a guest on Burr’s Watchcast three years ago, talking about his admiration for Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007) and his experience as a composer writing scores for nearly every film by John Sayles as well as for Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight (1991) and Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex (1998).

The twenty-third edition of New England’s largest film festival will open tonight with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters and wrap next Wednesday with Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. In Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Wilde plays “a flamboyant, foulmouthed, sex-crazed artist in various BDSM get-ups,” as Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri described her when Araki’s twelfth feature premiered at Sundance.

Wilde “has always stood out when she’s been allowed to go big,” wrote Ebiri, “and as controversial artist Erika Tracy, a self-described ‘pretentious bitch from hell,’ she gets what might be her best part yet. This is a woman who instantly peppers her newest assistant, the unassuming Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), with all sorts of inappropriate questions, and within a week of hiring him turns him into a sex toy, making him crawl on the floor of her office, tying him up, spanking him, dressing him up in leather and women’s clothing—just about all of it to his incessant delight.” In the Los Angeles Times, Amy Nicholson noted that “a murder mystery worms into the script that’s too screwy to be taken seriously. But as Erika’s mealy lover, Hoffman gets bossed around and humiliated and mostly digs his kinky misadventure. Me, too.”

Boots Riley, too, shows up in another film screening in Boston, Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic, a straight-ahead portrait of Robert Christgau, the “dean of American rock critics” renowned for the compact yet incisive reviews he’d stack up in the monthly Consumer Guide columns he wrote for the Village Voice from 1969 to 2006. At eighty-four, he’s still writing that column—and longer pieces as well—at Substack.

Along with fellow interviewees Colson Whitehead, Randy Newman, Thurston Moore, and Greil Marcus, Riley tells the camera about a Christgau review that hit home. As the frontman of the Coup, Riley especially appreciated reading Christgau on the band’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You because “I hear him listening.”

“For many,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear, “the first choice that comes to mind is his take on Prince’s Dirty Mind, an appraisal which ends with the immortal kicker, ‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.’” The Last Critic “isn’t the sort of documentary that reinvents the nonfiction filmmaking wheel. It doesn’t necessarily need to, thankfully,” adds Fear. “Wishnow makes sure all of the biographical beats get hit,” but “the film is also doing something besides letting us now praise a famous man, or serving up a portrait of artist as a critic (and critic as artist). It doubles as an ode to the art of criticism itself.”

Fellow music critic Carl Wilson has a few bones to pick with The Last Critic, but he does find that the film “gets across the ways Bob is at once warm and irascible, hypercompetent yet sometimes off-world. I like the loose framework of following him through the process of putting together one Consumer Guide, tracking the rhythm of his incredible work drive—and the accompanying sensation that, as Ann Powers memorably puts it, Bob is akin to a Jorge Luis Borges protagonist ‘whose intellectual passion leads him into a labyrinth he can never leave.’ He never wants to, apparently, till the literal living end.”

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]]> Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:54:00 +0000 <![CDATA[April Books]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9134-april-books
Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown in William Selig’s Something Good: Negro Kiss (1898)

Opening today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and running through Friday, A Hard Stare: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, and Their Circle on Film is a series organized by Andrew Durbin, the editor-in-chief of frieze and the author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. In 2026, Hujar is the more immediately recognizable name. Exhibitions such as the one currently on view in Berlin, several new books and reissues, and of course Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) have reignited interest in the work of the photographer best known for his portraits of New York cultural figures in the 1970s and ’80s.

When Thek died in 1988, barely one year after Hujar—Thek was fifty-four; Hujar, fifty-three—the obituary in the New York Times referred to him as “an artist best known for installations of objects depicting surrealistic scenes of death and renewal”—and then went a little fuzzy when it came to reporting on the cause of death. The truth was made plain the following year at the latest when Susan Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors with its dedication to Thek.

Thek’s “most important works were large-scale installations in Europe,” writes Alexander Cheves in the Guardian, “all lost, and which, as Durbin tells me, ‘everyone loved, but few could experience. And when they were finished, there wasn’t much left to sell. But I think his moment is about to come.’”

Thek and Hujar met in the mid-1950s, became lovers a few years later, and parted ways in 1975. “The Wonderful World is luscious and absorbing, if sometimes a bit giddy,” writes Moyra Davey at 4Columns. “But it doesn’t matter—Durbin’s writing is passionate, and novelistic in scope; it is also scholarly and precise where it needs to be about the art practices of both men.”

We should flag a few more events before we delve any further into this month’s roundup on new and noteworthy books. The third issue of Narrow Margin, featuring dossiers on the films of Larry Cohen and Rita Azevedo Gomes, will be launched in the UK next month as the Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Nothing but Life: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes, a retrospective running from May 2 through June 5. And on May 9, Megan O’Grady, whose new collection is How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, will present Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) in Los Angeles.

Great Silents

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival will open on May 6 with the recently reconstructed Queen Kelly (1929), directed—until he was booted—by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson as a convent girl who ends up running a brothel in German East Africa. Introducing her new book at Silent London, Pamela Hutchinson explains that The Curse of Queen Kelly is about how the film “came to be made, how and why it was abandoned, and how Gloria Swanson spent the rest of her life trying to reclaim it. This is film history as a rollercoaster ride. The things I learned surprised me, and the questions that it raised continue to trouble me. This is a story about the sharp end of silent Hollywood.” And Hutchinson has more to say in conversations with John Bleasdale (Writers on Film) and Marya E. Gates.

Paul Cuff has written a bit about von Stroheim and quite extensively about Abel Gance. His next book, Rediscovering Brigitte Helm: Film Performance and Stardom, 1925–1935, which will of course cover her unforgettable performance in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), doesn’t have a release date yet, but it does have a cover and a blurb. Cuff’s blog is The Realm of Silence, and he plans to use it in the coming days and weeks “to showcase a plethora of Helm memorabilia from my own collection.”

Lisa Stein Haven’s Early Buster Keaton: From the Vaudeville Stage to Comique Films, 1899–1920 is “a detailed, well-wrought look into the comedian’s early career(s),” writes Thomas Gladysz for Film International. Keaton’s “American-ness” is “at the heart of Haven’s investigation in to who Keaton becomes as a performer and filmmaker.”

Assertions of Presence

The discovery nearly ten years ago of Something Good: Negro Kiss, an 1898 short directed by William Selig and featuring vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown playfully smooching, has led to a book, Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Daniels talks with author Allyson Nadia Field about how, as she says, “it’s about not only the film but also how we understand the film. It’s about what the film meant then, which requires historical analysis. It’s about the performers and their lives and the other things that they did, and about the vexed world of turn-of-the-century Black performance. It’s about the cakewalk. It’s about the way these forms traveled into cinema. And ultimately, Something Good: Negro Kiss tells us a lot about Black performance and how we understand representation now, even though it’s a story from a hundred years ago.”

Artel Great—the author of The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance, a history of collaborations between comedians Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall in the late 1980s and early ’90s—will be at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles on Saturday to introduce Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (1991). On Sunday, Great will wrap the UCLA Film & Television Archive series The Black Pack: Rewriting American Comedy with a discussion of Murphy’s Harlem Nights (1989), and as Mark Olsen notes in the Los Angeles Times, further Black Pack programs are heading to Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago.

Ashley Clark has been talking about his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, with Ella Kemp at Letterboxd and with Ife Olujobi at Screen Slate. “It’s so crazy that year on year,” Clark tells Olujobi, “whenever any awards season comes around, we’re still talking about the same things, about the same types of erasure. I wanted to step aside from all of that and present something which confirms a history and a proud lineage of Black filmmaking, often against the odds. It’s not intended to be canonical—I’m not saying these are officially the hundred greatest Black films ever made—but it’s an assertion of presence.”

Star-Maker Machinery

“The construction of celebrity has always been collaborative: a script written by producers, journalists, and audiences alike,” writes Candice Wuehle at the top of a brief historical overview of books that “explore the machinery” of fame for Literary Hub. Over the past few weeks, Lena Dunham has kicked that machinery into high gear with Famesick, which the New York Times’ Alexandra Jacobs calls “an earnest, exposing book; a portrait of a lady on fire (indeed, a candle mishap in a hotel room sends her to the burn unit). Its quick hits of wit, especially about rich hipsters—‘film bros in their 30s and their wanly supportive girlfriends’ or the ‘jaunty, Keebler Elfish cadence’ of the Tracy Anderson workout method—are like sniffs from an oxygen mask.” Famesick “has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house.”

You’ll find much more on Famesick just about anywhere you turn, but let’s stick to the essentials. The New Yorker has an excerpt, “How I Became a Filmmaker,” and the book has been reviewed by Madeline Leung Coleman (Vulture), Sophie Gilbert (the Atlantic), and Scaachi Koul (Slate). David Marchese interviews Dunham and Amanda Hess profiles her, both for the NYT, and Emma Brockes talks with her for the Guardian.

Reviewing Liza Minnelli’s memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! for the New Yorker, Matt Weinstock writes: “Arranging her accomplishments on a single plane of vision is almost impossible, but what emerges in the attempt is a richly ouroboric body of work in which every concert alludes to her tabloid exploits and her tabloid exploits sometimes seem like guerrilla reenactments of things she’d done in her movies. As Minnelli once put it, ‘It’s a wacky career.’”

Kyle MacLachlan—FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and the Mayor of Portlandia—has written a memoir. Fictional Selves will hit the shelves in October.

Tinseltown’s Golden Ages

Lea Jacobs’s John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 “needs to be read slowly and carefully,” advises Kristin Thompson. “As Ford moves around among studios, different cinematographers, producers, script writers, and actors work with him from film to film, all having their influences . . . Jacobs accomplishes what most authors hope for: that the reader finishes by wanting to rewatch again films seen before, sometimes confident that her analyses will reveal them as much better than one had thought.”

Too often overlooked in discussions of what many claim to be the most golden year in Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1939, is George Cukor’s The Women, with its all-female cast featuring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine. “Directing ensemble scenes with upwards of half a dozen divas is no easy feat,” writes Caroline Golum at Little White Lies. “Leave it to Cukor to corral this kind of star power into a two hour-plus film that never takes a break to powder its nose.” September will see the release of Illeana Douglas’s Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women.

Not quite two months before he died in February 1966 at the age of fifty-seven, playwright, screenwriter, and director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) gave his last interview to Daniel Stein. The conversation is now being republished in Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, and Sabzian is running an excerpt. “This whole question of inner life,” said Rossen, wrapping an exchange about his final film, Lilith (1964), “I think there’s only one man that I know of in films that really and truly understands how to do it. And comes close, and that’s Bergman. I think Fellini’s a fake, totally and completely, a depraved—not depraved, that’s the wrong word—an Italian vaudevillian.” Rossen did like I vitelloni (1953), though. It “seemed realer.”

Reviewing David Streitfeld’s Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry for the Nation, Gus O’Connor writes that “Hollywood’s mythmaking machine was many things for McMurtry—a pain in the arse, an imperfect creative outlet, a curiosity, and, most importantly, a paycheck.” The author of the novels The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and the cowriter of the screenplays for Lonesome Dove (with Peter Bogdanovich) and Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana) “thought of himself, first and foremost, as a novelist and not a screenwriter. Yet one has to consider whether McMurtry’s films, more than his novels, have had a longer-lasting impact on popular culture, even if people have no idea he wrote those films. The question Streitfeld’s biography seems to orbit, then, is one about the connective tissue between the two mediums: how each of them informed the other and how, ultimately, the novel’s form was where McMurtry could best express his artistic and intellectual ideas.”

The “rampant consolidation” of the 1990s and early 2000s was a boon to the industry, as Thomas Schatz explains in Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System’s Last Hurrah: “Hollywood went on an absolute tear. Theater admissions in the U.S. spiked to their highest level in a half-century from 2002 to 2004, and all sectors were thriving—the major powers with their Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, and Spider-Man franchises; Indiewood with innovative gems like Lost in Translation (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); and the true independents with arthouse (and grindhouse) films and occasional runaway hits like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and The Passion of the Christ (2004). Not only was the movie industry booming, but it was striking a balance between art and commerce that hadn’t been seen since its vaunted Golden Age.”

New York, New York

Michael Lee Nirenberg’s Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking as Told by the Crews that Got the Shot takes us to the on-location sets of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), and more gritty tales of the big city. At the Village Voice, R. C. Baker reintroduces an excerpt that ran a couple of years ago, a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

“As a cornucopia of anecdotes, sassy portraits, and revealing asides, the book is unputdownably engaging,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Something that becomes apparent in Cinematic Immunity is that directors, for all their imaginative vision and dramatic sensibility, create, foremost, a social reality on the set, of which the events filmed—however artificial the design, however fantastic the story, however hyperbolic the performances—are a camera-angled slice of life. The views of the art of directing provided by the participants in Nirenberg’s book are exquisitely detailed and tangy with emotional immediacy.”

Michael Almereyda’s Writings and Relics: 1990–1995 chronicles a period when he shot Another Girl Another Planet (1992) in an East Village walk-up with a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 camera and directed the vampire movie Nadja (1994), which was “very much a neighborhood film,” as J. Hoberman wrote when a new restoration was released earlier this year. “Almereyda’s use of desolate downtown locations is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s in After Hours (1985). NoHo alleyways provide an instant netherworld and the illuminated windows of the old Tower Records on Broadway and East 4th Street are a notable effect. ‘The dead travel fast,’ Van Helsing [Peter Fonda] warns, and indeed, the woods of Transylvania feel but a subway ride away.”

Fiercely Independent

Jane Schoenbrun—whose third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, will open the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes next month—will also see their first novel released in October. Public Access Afterworld promises to be a “mesmerizing mashup of speculative fiction, horror, and conspiracy.”

Daniel Kraus—whose latest novel, Angel Down, was named one the ten best books of 2025 by the New York Times—has a new book out, Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World. Kraus claims to have seen George A. Romero’s 1968 classic more than three hundred times. “He has visited the locations, gone to conventions, purchased any and all ancillary products, and watched every remake, sequel, and spinoff, to the extent that I, a total stranger, am concerned for his well-being,” writes Vince Keenan. “There is a close reading of a film, there is a love letter to one, and then there’s what Kraus achieves here, which is an exploration of a work of art so intimate that it borders on invasive . . . I devoured Partially Devoured, and when I was done I saw Night of the Living Dead through Kraus’s eyes, appreciating it anew for the masterwork it is.”

Sticking Place Books is celebrating two other independent spirits with the publication of Gone Beaver and My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend: Lost Screenplays of the 1970s by Jim McBride (David Holzman’s Diary, The Big Easy) and My Lunches with Henry Jaglom, a collection of interviews with the late director of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) and Eating (1990) conducted by Daniel Kremer in the spirit of Jaglom’s own My Lunches with Orson. Kremer’s book features a foreword by Candace Bergen and an afterword by Noah Wyle.

En Avant

In 1983, Jane Brakhage, as she was known at the time, began interviewing her husband, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and within two years, the couple had a manuscript whose first title was The Autobiography of Stan Brakhage. The book project was set aside as the Brakhages’ marriage fell apart, but years later, the late P. Adams Sitney encouraged Jane Wodening, who had taken a new name and started a new life as a solitary writer in Colorado, to take a fresh look at the book—which was then published in 2015 as Brakhage’s Childhood. Sitney and David E. James then turned to further writing by and interviews with Wodening, and Sticking Place Books has just released The Autobiography of Jane Brakhage.

The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, a multi-venue series, carries on in New York through the end of the month. It coincides with the publication of I Walked Into My Shortcomings, a collection of Ken Jacobs’s writing and interviews edited by William Rose. Metrograph’s Journal is running an excerpt: “My early years were in a Yiddish speaking household in Williamsburg, where my grandfather took me by the hand to the Marcy on Sundays to see a Yiddish weepie double billed with a Hopalong Cassidy. Though I’d often be playing under the seats, some of the features had left impressions, mysterious disembodied cine-ghosts that I longed to meet with again.”

John Coulthart, in the meantime, flags the forthcoming publication this summer of Sophia Satchell-Baeza’s Sensual Laboratories: Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art, featuring a foreword by Jarvis Cocker.

Kluge and Farocki

Since Alexander Kluge passed away last month, there have been remembrances to recommend from A. J. Goldman in the New York Times and Bruce Robbins in the Baffler, and Carl Wilson points us to the late Gary Indiana’s engaging interview with Kluge that ran in a 1989 issue of BOMB Magazine. “At one level,” writes Sukhdev Sandhu at 4Columns, “Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances, a collaboration with Anselm Kiefer, translated by Alexander Booth, is merely the latest in Kluge’s ongoing book-length dialogues with visual artists, among them Georg Baselitz, Thomas Demand, and Gerhard Richter. But his affinities with Kiefer run especially deep . . . It’s been claimed that Kluge’s work is cold and impersonal. He himself says he writes ‘antirhetorically.’ Yes—but really, no. Intelligence Is the Art—its depths and orbits, elastic latitudes, lived and speculated histories—is supremely thermal.”

“Harun Farocki’s film and video work is almost too interesting to be art,” wrote Ken Johnson in the New York Times in 2011. Ted Fendt has translated a 1969 essay by Farocki that will be included in a forthcoming book, and it’s now up at e-flux. “Agitation speaks because it has a goal in view, and when it speaks, it does not lose sight of that goal,” wrote Farocki. “The agitation film is not produced in the film’s sphere of production; it comes into being only in agitation.”

Endnotes

In the latest seasonal roundup for Sabzian, Tillo Huygelen has notes on new books on André Bazin, the French New Wave and the generation of filmmakers in France that followed it, Anne-Marie Miéville, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Jocelyne Saab, Peter Watkins, and a whole lot more.

One of the most promising titles due this summer is The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, a new collection and the sixth book by Erika Balsom (Ten Skies). May 11 will see the release of the critical anthology Art/Film, and Melissa Anderson has been talking with Film Comment Podcast hosts Clinton Krute and Devika Girish about her collection, The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024.

Kier-La Janisse, the author of House of Psychotic Women and the director of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, has been running an independent publishing imprint, Spectacular Optical, which is now branching out into theatrical, streaming, and home viewing distribution. The first release is slated for tomorrow, Earth Day. Christopher Morris’s A Year in the Field (2023) will screen in the evening at the Roxy Theatre in Saskatoon, Canada.

Unlike many directors, Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) seems to have had a blast spending nearly a full “truly great” year promoting his movie. As Rafa Sales Ross reports for Variety, Mendonça is “currently writing a book about the ‘crazy’ experience.”

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]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:17:00 +0000 <![CDATA[A Reluctant Farewell to Nathalie Baye]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9133-a-reluctant-farewell-to-nathalie-baye
Nathalie Baye in Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980)

“I try to be watchful and make sure that I do not repeat myself,” Nathalie Baye told critic and French Film Festival UK founding director Richard Mowe in 2017. Baye, who has passed away at the age of seventy-seven, had broken through in François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), playing Joëlle, the script girl who assists Ferrand, the film director played by Truffaut himself, in maintaining some semblance of order on a set teaming with overblown yet fragile egos.

Surrounded by dazzling and dashing stars such as Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Joëlle is a rather plain yet calmly anchoring presence. “There was no way I wanted to be typed as the girl next door,” Baye told Mowe. “I saw myself playing dangerous and unsympathetic women.” In a career spanning more than fifty years, she managed to run the gamut, appearing in more than eighty films, garnering ten nominations for César awards—France’s rough equivalent to the Oscars—and winning four.

Born in Normandy, Baye grew up as the only child of a couple of starving artists “who, according to Nathalie, spent their lives ‘in a perpetual state of adolescent crisis,’” as Kim Willsher notes in the Guardian. She struggled with dyslexia and dyscalculia and found respite in dance, which led her to decide that her future would be in the theater. She often credited Truffaut with instilling in her a passion for cinema instead.

When Olivier Père, the director of Arte France Cinéma, interviewed Baye in 2021, he was primarily interested in hearing her talk about just a handful of the many directors she’d worked with: Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Claude Chabrol, Xavier Beauvois, and Xavier Dolan. There was a brief detour in the conversation when Père asked about Catch Me If You Can (2002), featuring Baye as the mother of Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man, but what Père wanted to know was whether she and Steven Spielberg swapped stories about Truffaut, who played a French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). They did.

Baye was particularly struck by what the two directors had in common. Driven by essentially upbeat, can-do spirits, both men, she said, lived for cinema. As Acquarello has noted, Truffaut’s The Green Room (1978), starring the director as a death-obsessed journalist and Baye as a secretary he befriends, is “an atypically static and somber film,” but Baye remembers the two of them constantly cracking each other up, which seems to have irritated assistant director Suzanne Schiffman no end.

Probably to the surprise of very few, Baye found Pialat to have a much “darker” outlook. In The Mouth Agape (1974), she plays one of four main characters, Nathalie, the wife of the son of a woman who is dying while her husband makes moves on other women. The director of “one gloriously uncomfortable film after another,” as Phillip Lopate has put it, Pialat was “a complicated humanist whose sympathies for his characters ran so deep that he felt no obligation to sugarcoat their flaws.” (Here we should mention that, starting on Wednesday, New York’s Film at Lincoln Center will present the U.S. theatrical premiere of La maison des bois, a 1971 series Pialat made for French television, along with three of his features.)

Baye was impressed with the way Chabrol involved so many members of his own family in the making of his fiftieth feature, The Flower of Evil (2003), and she had nothing but high praise for her fellow cast members. Bernard Le Coq plays the husband of her Anne, a candidate in an upcoming local election, and their kids from previous marriages (Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Doutey) are encouraged by their aging aunt (Suzanne Flon) to become lovers. “Another tastefully baroque roasting of petty bourgeois rites within suffocating domestic environs,” wrote Jessica Winter in the Village Voice, Chabrol’s “impassive melodrama begins with a prowl up a winding staircase that, as in La cérémonie and his previous effort, Merci pour le chocolat, can only portend corkscrewing revelations of murder and deceit.”

Baye won a César for her portrayal of a recovering alcoholic who heads up a Parisian police squad in The Young Lieutenant (2005), and Xavier Beauvois cast her again in the lead of his 2017 feature, The Guardians. Baye’s Hortense runs a farm while the men are off fighting in the First World War, and her daughter is played by Laura Smet, the real-life daughter of Baye and Johnny Hallyday, the hard-drinking rocker and occasional movie star who admitted to being taken by surprise himself when he and Baye fell for each other. Their parting nearly five years later was amicable, and they remained friends until Hallyday’s death in 2017. In 2015, Baye and Smet appeared together as comedically skewed versions of themselves in an episode of Call My Agent! directed by Cédric Klapisch.

Xavier Dolan was twenty-three when he directed Baye in his third feature, Laurence Anyways (2012), but he’d been acting since he was four, and as Baye told Père, that experience set him apart from many of the other directors she’d worked with. In Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World (2016), the winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes, Baye plays the garishly outfitted mother of a playwright who informs members of his family that he hasn’t seen in twelve years that he has a terminal illness. The cast is stellar—Gaspard Ulliel, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel—but on the whole, reviews were scathing.

A conspicuous absence in Père’s interview is Jean-Luc Godard, who directed Baye in Every Man for Himself (1980), which Godard called “my second first film,” and Détective (1985), “a rich comedy about the age of video” (Fernando F. Croce) dedicated to John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Clint Eastwood and costarring Hallyday, Laurent Terzieff, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Brasseur, Emmanuelle Seigner, and in her first role, Julie Delpy.

For her supporting performance in Every Man for Himself, Baye won her first César, and she was nominated that same year for the Best Actress César for playing an exhausted public school teacher in Bertrand Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation (1980). The following year, she won another Best Supporting Actress César for her turn as a troubled wife in Pierre Granier-Deferre’s Strange Affair (1981), and the year after that, won her first Best Actress César for her portrayal of a Parisian sex worker in Bob Swaim’s La balance (1982).

As news of Baye’s passing broke over the weekend, French president Emmanuel Macron remembered her as “a constant presence in French cinema over the past few decades, from François Truffaut to Tonie Marshall.” Outside of France, Marshall is not exactly a household name, but in 1999, she had a tremendous box-office and critical hit with Venus Beauty Institute and became the first woman to win the César for Best Director.

Marshall wrote her comedy set in a Parisian salon with Baye in mind as the lead, Angèle, whose coworkers are played by Bulle Ogier, Mathilde Seigner, and then-newcomer Audrey Tautou. Cast in lesser roles are even bigger names: Emmanuelle Riva, Edith Scob, Claude Jade, Marie Rivière, and Claire Denis. “Venus Beauty Institute has more than an unexpectedly playful and pointed sense of humor,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, and Baye delivers “one of her strongest performances. Sadness, anticipation, pity, fury, frankness, humor, and love, all these emotions and more play across her face as Angèle tries to cope with the choices life has given her.”

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]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:59:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Nobler in the Mind]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9131-nobler-in-the-mind Did You See This?

Tilda Swinton in Jes Benstock and Luke Losey’s The Box (1996)

The week began with lineups for two Cannes sidebars, Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and there’s one more that needs noting: ACID, the program that’s been put together by an association of film directors since 1992. You may not recognize many—or any—of the names behind this year’s nine selected titles, but ACID has quite a track record, having in the past presented first features from Radu Jude, Justine Triet, and Kaouther Ben Hania.

In other festival news, Tribeca, too, is all lined up and will open with Questlove’s latest music documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World). The twenty-fifth anniversary edition will run from June 3 through 14. Seattle (May 7 through 17) will showcase more than two hundred films and open with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Ebertfest is staging its “Last Dance” today and tomorrow, and in Nyon, Switzerland, Visions du Réel, opening today and running through April 26, will host guest directors Kelly Reichardt, Laura Poitras, and Sergei Loznitsa as well as artist Meriem Bennani.

Fans of Bollywood movies, “Brimful of Asha,” and/or the 2005 album You’ve Stolen My Heart are mourning the loss of playback singer Asha Bhosle, who has passed away at the age of ninety-two. “In some ways,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas for NPR, “Bhosle's career was the reverse image of that of her older sister, the equally famous playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. While Mangeshkar earned her reputation singing the roles of chaste, virtuous heroines, Bhosle specialized in saucier characters, such as in one of her most famous songs, ‘Dum Maro Dum.’ By Bhosle’s own reckoning, she recorded some 12,000 songs over a career that spanned about eight decades.”

This week’s highlights:

  • Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed, is the latest of many reinterpretations to appear in just the last year or so, and in his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri references plenty of them before considering why it is that “we seem to be at a rather ripe moment” for revivals of “the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays.” Hamlet “embraces grief, rage, betrayal, indecision, cowardice, duty, melancholy, madness, and so much more,” writes Ebiri. “For all his royal status, Hamlet is a figure of resistance, who targets, mocks, humiliates, and ultimately kills a king. He does this not for profit or ambition—unlike, say, Macbeth or Richard III—but for noble reasons. In one of this picture’s more intriguing twists on the material, Shakespeare’s invading Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, now becomes an encampment of activists pushed out of their homes by the Elsinore Corporation. Thus, Ahmed’s Hamlet discovers not just his father’s murder and betrayal but also the criminality on which his family’s entire wealth has been built. Hamlet’s disillusionment here feels of the moment, but it’s also thoroughly appropriate for this most rebellious of cultural icons.”

  • Starting tomorrow, New York’s Metrograph will screen new restorations of four erotic films directed by Radley Metzger, two of them released under his “nom-de-porn,” Henry Paris, and all of them introduced by Rob King, the author of the Metzger biography Man of Taste, and Ashley West, the founder of the Rialto Report. In his Journal essay on “that most aristocratic of pornographers,” Nick Pinkerton writes: “The elements that set Paris’s hardcore apart from the lower order of fap fodder are much the same that established Metzger as one of softcore’s gold standards: a keen compositional sense, a unifying air of suavity and ease, a sharp ear for comic dialogue, an aptitude for getting the best from performers, and a nimble erotic imagination uncolonized by pornographic cliché.”

  • Edoardo Rugo poses a question he then sets out to answer in his thoroughgoing essay on Marco Bellocchio for Bright Lights Film Journal. “Though shaped by a Marxist-Leninist background, his political vision frequently dissolves like smoke in the wind at the moment of mise en scène, in the crystallization of the cinematic image,” writes Rugo. “It is precisely this ‘coherent incoherence’ that becomes the true mechanism running through a career as vast as Bellocchio’s—a continuous and unrelenting engagement with history, which repeatedly translates into a disenchantment with the processes that political history is supposed to bring about and that private history is supposed to bear. Is it this disillusionment, this loss of faith in the student movements and the eventual recognition of rebellion’s impossibility, that forms the true authorial question in Bellocchio’s cinema?”

  • Inspired by “Film and Dreams,” a 1978 essay by Vlada Petrić—theoretician, historian, and cofounder of the Harvard Film Archive—Kinaesthesia is an exploration of dream sequences in silent-era cinema. Director Gerald Fox, who narrates over a rapid-fire series of countless clips, will be in London this evening to launch a season of hallucinatory movies he’s programmed for the BFI. For AnOther Magazine, Rory Doherty gets Fox talking about five essential sequences, such as the one in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) when the projectionist climbs into a movie. “The precision of those effects; they’re actually better than CGI,” says Fox. “You sense the authenticity of the imagery.” In Metropolis (1927), Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder has ominous visions, and Fritz Lang pulls off the sequence “through photographic means, through montage, through architectural means. Every film director who has wanted to do sci-fi with that kind of edge has gone back to that film.”

  • For designers, or for those of us who simply enjoy engaging eye candy, Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s newsletter Meanwhile is an essential subscription. The latest issue, #233, points us to a daunting array of sci-fi book covers, a postcard collection that could kill an entire afternoon if you’re not careful, coffee machines turned into tiny cafés by “Wes Anderson’s go-to model-maker Simon Weisse,” and a delightful, five-year-old interview with director Jes Benstock about the making of the stop-motion animated video for Orbital’s “The Box,” featuring Tilda Swinton as an alien wandering through East London. She was very, very into it, and as Benstock explains, she left the team “a gift” that they would only discover when they saw the rushes.

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]]> Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000 <![CDATA[This Is Not a Fiction 2026]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9128-this-is-not-a-fiction-2026
Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990)

Barbara Kopple will be in Los Angeles this evening and tomorrow to discuss her two Oscar-winning documentaries, Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dream (1990), as the American Cinematheque presents new restorations of both films as part of the third edition of This Is Not a Fiction. Kopple will be one of dozens of guests talking about their work as the festival screens forty-five films from today through April 24.

Writing about Harlan County in the Village Voice twenty years ago, Michael Atkinson noted that “Kopple documents a 1973 Kentucky coal miners’ strike in what amounts to real time—there are no after-the-fact summaries, but a persistent present tense of murder, gun threats, crowd violence, poverty, corporate usury, and in the end, astonishing communal solidarity . . . In 1976, Kopple’s rather terrifying film rocked its minuscule audience and instantly became a cultural touchstone.”

In 2017, Melissa Anderson wrote in the Voice that Harlan County is “filled not just with the talk—aggrieved, mournful, funny, inflamed—of the miners and their families but with their songs. When bird-boned Florence Reece, nearing seventy-five at the time, sings her anthem ‘Which Side Are You On?’ to an auditorium of strikers, her voice is almost whisper-soft. The lyrics, though, are emphatic, urgent, and always timely, as is Harlan County USA.”

Ten years after that standoff in Kentucky, around 1500 workers walked out of the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, after the company introduced a pay cut. Labor activist Ray Rogers alerted Kopple, and as she told Bailey Pennick when American Dream screened at Sundance back in January, the community “welcomed me with open arms and treated me and my crew like family.”

In the Reagan era, though, “it was hard to gather funding for a film on unionism,” said Kopple. “There was a point in the middle of the infamous Minnesota winter where we had less than three hundred dollars in the bank . . . I couldn’t have done it without the support and sacrifice of my crew, and the strength of the people of Austin, Minnesota.”

The story that played out in front of Kopple’s cameras became far pricklier than the more streamlined, us-vs.-them narrative that drives Harlan County. Rogers convinced the local union to ditch the strategy advised by the national union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and as Kenneth Turan wrote in his 1992 review in the Los Angeles Times, “the company and its positions almost fade from view in favor of the agonizing and unprecedented battle that took place within the striking union itself, a fight without heroes or villains, only victims.” American Dream is “above all a thoroughly human story, a tale of euphoric highs and dark lows, of a battle over principle that chillingly turned brother against brother and reduced participants to fistfights, fury, and tears.”

For Murray Kempton, who wrote about American Dream in the New York Review of Books in 1992, Kopple’s “gift is to make us feel almost as kin to the few who quit as to the many who stuck it out. There is no cruelty quite like that which gives a man or woman no choice except the surrender of dignity for a job or of a job for dignity.” Kopple will be in New York on Friday, May 1, when the new restorations of Harlan County and American Dream open at the IFC Center.

Restorations and Anniversaries

A good number of screenings at this year’s festival are being cross-pollinated with the Cinematheque’s current retrospectives of work by Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice for Sacro GRA (2013) and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Fire at Sea (2016), and Peter Watkins, the director of The War Game (1966) and La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) who passed away last November. There are also ongoing tributes to Želimir Žilnik, a key figure in the Yugoslav Black Wave, and Caveh Zahedi, whose confessional and ultra-meta “audacity is so overwhelming as to be blinding,” as Christine Smallwood has written in the New York Times. “It takes some time to notice that underneath the humor and raw willingness to humiliate himself is a rigorous, brutally efficient editor, shaping every moment for impact.”

This Is Not a Fiction will also present three short films that Sergei Eisenstein shot in Mexico in the 1930s, launching the Cinematheque’s series of Eisenstein restorations running from Sunday through May 17. Ross McElwee will be in town on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss two films he’s made about his late son, Photographic Memory (2011) and Remake (2025), and the new restoration of a true documentary landmark, Sherman’s March (1985). This “may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen,” wrote Nick Davis in 2006. Sherman’s March is a “humorously hangdog sojourn through the American South: the director’s home territory, densely populated with relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are trying to atomize his creeping dejection and couple him off with one Dixieland bachelorette or another.”

Among the West Coast premieres is Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Everybody to Kenmure Street, a chronicle of the spontaneous—and surprisingly successful—protests following the arrests of two men of Indian Sikh background by immigration authorities in Glasgow in the summer of 2021. “In the age of ICE and MAGA, and the Trump-inspired nationalist movements in the UK,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “it’s an amazing story of a community triumph, showing how the nasty little habits of domineering policing can be countered by stubbornly British—and in this case, specifically Scottish—insistence on justice. It’s a morale-boosting film.”

Howard Brookner completed Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS in 1987, and Aaron Brookner, his nephew, spent a dozen years working on the restoration that premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival. Wilson’s grand project, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, a collaboration with Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars, would have been a twelve-hour opera staged in six cities in conjunction with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Howard Brookner’s film is “a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself,” wrote Lauren Wissot at the top of her interview with Aaron Brookner for Filmmaker in September. “Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access—an overused term when it comes to docs—to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world.” The new restoration will screen in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music series Robert Wilson and the Moving Image, opening on Saturday and running through April 23.

If all this sounds deadly serious, rest assured, there will be moments of levity at This Is Not a Fiction in the coming days. Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy will be on hand for a screening of Best in Show (2000), which the late Eddie Cockrell called a “barkingly funny” mockumentary “that does for those canine pageants what [Guest’s] 1996 Waiting for Guffman did for small-town theatrics.” Akiva Schaffer, who codirected Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) with Jorma Taccone, will celebrate the tenth anniversary of what Screen’s Tim Grierson has called a “superbly silly sendup of the modern musical landscape” that is “as thimble-deep as the throwaway hits it’s satirizing, but also just as lively.”

Jackass Number Two turns twenty this year, and Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine will be there for Saturday’s screening. “Debased, infantile, and reckless in the extreme,” wrote Nathan Lee in the New York Times, “this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated, and cathartic comedy in modern movies.”

This Is Not a Fiction 2026 will wrap with Los Lobos: Native Sons, Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti’s portrait of the band at fifty, featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt, Rubén Blades, Tom Waits, Dolores Huerta, Danny Elfman, Jackson Browne, Cheech Marin, Edward James Olmos, Peter Frampton, and George Lopez. And Los Lobos will tie it all up with a live acoustic set.

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:31:00 +0000 <![CDATA[New Directors/New Films 2026, Part Two]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9127-new-directors-new-films-2026-part-two
Vladlena Sandu’s Memory (2025)

Following up on last week’s overview of the first half of this year’s New Directors/New Films, the festival of fresh work by emerging filmmakers copresented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, we’re taking a look here at films screening from today through the closing weekend. “However fraught the state of the movie industry,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “New Directors insists that there are always filmmakers from across the globe producing inspired, inspiring work that demands attention, deserves respect, and may earn your love. It’s making good on that promise this year with one of its best lineups in ages.”

Wednesday

Set in Iztapalapa, a working-class borough of Mexico City, Clemente Castor’s Cold Metal opens with a brief street gambling sequence before shifting focus to two brothers. Óscar (Óscar Hernández) has escaped from rehab, and Mario (Mario Banderas) awakens to “images that don’t belong to him.”

Dispatching to Filmmaker from last summer’s FIDMarseille, where Cold Metal won the Prix Georges de Beauregard, Cici Peng wrote that “Castor’s work is often aggressively opaque, guided by a seemingly haphazard editing logic that deliberately short-circuits narrative momentum as the film drifts between nonfiction, epistolary voice-over, gestural performance, and the supernatural, staged by a largely nonprofessional cast.”

Peng was “surprised by the sensation of being adrift, teleporting between ever-shifting film textures and terrains, from the underground to the skies of what appeared like the edge of the world. The film’s dialectics aren’t strictly ideological but affective: like Mario, I found myself clinging to signs, grasping at symbols, trying to decode meaning from disorder in an almost schizophrenic mode before suspending any desire for formal cohesion.”

Yuiga Danzuka was twenty-six when his debut feature premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last year. Brand New Landscape is an “elegant interweaving of a Japanese family’s emotional unraveling with meditations on Tokyo’s ceaseless cycles of alienation and renewal,” wrote Patrick Brzeski at the top of his interview with the director for the Hollywood Reporter. “But what many Western critics overlooked is that the film isn’t merely an above-average entry in the arthouse family drama canon—it’s also a bold and somewhat provocative act of autobiography.”

Danzuka is the son of renowned earthscape designer Eiki Danzuka. In Brand New Landscape, an architect cuts out from a family holiday to take on a star-making project, leaving his wife depressed and his two children feeling abandoned. Ten years later, the son, on an impulse, snatches an opportunity to check in on his estranged father.

“Danzuka’s framing of people in buildings calls to mind great poets of urban alienation like Antonioni and Edward Yang,” writes Nelson Kim for Filmmaker. “The film has some rough spots—a brief documentary interlude critiquing the father’s designs for gentrifying once-diverse neighborhoods lands clumsily, and a promising third-act turn to magical realism fizzles out—but the core story of a broken family moving haltingly toward reconciliation carries a quiet emotional charge that lingers afterward.”

Thursday

Manon Coubia’s short film The Fullness of Time (2016) won a Golden Leopard in the Pardi di domani competition at Locarno and another of Coubia’s shorts, Children Leave at Dawn (2017), screened at Critics’ Week in Cannes. Coubia has also spent ten years as a warden at a mountain refuge, an experience that inspired her debut feature, Forest High, which garnered a Special Mention when it premiered in the Berlinale’s Perspectives program.

Forest High was shot on 16 mm over four seasons as three women, one after another, serve as seasonal caretakers for a hut in the northern Alps, seeing to the bare-bones needs of hikers during their brief stopovers. This is “not a film of major dramatic incidents and revelations, though its payoff is clear and cleansing as a mountain spring,” writes Variety’s new chief film critic, Guy Lodge.

At the A.V. Club, Monica Castillo recommends five films from the ND/NF 2026 lineup, and Ukrainian director Vladlena Sandu’s Memory is one of them. Born in 1982 in Crimea, Sandu was six when she was sent to live with her abusive grandfather in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The Chechen Republic won its independence in its first war with the Russian Federation but lost it again in the second war. Sandu walked past corpses in the streets and took shelter from the bombs falling from the sky.

“To recreate these difficult scenes from her youth,” writes Castillo, “Sandu uses toys, animation, her family’s photo album, younger actresses to stand in for her younger self, and dreamy 16 mm footage of the sites in her story—all of which makes for a painful yet playful look back at the trauma her family endured. Memory references Sergei Parajanov‘s intricate use of design and color, Andrei Tarkovsky’s careful use of landscape and time, as well as the dioramas of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Although her story is a tragic one, it never loses its sense of childlike wonder.”

Friday

A social worker in Brussels turns to sex work to make ends meet when she unexpectedly finds herself raising her daughter on her own in Alexe Poukine’s Kika. “At first blush, “ writes Manohla Dargis, “the filmmaking in Kika seems less radical than the movie’s open-minded attitude toward outré sex work. Yet the director Poukine’s choices, including her use of some productively disorienting narrative ellipses—time can leap forward in an eye blink—accentuates the destabilization that comes to define the life of its titular heroine (a nuanced, appealing Manon Clavel). Equally impressive is how fluently Poukine slides from realism to expressionism in a tough, touching scene in which Kika looks deep inside herself while keening in a room as red as blood.”

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno, screens Friday evening and Sunday afternoon and then sees a weeklong run at New York’s Metrograph starting on April 24. Drawing from two manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Miyake tells two tales, one of a summer romance by the sea, the other of a wintry friendship slowly forged at an isolated inn.

Miyake “combines dollops of Hong Sangsoo—bifurcation, self-reflexivity about the writing process—with the more classical, Imamura-style stringency one finds in Hamaguchi’s work,” writes Michael Sicinski, who finds Two Seasons to be “a perfectly pleasant ninety minutes, and I don’t mean that as faint praise.” Metrograph notes that the film has been “hailed ‘a true masterpiece’ by Shigehiko Hasumi, Japan’s greatest living film critic.”

Saturday and Sunday

As the New Yorker’s Richard Brody points out, ND/NF 2026 “highlights a diverse array of movies with invigorating approaches to narrative form—foremost, Variations on a Theme, the second feature by the South African filmmakers Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, which weaves together multiple story lines in its hour-and-five-minute span.” The winner of the Tiger Award, Rotterdam’s top prize, Variations is set in the South African village of Kharkams, where Hettie—played by Jacobs’s grandmother, Hettie Farmer—prepares to celebrate her eightieth birthday. “The life of the rural region is framed in airy and luminous wide-screen images that recur with a lyrical vision of vast arcs of time amid dramatic social change,” writes Brody.

Chinese artist and filmmaker Viv Li has traveled the world, and when the pandemic hit, she found herself more or less stuck in Berlin. She put her five years in the German capital to good use, though, shooting her first feature, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest. “Following her semi-autobiographical character through the cultural landscape of Berlin and Beijing, the film presents the artist as a ‘misfit’ between two cultures,” writes Mia Butter at the top of her interview with Li for Berlin Art Link. “Tackling themes of migration, belonging in a globalized world, and self-acceptance, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest explores the local queer scene in Berlin, traditional family values in China, and the state of limbo in which the protagonist finds herself.”

This year’s ND/NF will wrap with the U.S. premiere of Rosanne Pel’s Donkey Days, starring Jil Krammer and Susanne Wolff as adult sisters competing for the affection of their manipulative mother (Hildegard Schmahl). “Pel deftly weaves this tragicomic narrative from the same cloth as the Dogme 95 canon,” writes Sonya Vseliubska for Notebook. “It’s clear from her handheld camera, which captures her heroines in both hysteria and sadness, as well as the improvisatory style of her talented actresses, who wind their way through serpentine mise-en-scènes in sprawling rooms. But what truly gives Donkey Days its Vinterbergian touch is the dramatic setup at the heart of the story—a toxic family gathered around the dining table, where the aim is not to eat but to fight.”

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]]> Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:39:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Directors’ Fortnight 2026 Lineup]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9125-directors-fortnight-2026-lineup
Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens (2026)

First announced in 2022, Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam will finally see its world premiere as the opening film at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight. Balagov’s two previous features premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, where Closeness (2017) won the FIPRESCI Prize and Beanpole (2019) won both the FIPRESCI and the award for Best Director. Presenting the Fortnight lineup on Tuesday morning, artistic director Julien Rejl said that Butterfly Jam “brings to mind the films of James Gray.”

With a cast headlined by Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough and featuring Harry Melling, Tommy McInnis, and Monica Bellucci, Butterfly Jam tells the story of fifteen-year-old Pyteh, an aspiring professional wrestler who helps out at the Circassian restaurant in New Jersey run by his father and his aunt. One of his dad’s misguided schemes blows up in his face, and Pyteh will have to come to terms with the man his father truly is.

Founded in 1969 by the French Directors Guild, the Fortnight will screen nineteen features and nine short and medium-length works during its fifty-eighth edition, which runs from May 13 through 23. The selection of features is finely balanced between new work by established directors, debuts, fiction, nonfiction, and animation.

Big Names, Fresh Work

Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid has been adapted by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Benoît Jacquot, and last summer, Radu Jude told the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai that his version will be “like a very distant dialogue” with the original story. “I want to speak about immigration and about Romanians working abroad. It’s about a woman who works for a French family in Bordeaux while her own small daughter remains home . . . I’m interested in exploring this connection between the Western world and Romania and Eastern Europe through the story of a character.”

Adapted from Keiran Goddard’s 2024 novel by playwright Enda Walsh, who wrote the screenplays for Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025), Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning tracks five friends who have grown up together in a working-class neighborhood in Birmingham, England. They had dreams and plans to realize them, but the first sentence of Goddard’s novel reads: “And then none of it happened.”

Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom (La libertad doble) is a sequel to his 2001 debut, La libertad, which spent seventy-three mostly quiet minutes with Misael, an Argentine woodcutter simply going about his day. Twenty-five years later, Misael is still at it, still working alone in the forest, and still free—until his older sister falls ill and he’s called on to care for her.

Dominga Sotomayor has won a Tiger Award in Rotterdam for Thursday Till Sunday (2012) and a Leopard for Best Direction in Locarno for Too Late to Die Young (2018). La perra, adapted from Pilar Quintana’s 2017 novel and produced by Rodrigo Teixeira, will star Manuela Oyarzún (Pablo Larraín’s No) and Selton Mello (I’m Still Here) in the story of a woman living on an island off the southern coast of Chile. She rescues an abandoned puppy and calls her Yuri—the name she was going to give the daughter she never had.

July Jung’s A Girl at My Door (2014) premiered in the Un Certain Regard program and her follow-up, Next Sohee, closed out the 2022 edition of Critics’ Week. Jung’s third feature, Dora, features former K-pop idol Kim Do-yeon in the title role and Sakura Ando, who has starred in films directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The new film is “a very free and contemporary adaptation of Dora’s case study by Freud in 1900,” says Julien Rejl. “It’s a very famous case but transposed here to contemporary Korea . . . The issue of desire and the desire for a young woman is at the core of the film.”

Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) was met with outstanding reviews when it premiered in Berlin in 2020 and then went on to win five Africa Movie Academy Awards. The brothers’ follow-up, Clarissa, is a reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway set in contemporary Lagos, and it stars Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and Nikki Amuka-Bird.

Jorge Thielen Armand has screened his work in Venice, Rotterdam, New York, and at Sundance, and his latest feature, Death Has No Master, centers on a middle-aged woman who returns to her family’s cacao plantation in Venezuela after thirty years. She’s been thinking about settling down there, but former workers have taken over the place. The inevitable standoff turns violent.

First Features

Sompot Chidgasornpongse has made well over a dozen short films, but he’s best known for his close work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an assistant director, from Tropical Malady (2004) through Memoria (2021). As a producer, Apichatpong has overseen Sompot’s first feature, 9 Temples to Heaven. Nine members of one family aim to spend a full day visiting nine temples in order to build up the good karma they hope will prolong their grandmother’s life. “The film is an ensemble piece, and the audience will be immersed as an invisible member of the family,” says Sompot.

Sarah Arnold’s 2014 short Totems won the Pardino d’oro (Concorso nazionale) in Locarno, and her first feature, Too Many Beasts, opens with a conflict between hunters and farmers in northeastern France sparked by roaming wild boars. When one of the farmers goes missing, a Corsican police officer is called in to investigate.

Eivind Landsvik, whose 2023 short Tits screened in competition at Cannes, directs singer-songwriter Marie Ulven, better known as Girl in Red, in his debut feature, Low Expectations. Ulven plays Maja, an acclaimed artist who has worked, toured, and partied to the point of exhaustion. And she’s only twenty-nine. She decides to pull back, move in with her mom, take a part-time job, and just watch life go by from the sidelines—if life will let her.

Reed Van Dyk’s DeKalb Elementary (2017) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film, and he’s lined up Kenneth Branagh, Hiam Abbass, and Boyd Holbrook to head the cast of Atonement. Based on Dexter Filkins’s 2012 piece for the New Yorker, Atonement tells the story of a marine who seeks forgiveness from the surviving members of an Iraqi family he and his unit fired on in 2003.

Lila Pinell’s Shana is “the type of comedy we’d like to see more of,” says Julien Rejl. Pinell has made a handful of short films, worked quite a bit in television, and codirected two features. This is her first solo outing, an expansion of her 2021 short Le roi David, the winner of the Prix Jean Vigo. Eva Huault once again plays Shana, the inheritor of a ring she hopes will bring her better luck than she’s been having lately. The cast also features Noémie Lvovsky.

Documentaries

Now ninety-four, Alain Cavalier has been making films for nearly seven decades, and his Thérèse (1986) won Best Film and Best Director at the César Awards. Cavalier was also “among the pioneering discoverers of new films and talents at the start of the Fortnight,” says Julien Rejl. “We are extremely proud to present the final installment of his filmed diary,” Thanks for Coming.

Gabin, a portrait of the youngest son in a family that runs a butcher shop in northern France, is the first feature from Maxence Voiseux. Gabin is expected to take over the business, but he dreams of breaking free. Shot over the course of a full decade, Gabin traces a life from ages eight to eighteen.

The third documentary in the lineup premiered to raves at Sundance. Shot in the summer of 1972, when William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) gathered luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for an evening in Duke Ellington’s townhouse, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is directed by Greaves’s son, David Greaves, who manned one of the cameras. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has called Once Upon a Time in Harlem “one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction.”

Animation

We Are Aliens, the first feature from anime artist Kohei Kadowaki, traces the story of two friends who meet in the third grade, grow close, and then, over the course of thirty years, grow apart. Sébastien Laudenbach is best known for codirecting Chicken for Linda! (2023) with Chiara Malta, and he’s gone solo on Viva Carmen, an adaptation of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, “but also,” he says, “a spin-off.” The story is told from the point of view of thirteen-year-old Salva, a street kid in 1840s Andalusia who is determined to prevent Carmen’s death.

The 2026 edition of the Fortnight will wrap with Le vertige, a late and entirely unexpected entry from Quentin Dupieux, who already has Full Phil lined up to premiere in Cannes as a Midnight Screening. Julien Rejl won’t say much quite yet about Le vertige other than that it’s a 3D motion-capture animation featuring the voices of Dupieux’s frequent collaborators Alain Chabbat, Jonathan Cohen, and Anaïs Demoustier.

Endnotes

During the Fortnight’s opening ceremony, the French Directors’ Guild will present the Carrosse d’Or, an award presented since 2002 to “a filmmaker who has left their mark on the history of cinema,” to Claire Denis. And when all is said and done, the Fortnight will announce the winner of this year’s People’s Choice, introduced in 2024 as the first audience award to be presented in Cannes. The first winner was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, and last year’s winner was Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake, which also took home the Camera d’Or, the prize given to the best first feature to premiere in Cannes’ Official Selection, Directors’s Fortnight, or Critics’ Week.

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]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:52:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Critics’ Week Lines Up Eleven Features]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9122-critics-week-lines-up-eleven-features
Aina Clotet in Viva (2026)

For the first time in its sixty-five-year history, Critics’ Week, the Cannes sidebar spotlighting first and second features from up-and-coming filmmakers, will open with an animated film. Phuong Mai Nguyen won the Adult’s Jury Award for Best Animated Short at the Chicago International Children’s Festival in 2015 for Chez moi, and her first feature, In Waves, is a Northern California love story.

Two teens—AJ, a shy skateboarder, and Kristin, a go-getter surfer—fall for each other, and all’s well until Kristin falls ill. The French voice cast is led by Lyna Khoudri, Rio Vega, Paul Kircher, and Birane Ba, while Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu lead the voice cast of the English-language version.

In Waves is one of four special screenings this year. Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, whose 2020 short Tender Age was nominated for a César, has cast Bastien Bouillon—who also stars in Léa Mysius’s Histoires de la nuit, slated to premiere in competition at Cannes—in Stonewall, the story of a brother and sister grappling with the release of their father from prison. Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel is a romantic comedy about two truckers in love starring Alexis Manenti and Julian Świeżewski.

Artistic director Ava Cahen and her team have selected Félix de Givry’s Adieu monde cruel to close out this year’s edition. De Givry cowrote and coproduced Ugo Bienvenu’s Oscar-nominated animated feature Arco (2025), and he’s cast Milo Machado-Graner, the breakout star of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023)—he played Daniel, the visually impaired son of Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis’s Sandra and Samuel—as a fourteen-year-old who has written a letter to his family and friends announcing his decision to kill himself. When his suicide attempt fails, he goes into hiding, but one of his classmates spots him.

Competition

Seven features are set to compete for the Grand Prize, and five of them are directed by women. Blerta Basholli, who won the Grand Jury Prize, the Directing Award, and the Audience Award at Sundance for Hive (2021), has completed her highly anticipated second feature. Set in Pristina on the brink of the Kosovo War in the late 1990s, Dua centers on a thirteen-year-old and her family as their lives are about to be upended.

The Station, revolving around a gas station in Yemen run by women where men, weapons, and talk of politics are banned, is the first feature from Sara Ishaq, whose 2012 documentary short Karama Has No Walls was nominated for an Oscar. In La Gradiva, the first feature from cinematographer Marine Atlan (The Girl in the Snow), a Latin teacher takes a class of high school students on a trip to Pompeii.

Award-winning actor Aina Clotet directs herself in Viva as Nora, a woman recovering from breast cancer and facing a whole new world of possibilities. And Jess Jing Zou’s A Girl Unknown is a story told in three chapters, all centering on a Chinese woman with three names and three families.

Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, the first fiction feature from documentarian Bruno Santamaría Razo, flashes back to the early 1990s as a filmmaker sorts through memories of being eleven and his father being diagnosed with HIV. And Alexander Murphy’s Tin Castle is a nonfiction portrait of a family of Irish Travellers living in a rundown trailer stranded in the middle of a field.

Critics’ Week 2026 will run from May 13 through 21, and the short film selection will be announced on Wednesday.

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]]> Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:57:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Not I, AI]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9120-not-i-ai Did You See This?

Jia Zhang-Ke’s Dance (2026)

The third issue of Narrow Margin, devoted to the work of Rita Azevedo Gomes and Larry Cohen, will see an official launch on Tuesday as the editors present two films by Azevedo Gomes, Altar (2000) and The Conquest of Faro (2005), at Light Industry in New York. Further terrific news for fans of Portuguese cinema comes from Cinema Guild, which has acquired the restored films of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. North American releases will begin with a retrospective in Toronto running from May 8 through 17.

This week’s highlights:

  • “I am not worried about whether technology will ‘replace’ cinema,” Jia Zhang-Ke wrote in a Weibo post when he released an AI-generated video of his younger and current selves dropping in on scenes from his films. “What truly matters is how people use technology.” Michael Berry, the author of two books on Jia, writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the splash the video made in China, Jia’s many public personas, and the role of AI in China’s ongoing ascent as a global power: “There is a certain perversity about a director whose films have consistently interrogated themes like labor rights and environmental devastation seemingly going all in on AI. For those primarily familiar with Jia Zhang-Ke as a well-known art-house auteur, the video may simply scan as a stunt. But considered within the arc of Jia’s multifaceted career, these contradictions begin to come into focus, revealing their own uncanny logic.”

  • Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers stars Ian McKellen as Julian, a renowned artist who hasn’t painted anything of significance in twenty-five years, and Michaela Coel as Lori, an art restorer Julian’s kids hire to forge a completion of a series of Julian’s paintings that they can sell when he dies. When Amy Taubin first saw The Christophers, “I thought it was a trifle,” she writes at Filmmaker, “but it stayed with me, so I saw it again. It is one of Soderbergh’s best and most personal films about art, relationships, and the instability of everything we believe we know.” Soderbergh talks with Taubin about working with actors, operating his own camera, and using just a smidgeon of AI on John Lennon: The Last Interview (which is slated to premiere in Cannes next month), but “a lot of AI” on a projected movie about the Spanish-American War that would star Wagner Moura.

  • It’s hard to imagine Jim Jarmusch being tempted to even experiment with AI. As Father Mother Sister Brother opens in the UK today, Amy Raphael talks with Jarmusch in the Guardian about taking his Golden Lion through security at the airport in Venice, the mounting challenges of getting a film off the ground, and what he calls “one of the most beautiful gifts of my working life,” working with Gena Rowlands on Night on Earth (1991). Before he died, John Cassavetes wrote a screenplay for Rowlands, Unless That Someone Is You, and she asked Jarmusch to direct, but he was tied up with Dead Man (1995). Jarmusch says he feels “beautifully connected” to Cassavetes and David Lynch via his cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, who worked with both directors. “I’m not a surrealist like David,” says Jarmusch, “nor am I quite as visceral as Cassavetes, but I’m a humanist romantic, as John was.”

  • A series of films by Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clémenti, and others, all starring Tina Aumont, will open at Anthology Film Archives on April 17 and run through April 30. “Aumont didn’t mind playing the sexpot,” writes Beatrice Loayza at 4Columns. “Her style relied on embracing her sensuality, which was openly coquettish and laced with the kind of faux innocence that created a sense of mischief. With her heavy brow and kohl-rimmed eyes, her look could easily turn manic, deviant, making her a precursor of the likes of Béatrice Dalle and Asia Argento, tempestuous brunettes who also thrived in B movies and the seedier pockets of the art house.”

  • Marya E. Gates talks with Valerio Ciriaci about his new documentary, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, which delves into the life and work of Italy’s first female director. Notari worked in Naples from around 1911 to 1930, when fascist censorship put a stop to her career. She was forgotten for decades until a network of artists began a process of rediscovery and reclamation in the 1970s. “It’s clear that not only does she know the language of fiction, but also she knows the language of documentary,” says Ciriaci. “This is not common. I’ve watched a lot of Neapolitan silent cinema, which doesn’t make me an expert, but I know how Elvira’s work relates to those others. They were filming street life as well, but not like her. She knew those people. You can see that she was part of that community, and she films it with an eye that is not judgmental . . . and is not voyeuristic. She’s somebody who belongs there.”

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]]> Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:01:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Cannes 2026 Lineup]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9119-cannes-2026-lineup
Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (2026)

Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has unveiled what he says is “around ninety-five percent” of this year’s Official Selection. We can expect to hear about late additions in the coming days and weeks—James Gray’s Paper Tiger, for example, is a very likely contender—but for a festival with a reputation for calling back seasoned auteurs, the 2026 lineup is already promising a fresher roster of filmmakers. Twelve of them have been invited to compete for the Palme d’Or for the first time.

Cannes’s seventy-ninth edition will open on May 12 with Pierre Salvadori’s La Vénus électrique, a comedy set in 1920s Paris that will premiere out of competition, and run through May 23.

Competition

Of the twenty-one films so far slated to premiere in the main competition, three come from Japanese directors. Shot in Paris and Kyoto, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden stars Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home whose life is changed when she watches a terminally ill playwright (Tao Okamoto) develop a new project.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box is set in a near future when it is not all that unusual for a couple (Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto) to welcome a state-of-the-art humanoid into their home as their son. And Nagi Notes, directed by Koji Fukada, is the story of two friends and former sisters-in-law coming to terms with turning points in both of their lives.

The national cinema best represented in the lineup is, naturally, France’s, and that goes beyond the directorial talent. Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, and Catherine Deneuve lead the cast of Parallel Tales, the latest feature from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation). Deneuve also costars with Léa Seydoux, Laurence Rupp, and Jella Haase in Gentle Monster, a story of two women realizing that they’re devoting their lives to men. Austrian Marie Kreutzer (Corsage) directs.

Seydoux will also lead the cast of The Unknown, the third feature directed by Arthur Harari, who—despite raves for his Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (2021)—is still best known for cowriting Anatomy of a Fall (2023) with Justine Triet. In The Unknown, a photographer (Niels Schneider) spots a woman (Seydoux) he can’t take his eyes off of, and when he wakes the next morning, he discovers that he is inhabiting her body.

Along with Harari, the French contingent boasts Léa Mysius (The Five Devils), whose Histoires de la nuit stars Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel, Bastien Bouillon, and Monica Bellucci in a story of a birthday party disrupted by intruders; Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet (Anaïs in Love), whose A Woman’s Life stars Léa Drucker as an overworked surgeon; Jeanne Herry (In Safe Hands), whose Another Day, featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos, is a portrait of a struggling actor; and Emmanuel Marre (Zero Fucks Given), whose Notre salut depicts the early days of the Vichy regime.

Hungarian director László Nemes (Son of Saul) will make his French-language debut with Moulin, starring Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin, a hero of the French Resistance. Lukas Dhont (Close) calls Coward, which centers on a young Belgian soldier fighting in the First World War, “my most ambitious film to date.”

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, whose working title was 1949, stars Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller as Thomas and Erika Mann, father and daughter, both renowned writers, taking a road trip in a black Buick through a divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. The Dreamed Adventure, the long-awaited fourth feature from Valeska Grisebach (Western), is set in a region between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey and focuses on a woman who agrees to help an old acquaintance with a plan to commit a crime.

Hope, Na Hong-jin’s even-longer-awaited follow-up to The Wailing (2016), stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Jung Ho-yeon as well as Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in a story set in a remote harbor village, where reports of a tiger on the loose spark a panic that escalates into something weird.

Cristian Mungiu, whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in 2007, returns with Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a married couple—he’s Romanian, she’s Norwegian—moving to her isolated hometown in Norway. Their new neighbors grow suspicious about the way they’re raising their children, leading to difficult questions about personal freedoms and societal norms.

Frémaux suggested on Thursday morning that Minotaur, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan), is a loose remake of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969). Facing crises at home and at work, the director of a successful company teeters on the brink of an emotional and moral collapse.

Pedro Almodóvar says Bitter Christmas is “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.” Already in theaters in Spain, Almodóvar’s twenty-fourth feature stars Barbará Lennie as Elsa, a director of commercials writing a screenplay in 2004 that draws from the painful lives of her friends. Elsa’s story, though, turns out to be a screenplay that Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is working on in 2026.

Javier Bardem stars as an acclaimed director who casts his daughter (Victoria Luengo) in his latest project in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved. The Black Ball, codirected by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, is inspired by an uncompleted work by Federico García Lorca, tracks the interconnected lives of three gay men, and stars Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close.

Up to this point, Ira Sachs is the sole American filmmaker with a film in the main competition. The Man I Love stars Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, and Rebecca Hall in a “musical fantasia of a city under duress,” New York in the late 1980s.

Un Certain Regard and More

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the third feature from Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow), will open Un Certain Regard, the competitive program introduced in 1978 to spotlight up-and-coming filmmakers. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson star as a filmmaker and an actor at work on the latest installment of Camp Miasma, a slasher franchise. Schoenbrun has described Teenage Sex and Death as “my best attempt at the ‘sleepover classic’: an insane yet cozy midnight odyssey that beckons to unsuspecting viewers from the horror section at the local video store.”

One highlight of the noncompetitive Cannes Première program will be Visitation, the latest feature from Volker Schlöndorff. Set in and around a house by a lake near Berlin, the story spans generations and decades, from the rise of fascism through the reunification of Germany. The ensemble cast includes Lars Eidinger, Martina Gedeck, Susanne Wolff, Michael Maertens, Ulrich Matthes, Detlev Buck, Angela Winkler, and Wigand Witting.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, a thriller about a mysterious mist engulfing a major city, was shot in Tokyo, features Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, and has been selected to premiere out of competition. Quentin Dupieux says that Full Phil, a Midnight Screenings selection starring Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson, is “like Emily in Paris in hell—a fever dream, a nightmare version of it.” And Steven Soderbergh, whose The Christophers will open tomorrow, will see his nonfiction feature John Lennon: The Last Interview premiere as one of seven Special Screenings.

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]]> Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:17:00 +0000 <![CDATA[New Directors/New Films 2026, Part One]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9118-new-directors-new-films-2026-part-one
Jaume Claret Muxart’s Strange River (2025)

With his first feature, Leviticus, Adrian Chiarella has opened the fifty-fifth edition of New Directors/New Films, taking part in Q&As on Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and this evening at Film at Lincoln Center. A critical hit when it premiered in the Midnight program at Sundance, Leviticus stars Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen as Naim and Ryan, two teens who have fallen in love.

That does not go down well in their isolated Australian town, where the prescribed treatment is conversion therapy. The rituals they’re sentenced to undergo call forth a curse. At any moment one of the boys is alone, the other may show up—but he will not be who he appears to be. This entity is a demonic, murderous force taking the form of one’s deepest desires. More than a few reviews note Chiarella’s nods to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014).

Dispatching to the Guardian from Sundance, Benjamin Lee observed that the premise “lends the film not only a piercing sadness but also a swell of giddy, against-all-odds romance (love might actually tear us apart, but what if it’s worth the risk?). It would be too easy and too of the moment to dwell in the grim trauma of the story but, when ears aren’t being sliced and heads aren’t being decapitated, Chiarella leans into the epic star-crossed swoon of the story. Visually, he’s as adept at capturing the chilly horror of isolation as he is at capturing the soft-hued buzz of togetherness.”

“There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film,” writes Richard Lawson in the Hollywood Reporter, “one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives.”

Three on Thursday

The first full day at ND/NF will offer Isabel Pagliai’s Fantasy, the winner of the First Film Award at FIDMarseille; Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe’s Aro berria, which scored a Special Jury Mention in San Sebastián; and Ique Langa’s The Prophet, which premiered in the Tiger Competition in Rotterdam. At the center of Fantasy is Louise, a young woman alone with her cat and her phone. She watches clips, makes video diaries, and leaves messages for a man who doesn’t reply.

“Pagliai builds a fascinating tension between the stillness of the compositions and Louise’s agitated psyche,” writes Phuong Le in the Guardian. “In contrast to this melancholic mood, Pagliai’s visual style is thrillingly eclectic. The mix of painterly static shots and lo-fi, handheld footage channels a state of emotional paralysis.”

Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe has spent years researching the sort of alternative communities her parents lived in before she was born. In 1978, a metalworkers strike in San Sebastián led several leftists to leave the city for a commune where, as Nicholas Vroman notes, sessions lasting for weeks on end involved “a sort of mix of Reichian therapy and Tantric spiritual philosophies.”

Oliver Laxe (Sirāt) pops up here as a Tantric guru. “Working with a superb ensemble of largely unfamiliar faces—and drawing on production design and costumes that recreate the period with remarkable fidelity—Aro berria transports us to a time and place that prove riveting,” writes Cristóbal Soage at Cineuropa.

Mozambican writer-director Ique Langa spent nine years researching The Prophet and then working with the nonprofessional actors from his father’s rural village of Manjacaze to tell the story of Hélder, a pastor who aims to revitalize his waning faith with witchcraft. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai, Langa says that “there’s been a huge surge of these pastors, with a lot of rumors about them using alternative powers. There are all these churches that are coming out of nowhere with these pastors that are quote, unquote prophets.”

Into the Weekend

In Tuesday’s preview of this year’s Los Angeles Festival of Movies, we took a couple of quick looks at John Early’s Maddie’s Secret and Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor, and both films will screen during the first weekend of the festival. Friday sees the New York premiere of Do You Love Me. Multidisciplinary artist Lana Daher calls her first feature “a personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage.”

It’s “a substantive feat of excavation,” writes Yassin El-Moudden in the Guardian. “A significant amount of Do You Love Me consists of scenes from past Lebanese movies, therefore showcasing the country’s cinema—including the works of trailblazing female filmmakers such as Jocelyne Saab and Heiny Srour—while also reframing conventional narratives of its own image.”

Xinyang Zhang spent eight years working on his debut feature, Panda, which saw its world premiere in February in the Forum Expanded program at the Berlinale. Four people wander the banks of the Yangtze River: “Xing Qiji, the doctor, resembles a summoner of souls,” Xinyang Zhang tells Forum head Barbara Wurm. “The young woman is a mythic figure, a being filled with spirituality, almost like a bodhisattva. Wang Laodao, the cook who cuts his own finger, resembles a suffering ordinary man. And the homeless man is like a fanatical shaman—a scientist and a dreamer. They all move through this human world together: they encounter one another. Their social classes and their ways of thinking all seem quite different, but when they are together, these people attain a kind of equality.”

Kai Stänicke’s Trial of Hein opened the Berlinale’s Perspectives program of first features this year. Hein (Paul Boche) has spent fourteen years away from home, a village on a remote island in the North Sea. When he returns, no one in the community recognizes him (or admits to recognizing him). Hein will have to prove he is who he says he is, and Stänicke’s screenplay “toys with us as well as its protagonists,” writes Screen’s Lee Marshall, “swerving toward folk horror, flirting with comedy, and standing on the brink of symbolic portentousness before pulling back.”

Charli XCX stars in Pete Ohs’s Erupcja as Bethany, a Londoner ostensibly in Warsaw for a romantic getaway with her devoted boyfriend (Will Madden), but all she really wants to do is hang out with an old friend, Nel (Lena Góra). Erupcja is “a work of novelistic amplitude,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Emotional turbulence courses through the film, conveyed less by spectacular blowups than with a finely tuned mechanism of phone calls and voice mails, visits and absences, plans made and forgotten and brazenly broken. The web of secrets and confessions, schemes and counterplots, short-term pleasures and far-reaching decisions, are couched in dialogue that is pugnacious, vulnerable, comedic, and sometimes richly poetic, and which feels as spontaneous as it is carefully crafted.”

During his last weeks at Filmmaker, Scott Macaulay wrote that Erupcja’s “many considerable strengths—its beautifully natural performances (Charli makes a fantastic screen debut here, and she and Góra have a lovely chemistry), its subtle and relaxed dramatization of characters whose inner lives are often opaque to each other, and its freewheeling depiction of Warsaw youth culture—are inseparable from the purity of its making. Five features in, Ohs has finely honed his method with this new picture, expanding his canvas both in terms of location but also theme and emotional expression. With an off-screen narrator spinning Bethany and Nel’s tale into the realm of fable, Erupcja will touch any romantic who’s gone on a trip to a place that can make you change.”

Its title echoing the ancient Greek word for the sort of athletic contest that eventually became what we know as the Olympics, Agon is the first feature from Giulio Bertelli, the younger son of Fondazione Prada cochairs Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. The film is “structured around three parallel portraits,” notes Davide Abbatescianni at Cineuropa, “a trio of women embodying different stages of life, and different shades of fragility and strength. Fencer Giovanna Falconetti (Yile Vianello), judoka Alice Bellandi (here playing a fictionalized version of herself), and rifle shooter Alex Sokolov (Sofjia Zobina), an Italian champion of Russian origins, move through sterile environments and aseptic settings, their routines alternating between intense training, long moments of solitude, and glimpses of competition.”

In Strange River, the debut feature from Jaume Claret Muxart, a Catalan family takes a summer biking tour along the Danube. “Mixing sensuality and lyrical atmospherics with an unapologetically highbrow frame of reference (German Romantic drama, modernist architecture),” writes Jonathan Romney in Screen, “this elegantly confident offering” is “tender, enigmatic, and gorgeously shot on 16 mm” by Pablo Paloma.

Monday and Tuesday

Written and directed by actor Lorenzo Ferro (Simon of the Mountain, Narcos) and music video director Lucas A. Vignale, The River Train introduces Milo Barría as Milo, a nine-year-old growing up in a small town in Argentina and training to become a great Malambo dancer—because that’s what his father wants him to do. Milo’s own dream is to live as an artist in Buenos Aires, and one night, he slips some sleeping powder into his family’s dinner takes off for the big city on a sky-blue train. “Ferro and Vignale don’t shout the film’s ambitions,” writes John Lynn for the International Cinephile Society. Instead, “they let them drift into view, like the train itself, moving steadily through fields and memory.”

Inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead and executive produced by Carlos Reygadas, Next Life, the first fiction feature from multimedia artist Tenzin Phuntsog, focuses on a Tibetan American family in Northern California as they prepare for the death of their father. At In Review Online, Chris Cassingham writes that the “simplicity of the premise . . . at once justifies [the film’s] austere tone and atmosphere and belies its complex and sensuous spirituality. The dialectical nature of Phuntsog’s point of view allows contradictions and ironies to take precedence over character development and narrative logic, and suggest a bridge between life and death that is, perhaps, not one-way.”

In Sanju Surendran’s If on a Winter’s Night, executive produced by Payal Kapadia, Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada) and Abhi (Roshan Abdool Rahoof) set out together from Kerala to start a new life together in Delhi. Reviewing this “quiet, pensive film about choices and regrets,” Daniel Eagan writes that “it’s about how even the most confident and hopeful of us can be reduced to helplessness. Early in the film Sara walks past a poster for Devi, and the work of director Satyajit Ray may be a clue to Surendran’s methods. I was reminded of Ray’s Distant Thunder, which slowly and calmly detailed how a doctor and his family are ruined during World War II by forces they don’t fully understand.”

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]]> Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:51:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2026]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9117-los-angeles-festival-of-movies-2026
Eric Rahill and John Early in Maddie’s Secret (2025)

When Maddie’s Secret, the first feature directed by comedian John Early, premiered in Toronto last fall, Adam Nayman, writing for the Ringer, called it “a loving pastiche of after-school specials featuring Early in a remarkably assured and tender distaff performance as a would-be culinary influencer struggling with bulimia. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, Early aces his own high-degree-of-difficulty assignment by leveraging his alt-comic instincts against a reverent (and revelatory) cinephilia.”

“Early is one contemporary filmmaker—Todd Haynes is another—who sees the exquisite, manicured melodramas of Golden Age Hollywood as a useful template for the era of social media, in which every gesture is also a performance,” writes Mark Asch at Little White Lies. “The cast of Maddie’s Secret—particularly tomboyish Kate Berlant, as Maddie’s spiky and besotted sapphic sidekick—put an overenunciated gloss on every scene . . . That Maddie is a domestic-goddess entrepreneur is also a throwback to the classic women’s picture—Claudette Colbert was a single mother turned pancake-mix magnate in the original Imitation of Life, and Mildred Pierce was a baker who became a restaurateur, the kitchen being a place where a woman could transcend traditional gender constraints by embodying them to the hilt.”

On Thursday, Maddie’s Secret will open the third edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, “one of the finest-curated festivals in America,” as far as Film Stage founding editor Jordan Raup is concerned. Running through Sunday, LAFM 2026 will present nine features plus three restorations, including Lino Brocka’s rarely screened Macho Dancer (1988); shorts programs featuring new work by Don Hertzfeldt, Neo Sora, Adam Piron, and Josephine Decker; a conversation with Decker and production designer and producer Lisa Hanawalt (BoJack Horseman); and another with writers Melissa Anderson and William E. Jones.

Maddie’s Secret is one of two films in the lineup set to screen in the next few days in New York as part of this year’s New Directors/New Films. The other is Chronovisor, the first feature from Jack Auen and Kevin Walker, who have been working together for years under the name Cosmic Salon. Anne Laure Sellier, a professor of behavioral sciences at HEC Paris, plays Béatrice Courte, a scholar at Columbia who comes across a real-life but shushed-up and forgotten chapter in history. “In the same way our character becomes obsessed with it, that was kind of our life for a few months,” Walker tells Alex Fields, who interviews the directors for Tone Glow.

In the 1950s, Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine priest and musicologist claimed to have invented a device, the Chronovisor, that would allow us to peer into the past. Ernetti said he’d witnessed the crucifixion of Christ and a speech delivered by Cicero and had photographs to prove it—but his supposed evidence was dismissed along with his time machine by journalists, experts, and Pope Pius XII.

“While, on the one hand, Chronovisor seems to share some DNA with various Dan Brown adaptations and other Catholic-conspiratorial pulp,” writes Dylan Adamson in the Brooklyn Rail, “Walker and Auen are more interested in the fuzzy boundaries of conspiratorial thinking—its temptations, hazards, and stubborn grains of truth. The amount of prop literature the film summons in evidence of the Chronovisor beggars belief, until one verifies post hoc that all, or nearly all, of this material actually exists.” Chronovisor is “too tempted by fantasy to make a documentary of this material, and yet includes too much truth and documentary technique in its mix to exist comfortably in the category of fiction.”

When Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming premiered at last year’s Berlinale, the BFI’s Sam Wigley called it “the most transfixing, formally experimental first feature I’ve seen in an age, a nonlinear romance and road trip that unfolds against a landscape haunted by Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan.” The family of an Armenian man killed in the conflict asks a soldier, Atom (Davit Beybutyan), to take the man’s daughter, Claudine (Veronika Poghosyan), to a safer place.

“Utilizing a visual technique where only part of the frame is in focus, thanks to an additional lens affixed to the main camera body, Haroutounian tracks both the tension and growing amorous connection between the two young people, as they embark on their road trip to nowhere in particular,” writes David Katz for the International Federation of Film Critics. “Haroutounian mainly aims to hypnotize us, making the primary characters’ smallest gestures riven with suspense, as we can feel the feelings repressed by their previous parochial existences finally breaking through.”

LAFM will present two films that premiered last summer in Locarno. With Hasan in Gaza, the winner of the Europa Cinemas Label award, is primarily made up of MiniDV footage Kamal Aljafari shot in late 2001 during the Second Intifada. With a guide named Hasan, Aljafari went looking for a man he’d shared a prison cell with years before. “Much of With Hasan’s pathos lies in our anachronistic encounter with Gaza’s once-vibrant streets and souks, where smiling children play and fresh vegetables abound,” writes Kareem Estefan for Film Comment. “But the rubble, subjugation, and poverty wrought by Israeli occupation are here too . . . With Hasan is poignant not only because it depicts Gaza before its annihilation, but because Aljafari explores its lifeworlds with a loving curiosity that has nothing to do with saving it or speaking on its behalf.”

Closing out this year’s edition will be Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, the winner of the First Feature Award in Locarno and the Best Canadian Discovery Award in Toronto, which is where Jason Bailey caught up with it. Blue Heron “starts out as one kind of movie, a kind of sun-kissed memory play in which the filmmaker reanimates her scattered memories and big family full of tricky personalities,” wrote Bailey at Crooked Marquee, “and it does that well.”

Romvari “has a gift for recapturing the way it feels and sounds when kids are playing, when things are hectic around the house, when parents are fighting,” wrote Bailey. “And then, unexpectedly, she flips the script, jumping decades and changing styles, looking at this story from a completely different (and altogether unexpected) point of view, before crossing those streams in a manner both innovative and devastating.” Blue Heron is “an emotional haymaker, and Romvari’s quiet, observational approach, capturing even the most dramatic events without judgment, is astonishing.”

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]]> Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:35:00 +0000 <![CDATA[The Lubitsch Touch]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9116-the-lubitsch-touch
Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932)

The 2026 version of The Lubitsch Touch isn’t quite as expansive as the one New York’s Film Forum presented in 2017, but it is certainly just as welcome. Writing in the Village Voice nine years ago, Farran Smith Nehme noted that “the Lubitsch touch” was “the brainchild of a go-getter in the Warner Bros. publicity department named Hal Wallis, when Ernst Lubitsch was under contract at the studio in the 1920s. Thus did future producer Wallis invent one of the few PR slogans ever to be turned by critics into a philosophical debate, to be defined and redefined ever since. On the simplest level, I’d agree with Armond White that the touch was sophistication. You may favor a mistier, more metaphysical definition,” but “we all know the touch when we see it.”

“The phrase hovers over the filmmaker like a halo,” wrote Siri Hustvedt in her 2019 essay on Lubitsch’s final completed feature, Cluny Brown (1947). “It appears to be a quality of visual and verbal grace that cannot be reduced to any particular aspect of production. As far as I can tell, no writer has mentioned that, whatever it means, it summons the tactile sense, what is never present for any moviegoer except by imagination. Lubitsch loved to evoke that missing sensual element by suggestion—especially the play and pleasure of human sexuality.”

An Ashkenazi Jewish Berliner, Lubitsch was nineteen when he began performing with Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, and within a few years, he was directing and starring in short comedies. By the late 1910s, he was directing such stars as Pola Negri and Emil Jannings in feature-length historical dramas. They were hits, and in 1922, he set out for Hollywood, where he would establish his reputation as a master of urbane comedy.

In a 2017 essay for the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien wrote that Lubitsch “offers a parallel domain of buoyant elegance, a theater of free-floating desire and inextinguishable humor ingeniously stitched together out of the fabric of Austrian operettas and French farces and the plot devices of a hundred forgotten Hungarian plays, flavored by delicate irony and risqué innuendo, where sex is everywhere but just out of sight behind discreetly closed doors, constantly implied in what is never quite stated.”

Starting tomorrow, this year’s series of thirteen features will run on Tuesdays through June 30 and open with The Love Parade (1929). Set in Sylvania, a make-believe country somewhere in Central Europe, Lubitsch’s first sound film stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald as a count and a queen with the hots for each other. The Love Parade “depicts the battle of the sexes waged with lacerating, loose tongues, as would become his trademark,” wrote Michael Koresky in his 2008 overview of four Lubitsch musicals, all of them screening at Film Forum. “These were the days before enforcement of the moralizing Production Code (colloquially known as the Hays code), so in this and his other early sound musicals, Lubitsch could be even more wicked.”

MacDonald costars with Jack Buchanan in Monte Carlo (1930), a musical “pungent with sexual overtones,” while the “infectiously giddy” The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) features Chevalier torn between Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the leader of an all-girl orchestra, and Anna, the Princess of Flausenthurm. Chevalier and MacDonald are reunited in One Hour with You (1932), playing Andre and Colette, a couple whose happy marriage is challenged when Colette’s best friend, Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin), makes a move on Andre. When One Hour With You premiered in New York, the Times’s Mordaunt Hall reported that there were “moments when the audience giggled in expectation, and other incidents aroused hearty mirth.”

Just seven months after that night, Trouble in Paradise (1932) thrilled Hall to new exclamatory heights: “Imagine the charming Miriam Hopkins impersonating an ingratiating, capable thief! Then try to visualize Herbert Marshall as a delightful scoundrel who might look upon Alias Jimmy Valentine as a posing blunderer!” Hopkins’s Lily and Marshall’s Gaston team up to relieve Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis) of her diamond-encrusted purse, but then Gaston finds himself taking a little more than a liking to their target. Lubitsch himself once said of Trouble in Paradise: “For pure style, I have done nothing better or as good.”

Design for Living (1933) is “what sexy should be—delightful, romantic, agonizing ecstasy,” wrote Kim Morgan in 2011. “And it’s not just sexy but also revolutionary, daring, sweet, sour, cynical, carefree, poignant, and so far ahead of its time that one could cite it as not only a pre-Code masterpiece but also a prefeminist testimonial. A uniquely Lubitschian picture in its elegance and graceful wisdom, with the gruffly intelligent, street-smart Hollywood writer and soon-to-be legend Ben Hecht collaborating, this take on the trials, titillations, and torments of a kind of relationship usually seen in true adult films, a ménage à trois (and one involving the gorgeous trio of Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins), is unlike any other movie of its era.”

The four early musicals, Trouble in Paradise, and Design for Living were all made for Paramount, but in 1934, MGM reunited Lubitsch, Maurice Chevalier, and Jeanette MacDonald for a third adaptation of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow (the first was directed by Michael Curtiz in 1918 and the second by Erich von Stroheim in 1925). This would be the “last and finest” of Lubitsch’s musicals, noted Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader in 1985, and the director “brilliantly exploits Cedric Gibbons’s opulent sets, but his genius is most evident in the film’s final poignancy—a farewell to the genre he helped to create.”

Before working together on the screenplays for such enduring classics as Ninotchka (1939), Ball of Fire (1941), and Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett teamed up for the first time to write Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). Gary Cooper stars as a filthy rich American who meets his #8 (Claudette Colbert) on the French Riviera. “Lubitsch has rarely come so close to zaniness, to the wackiness celebrated by the Marx brothers,” wrote Serge Daney in Cahiers du cinéma in 1968.

In Ninotchka, Greta Garbo’s stern Leninist is sent by the Soviets on a strictly-business trip to Paris, where she will eventually fall in love with a count (Melvyn Douglas) and, famously, learn to laugh. Talking to James Linville in the Paris Review in 1996, Wilder recalled how he and Brackett got stuck trying to figure out a way to depict Ninotchka’s conversion. Lubitsch called them over to his place.

“It’s funny,” said Wilder, “but we noticed that whenever he came up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there. ‘I’ve got the answer,’ he said. ‘It’s the hat.’” Ninotchka has scoffed at a ridiculous hat she’s spotted in a storefront window, but later, on her own in her room at the Ritz, she opens a drawer, pulls out that very same hat, “puts it on,” Wilder went on, and “looks at herself in the mirror. That’s it. Not a word. Nothing. But she has fallen into the trap of capitalism, and we know where we’re going from there.”

The only Lubitsch film to feature either Margaret Sullavan or James Stewart, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) gives us both actors. They star as Klara and Kralik, clerks in a leather goods store in Budapest. They can’t stand each other, and besides, each of them has been fanning flames with a secret pen pal. “There’s such sweet inevitability to Klara and Kralik’s love story,” writes the Austin Chronicle’s Kimberley Jones. “That doesn’t mean the movie is all softness; Lubitsch gooses laughs from an adulterous affair and a suicide attempt, after all. The real surprise is in how earnestly the director of some of the finest, spikiest romantic comedies ever made is willing to step off the gas and let heartfelt romance win the day. And it is so very winning.”

In 1942, a comedy about a troupe of Polish actors attempting to outsmart the Nazis occupying Warsaw was a risky proposition, and early reviews of To Be or Not to Be were mixed. But the film “did something rare,” wrote Geoffrey O’Brien in 2013, “by interweaving farce and disaster in such a rigorously structured fashion as to elicit, in the very same scenes, genuine anxiety and a hilarity so acute that it has something like an ecstatic kick. For many, myself included, it is close to being the funniest film ever made, featuring Carole Lombard in her last and greatest performance and Jack Benny in the only film role that did justice to his comic genius. But at every step, it keeps plainly in view—just offscreen, and detectable even in the comic buffoonishness of Sig Ruman’s Colonel Ehrhardt—the possibility of real terror, real soul-destroying cruelty, real suffering.”

In Heaven Can Wait (1943), Henry (Don Ameche) passes away on the day after his seventieth birthday and appears before His Excellency, as polite a top-tier demon as anyone might expect in a Lubitsch film. Arguing that he belongs in Hell, Henry launches a series of flashbacks. “Heaven Can Wait is possibly the director’s most downbeat film, darker in some respects to even To Be or Not to Be,” wrote Jake Cole at Slant in 2018. “But Lubitsch consistently finds ways to alleviate serious moments of romantic longing and feelings of betrayal . . . The entire ethos of the film, if not a sizable portion of Lubitsch’s oeuvre, is summed up by an early line that Henry tells His Excellency when the latter asks if he had a good funeral: ‘Well, there was a lot of crying, so I believe everybody had a good time.’”

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]]> Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:08:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Calling to Your Attention]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9115-calling-to-your-attention Did You See This?

Mani Haghighi’s A Dragon Arrives! (2016)

In the run-up to next Thursday’s unveiling of its full 2026 lineup, Cannes has announced that its seventy-ninth edition will open on May 12 with Pierre Salvadori’s La Vénus électrique, a comedy set in 1920s Paris. Then, during the Directors’ Fortnight opening ceremony on the following day, the French Directors’ Guild will present the Carrosse d’Or—given each year to “a filmmaker who has left their mark on the history of cinema”—to Claire Denis.

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival will open on April 24 with an unprecedented double feature: Kent Jones’s Late Fame, starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, and Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Jones, Lee, and Wilde will all attend the festivities at the newly restored Castro Theatre. Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters will be the Centerpiece presentation, and the sixty-ninth edition will close out on May 4, Star Wars Day, with Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Mary Beth Hurt, an accomplished theater actor when she made her on-screen debut in Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), died this past weekend after a decade-long struggle with Alzheimer’s. She was seventy-nine, and her daughter, Molly Schrader, and husband, Paul Schrader, jointly announced her passing. Hurt’s follow-up to Interiors was Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), directed by Joan Micklin Silver and starring John Heard as Charles, a schlumpy civil servant obsessed with Hurt’s Laura. Hurt, an ensemble player who favored supporting roles, also appeared in George Roy Hill’s The World According to Garp (1982), Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) and Affliction (1997), Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (2006).

This week’s highlights:

  • The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs is a monthlong event taking place in fourteen New York venues, and the essential overview comes from Amy Taubin at Screen Slate. On April 15, Taubin will present two programs at Anthology Film Archives, “one comprising two portraits, both featuring Flo Jacobs, the other a combo of The Whirled (1956–63) starring Jack Smith, along with what for me is [Ken] Jacobs’s most exquisite and heartbreaking movie: The Sky Socialist: Environs and Out-Takes (1964–66, completed in 2019.)” In the New York Times, J. Hoberman—Jacobs’s former student and projectionist—writes about Star Spangled to Death, a six-and-a-half-hour “basement mash-up that variously evokes Greed, Howl, and Moby Dick” that Jacobs worked on from the mid-1950s to 2004. And this coming Tuesday, Hoberman will be at Light Industry to present Return to Lecture Hall 6, a program of shorts Jacobs screened in his classes.

  • Seeped in “a grand tradition that goes back more than sixty years,” the films of Iranian director Mani Haghighi have screened at festivals around the world, occasionally picking up awards, but the work of “one of the world’s most interesting and most woefully underrated filmmakers” calls out for greater attention, argues Richard Brody in the New Yorker. For Brody, “the masterpiece of Haghighi’s career so far” is A Dragon Arrives! (2016), which “expands a simple premise—the investigation into the death of a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime—into a pan-historical jamboree, a breathtakingly imaginative abundance of narrative strands, a thrilling, revelatory complex of adventures and ideas that is also a compendium of Haghighi’s themes, styles, and ideals.”

  • Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, the winner of the First Feature Award in Locarno, will open on April 17, and we’re presenting a program of Romvari’s short films on the Criterion Channel. Talking with Romvari at RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates asks if there was a film from which she drew inspiration. Romvari names Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture (1975), a reconstruction of a real-life sexual assault. “Watching it now,” she says, “it’s crazy to me how much of an impact it clearly had, even somehow subconsciously, on so many filmmakers. It’s doing the hybrid techniques so elegantly, and it’s from fifty years ago . . . I’m in a long line of women, specifically, who make work based on processing their pasts, especially within systemic harm and societal issues, using themselves as a vessel to discover those things. When I saw that film, it just made me feel like I was in conversation with a film that I had not even seen. It made me feel like there is something very specific and special about the way that women use film.”

  • A Kiyoshi Kurosawa double bill is currently winding its way through theaters. In the forty-five-minute Chime (2024), a viruslike sound induces strange and violent behavior in all who hear it, and in Serpent’s Path (1998), a low-level yakuza gangster recruits a math teacher to help him take revenge for the murder of his daughter. “In a review of last year’s Cloud,” writes Dan Schindel at Reverse Shot, “I wrote that Kurosawa captures the ‘persistent tinnitus-like hiss in your mind, the background radiation of unease’ in contemporary life. That quality is literalized in Chime, since the vector for the violent compulsion (or perhaps its herald) is a sound only the affected can hear . . . If Chime is an inward spiral with hints of outer chaos, Serpent’s Path is a vortex destroying all in the orbit of its main characters.”

  • The new team at Filmmaker is previewing its forthcoming issue with two conversations between directors who have known each other for a good number of years. Chloé Zhao talks with David Lowery about his latest feature, Mother Mary, opening on April 17, and Ricky D’Ambrose has questions for Radu Jude about Kontinental ’25. “I wanted to make a film where words were the main material—where language itself became the subject,” says Jude. “That idea was influenced, indirectly, by Victor Klemperer’s book The Language of the Third Reich. Probably better known for his Diaries, Klemperer was “a Jewish German philologist who survived the Nazi period because he had [scare quotes] an Aryan wife,” explains Jude. “He paid obsessive attention to how language shifts under ideology—how words acquire new meanings. I always say this book should be required reading for screenwriters.”

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]]> Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:32:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Frederick Wiseman’s America]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9114-frederick-wiseman-s-america
Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights (2015)

Last year’s bountiful Frederick Wiseman retrospectives in New York and Los Angeles reaffirmed the late filmmaker’s status as one of the great masters of nonfiction, and since his passing in February, appreciation has only swelled. On Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image, Reverse Shot will present a screening of In Jackson Heights (2015), Wiseman’s portrait of one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhoods in the world, never mind New York alone.

But there’s also another solid reason to watch or revisit the films in 2026, one called out in the title of a yearlong retrospective running at San Diego’s Digital Gym Cinema, This Is America at 250: Frederick Wiseman. The nation’s semiquincentennial will be similarly celebrated from next Wednesday through May 3 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York.

Introducing the twelve-film series Frederick Wiseman’s America, JBFC Director of Film Curation and Programming Eric Hynes calls Wiseman “one of the greatest chroniclers in the country’s entire 250-year history. Cinema’s version of Mark Twain, Wiseman’s perceptive, majestic, and quietly comedic films have covered all corners of the country, from towns in Maine, Colorado, and Indiana, to seats of government, courts of law, welfare offices, high school auditoriums, even outposts on foreign soil.”

“Wiseman was likely America’s preeminent ‘meetings filmmaker,’ someone who relished filming any kind of professional or community gathering,” writes Vikram Murthi in the Atlantic. “Although local government meetings in Wiseman’s films are often sources of bureaucratic frustration, the meetings in In Jackson Heights are sites of potent expression . . . Street vendors, soccer fans, Arabic teachers, LGBTQ activists—all deserve to assert their dignity in Wiseman’s eyes.” At one point in the film, New York City Council member Daniel Dromm proudly tells a crowd that “167 different languages” are spoken in the neighborhood.

Wiseman was also “American cinema’s reigning master of loose chatter, with the best ear for dialogue this side of Billy Wilder,” writes Adam Nayman for the New Left Review. “He liked to cultivate cacophony: classrooms and playgrounds as echo chambers; hospitals and missile silos as makeshift soundstages; prisons and city halls as towers of babble.” Wiseman’s “powers of perception and persuasion were only deceptively self-effacing. The absence of the director, whether as a voice on the soundtrack or a physical presence, belies the palpable intentionality of the framing and cutting. These techniques made Wiseman’s movies as expressive as art-house psychodramas or as pressurized as a good thriller.”

Documentary Magazine editor Abby Sun has asked contributors for a few words on a favorite from the oeuvre, and Arlin Golden, who cohosts Wiseman Podcast with Shawn Glinis, suggests that Domestic Violence (2001) “might be Frederick Wiseman’s crowning achievement. All of his films are in dialogue with one another, but Domestic Violence could be the skeleton key that unlocks the knotty pain evident throughout his various institutional portraits. By revealing the unending cycles of routine private abuse, Wiseman offers one potential motor on the ceaseless treadmill of American social dereliction, as the hurt originating at home is inevitably internalized and manifests in the public sphere.”

Like Michel Foucault, Wiseman “knew that power is everywhere,” writes Henry Roberts for ArtReview. “For Foucault, people internalized rules through norms, becoming ‘docile bodies’ that learn not to resist. This starts at the earliest institutional level, the school. In High School (1968), Wiseman’s second feature, bodies are judged, sexuality is policed, and expression is restricted. The film ends with the school principal reading a letter from an ex-pupil fighting in Vietnam. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she reads aloud. ‘I am only a body doing a job.’ By ending the film with this moment, Wiseman’s message is clear: conformity will lead you to the grave, and before you go, you may even write back to your school to say thank you.”

This scene—along with sequences in Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), and Belfast, Maine (1999)—is cited in Jordan Mintzer’s Hollywood Reporter appreciation of Wiseman as “not simply a great documentary filmmaker, which is a label he’s always rejected. He’s a great filmmaker, period.” And now, “at a time when our institutions seem to be in great peril,” wrote Mintzer, “these scenes appear to be hammering home a theme Wiseman has been slyly emphasizing all along, from decade to decade and from film to film, in a body of work that’s suddenly become more relevant than ever: the everyday miracle, now under threat, of democracy in action.”

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]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:25:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Lucrecia Martel at Berkeley]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9113-lucrecia-martel-at-berkeley
Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001)

“If the world is so complicated, why don’t we harness the power of cinema to reshape perception?” asks Lucrecia Martel at one point in her conversation with Andrea Avidad at Screen Slate. “If we were all living in a wonderland with jobs, access to education, and healthcare, it would truly be foolish to alter people’s perceptions. But that’s not the reality we’re in. We live in a world of uncertainty and fear. We cannot put off rethinking our ways of thinking, our habits, and our ideas.”

On Saturday, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will launch Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común—a retrospective presented in conjunction with the filmmaker’s residency at UC Berkeley—with the presentation of a 35 mm print of Martel’s debut feature, La Ciénaga (2001). The title—The Swamp—is the fictional name Martel has given Salta, the capital of the northern province of Argentina that bears its name and her own hometown. The film, a discursive group portrait of a large family summering at their country estate, tells no single story but instead maintains an elastic tension, a constant and apprehensive sense that something—and probably not something good—is just about to happen.

“It is difficult to tell what is central and what is secondary in each image, as the story avoids emphasizing any one situation over another,” wrote David Oubiña in his 2015 essay on La Ciénaga. “But that is precisely what is so distinctive about this stunning movie. Promiscuity, confusion, uncertainty: what the film relates is contained in the way it relates it.” La Ciénaga is “precisely a movie about unproductive pursuits, wasted time, the dissipation of energy, inactivity. Its characters are stuck in a bog, and not one of them seems to notice they’re sinking without hope of rescue.”

In The Holy Girl (2004), a fourteen-year-old girl finds herself rubbed up against in an overtly sexual manner by a doctor attending a convention at the hotel owned by the girl’s mother. “Working against the grain of this potentially lurid story,” wrote J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, “Martel again builds her dryly comic drama from an accumulation of recurring riffs and seemingly unrelated micro-incidents. Complicated family relations are only gradually made clear; narrative lines do not rush to converge. Where La Ciénaga seemed steeped in a Chekhovian sluggishness, The Holy Girl is more concerned with transience. With its chance meetings and hectic confusion of public and private space, the hotel is the perfect setting; with her morbid confusion between sexual and spiritual excitement, the adolescent Amalia (Maria Alché) is the perfect heroine.”

The Headless Woman (2008) completed what became known retroactively as Martel’s Salta trilogy. Véro (Maria Onetto), a woman, clearly well-off—it’s the sunglasses, the earrings, her hair’s shade of blonde—is driving along a dirt road when her phone rings. She leans away from the steering wheel to pick it up and hits something. A dog? One of the Indigenous boys seen early playing along the roadside? Véro takes a moment to gather herself—and drives on. Some time will pass before she can pronounce out loud the conclusion she’s reached: “I killed someone on the road.” Her family and friends scramble to cover up what all of them assume to be a hit-and-run.

Writing about The Headless Woman for n+1 in 2010, Benjamin Kunkel gave readers a brief primer on the history and culture of Salta, discussed Martel as a standard-bearer of the New Argentine Cinema, and sorted through various readings of the film that critics had offered, both pro and con. “The richness and perturbation of the film derive, of course, not from any of these interpretations,” wrote Kunkel, “but from its way of sponsoring all of them while at the same time confining itself to the strictest realism. The Headless Woman is an astonishing movie about an overdetermined and, in that way, highly life-like and familiar situation—at once very local, global, social, and sexual—in which something has gone badly wrong, and the wrongness is compounded by your inability to say exactly what.”

Martel’s fourth feature, Zama (2017), didn’t arrive until nine years after the release of The Headless Woman, and another eight years would pass before her fifth, Landmarks (2025), premiered in Venice last summer. But throughout a filmmaking career that began in the late 1980s, Martel has made short films, and BAMPFA will screen a selection of six of them on April 18. Martel will be on hand to talk about them as well with Blanca Missé, an associate professor at San Francisco State University.

Based on Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel, Zama stars Daniel Giménez Cacho as Don Diego de Zama, a magistrate stationed at a far-and-away South American outpost of the Spanish Empire in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Zama has put in a request for a transfer to Lerma, a town at the center of Salta, in order to be closer to his wife and children. He’s sure that transfer will be forthcoming, and so, he waits, year after year, suffering one humiliation after another.

In his 2018 review for Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman note that in “a superb, far-ranging interview with José Teodoro for Film Comment, Martel says that what interested her about Benedetto’s character was his inability to go with the flow: ‘If he surrendered his existence to his surroundings, he’d be much less dissatisfied.’ The comic irony of Zama is that a man who embodies the occupying mentality of colonialism is desperate to escape the very land that he’s appropriated.”

Martel has worked with sound designer Guido Berenblum on all of her features, and she tells Andrea Avidad that what she finds “interesting about sound is that it’s the realm of the untamed, where references aren’t so clear. That’s why all of this makes it comparable to desire, as well as to the undefined, the continuous, and the difficult to legislate.” 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson has noted that Martel and Berenblum use the Shepard tone at least three times in Zama: “This sinister drone—an auditory illusion that gives the impression of a tone continually descending in pitch—sounds like the world ending, or madness corroding an already diseased soul. It is the sound of falling into an abyss.”

Landmarks, Martel’s first nonfiction feature, takes as its starting point the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an activist and leader of Argentina’s Indigenous Chuschagasta community, and expands to cover the 2018 trial of the local landowner whose attempt to evict the Chuschagasta people from the hills he intended to mine led to the confrontation. The scope of Landmarks widens, “gradually building a damning account of five hundred years of dispossession and violence against indigenous citizens,” writes A. G. Sims for Reverse Shot. “Martel’s filmmaking here is intentionally straightforward and precise, wielding careful storytelling as a cudgel against the bludgeoning power of the state, in order to credibly represent and affirm the existence of a history and culture that has been ‘officially’ denied. It hardly seems like a concession considering what’s at stake.”

Talking earlier this year to Flavia Dima at Sabzian, Martel insisted that “I have never worried about style, not even in my fiction films. Style, to me, seems something stupid, something noticed mainly by those who know little about cinema. Style is not something one imposes on the world. It emerges only when one observes the world and, starting from the world itself, imagines an audiovisual order through which its story can be told. Style then appears, not as an intention, but as a consequence, as an effect.”

Diva notes that some critics have been put off by the use of drones in Landmarks. “I think one of the challenges for us, contemporaries, is what we do with technology,” says Martel. “Because it wasn’t necessarily invented for the well-being of citizens but rather for surveillance, control, or punishment. Our challenge, I believe, is to take this technology which was not created to serve people’s needs, but rather business interests or military purposes, and find ways to turn it around in the community’s favor. Generally, when you make a film about community problems, directors are naturally interested in engaging with people, having conversations, and so on. Yet, on that scale, it’s easy to lose sight of why those people are at risk. It’s because they live in such a beautiful place.”

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]]> Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:29:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Cold War Visions]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9112-cold-war-visions
Veljko Bulajić’s Atomic War Bride (1960)

Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983) depicts death’s slow and quiet encroachment on a northern Californian town after a nuclear bomb is detonated sixty miles away. Our recent release has revived some discussion of other postnuclear scenarios: Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) and Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1966)—and by the way, Devika Girish and J. Hoberman’s conversation about Watkins and his work on the latest Film Comment Podcast is very much a recommended listen—as well as the searingly impactful made-for-television movies The Day After (1983), directed by Nicholas Meyer, and Threads (1984), written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson. Threads premiered on the BBC on September 23, 1984, a date that has been described as “the night the country didn’t sleep.”

All of these films are drenched in the dread felt throughout the Cold War—but only on one side of the Iron Curtain. A seven-film series opening tomorrow at the Barbican in London and running through April 29, Cold War Visions: Nuclear Anxiety in Eastern Bloc Cinema, will probe the other side. Curator Teodosia Dobriyanova will introduce the opening night presentation, a new restoration of Jindřich Polák’s Ikarie XB-1 (1963).

Set in 2163 and loosely adapted from Stanisław Lem’s 1955 novel The Magellanic Cloud, the Czechoslovak production “remains one of the most original and exciting science fiction films ever made,” wrote filmmaker Alex Cox for the Guardian in 2011. A multinational crew of forty sets out on the spaceship Icarus for a mysterious White Planet, a journey that will take them a little more than two years while fifteen years pass back on Earth.

Obstacles along the way include a rogue twentieth-century spaceship loaded with nuclear weapons and a “dark star” whose radiation saps energy from the crew and drives one of them mad. “Yet the outcome of this strange sleeping sickness is splendid,” wrote Cox, “perhaps the best finale of any science-fiction film, ever.”

Directed by Rangel Vulchanov, who has been described as the “Bulgarian Fellini,” the rarely screened 1962 film The Sun and the Shadow (1962) stars Anna Prucnal—who would eventually work with the actual Fellini when she costarred with Marcello Mastroianni in City of Women (1980)—as a translator touring Bulgaria. On the beach, she meets a fine young man (Georgi Naumov), and the two hit it off. But the more they get to know each other, the more a nagging fear of an imminent nuclear attack tugs at the translator.

Dobriyanova has selected two films by Andrei Tarkovsky, and here we should mention that the “Nuclear Anxiety” in the title of the series refers to more than World War III. In Stalker (1979), a hired guide (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) leads a writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko) to the Zone, a forbidden area in ruins, perhaps following some sort of alien incursion. Deep in the heart of the Zone, the Room awaits, promising to fulfill the desires of anyone who steps inside.

Stalker was a famously troubled production whose location was eventually moved to an industrial area in Estonia, where the toxic waste is widely believed to have been the source of the cancer that eventually killed Tarkovsky, Solonitsyn, and Tarkovsky’s wife and assistant director, Larisa Tarkovskaya. Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 blew up seven years after Stalker was released, and in 2006, designer John Coulthart pointed out that “the 1,400-square-mile quarantined area around the power station is referred to as the Zone of Alienation, the Chernobyl Zone, the 30 Kilometer Zone, the Zone of Exclusion, or the Fourth Zone. Scientists who study the forbidden region (and guides who take people there illegally) have referred to themselves as ‘stalkers.’” And Dobriyanova notes that in 2007, “Kyiv-based game development studio GSC Game World released a video game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.”

With The Sacrifice (1986), Tarkovsky’s final film, we’re back to the threat of the war to end all wars. Shot by Sven Nykvist and starring Erland Josephson, both known for their collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, The Sacrifice takes place on the birthday of Alexander (Josephson). Celebrations are underway when the remote house in rural Sweden shudders and a news broadcast announces an imminent nuclear attack. “The members of the household and their guests are on the verge of a collective breakdown as they face the end,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “but Alexander’s friend Otto (Allan Edwall), a postman and retired history teacher, offers him a metaphysical bargain to save the world. The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own. His images have a transcendental glow and a hieratic poise.”

Veljko Bulajić’s Atomic War Bride opened in the summer of 1960 in Tito’s Yugoslavia and then screened in competition in Venice. It’s since been largely forgotten, and in fact, April 15 and 22 will mark the first screenings in the UK. Antun Vrdoljak and Ewa Krzyzewska (Ashes and Diamonds) star as John and Maria, whose wedding day is rudely interrupted by the outbreak of global nuclear war. Cesare Zavattini, who worked with Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, wrote the screenplay.

The series will wrap with a nonfiction double bill. Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski’s 2023 short Chornobyl 22 features footage clandestinely shot of Russian troops discussing their takeover of the Chernobyl Zone in 2022. And Zhanana Kurmasheva’s We Live Here (2025) focuses on one of countless families living in villages near the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan, where more than four hundred nuclear tests were conducted by the Soviets between 1949 and 1991. More than 1.5 million people have been diagnosed with ailments linked to the fallout.

When We Are Here screened at Hot Docs last summer, Rachel Ho, writing for Point of View Magazine, called it “a stoic film, landing the final warning for an increasingly divisive world whose countries no longer find themselves in an arms race, but locked and loaded with a nuclear arsenal ready to be deployed at the touch of a button.”

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]]> Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:51:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Revisiting Chinese Cinema]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9110-revisiting-chinese-cinema
Gong Li in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987)

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, the Hong Kong International Film Festival will open on Wednesday with Anthony Chen’s We Are All Strangers, a family drama set in contemporary Singapore that met with solid reviews when it premiered in competition in Berlin. “As flavorful and satisfying as the Hokkien noodles seen being stir-fried, seasoned, and served with a cold beer at various intervals,” wrote David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, “the film is a hypnotic conclusion to what the writer-director calls his Growing Up trilogy—preceded by the poignant domestic drama Ilo Ilo and the melancholic intergenerational romance Wet Season.”

The closing night film, screening on April 12, will be Philip Yung’s Cyclone, starring Yuqiao Liu as a sex worker saving up for gender-affirming surgery. “Although internationally known for multilayered crime films such as Where the Wind Blows (2022), Philip Yung has long been drawn to more intimate stories,” wrote Vanja Kaludjercic, the director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when the film premiered in February. “Cyclone feels like a place where everything he cares about has found a home. The narrative is both sprawling and concentrated, profoundly personal yet resonant with the experience of a people. It moves across temporal, regional, and cultural barriers with clarity and grace, all the while maintaining an effortless visual beauty.”

Along with more than two hundred films from seventy-one countries, a spotlight on Jia Zhang-Ke, and more special guests including Juliette Binoche, Ildikó Enyedi, and Ben Rivers, HKIFF50 will also present Revisiting Chinese Cinema: The Beginning of a New Journey. The lineup of twelve Chinese-language classics that the festival has championed over the years is roughly divided into three subsections focusing on the China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Huang Jianxin, Ann Hui, and Tsai Ming-Liang will be on hand to deliver master classes.

Fifth Generation

With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the Beijing Film Academy was more or less shut down and didn’t begin accepting new students again until 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong. The first graduating class of 1982 included future leading filmmakers of what became known as the Fifth Generation.

“Marked by radical aesthetic experimentation, boldly emotive performances, and complex and critical thinking about the events leading up to and following the 1949 Revolution,” wrote Noah Cowen for the BFI in 2014, “such celebrated films as Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (1986) came to represent a definitive break with preceding Mainland cinema, while their dazzling play with color and striking, often symbolic use of landscape endowed them with an epic dimension that brought Chinese cinema to the forefront of the international art-house circuit.”

Yellow Earth, Chen’s debut feature, was shot by Zhang Yimou and won the top prize in Hong Kong in 1985. Set in the late 1930s, the story centers on a communist soldier sent to a remote village to gather traditional songs as artifacts of peasant culture. He wins the trust of a family with a young daughter whose marriage has already been arranged, and “he realizes helplessly that he is powerless to intervene,” wrote Tony Rayns around twenty years ago. “The film’s political candor matches its aesthetic daring. The images, exquisitely composed, derive from the traditions of Shaanxi peasant painting and Chen uses them as the basis for a film ‘language’ unlike anything else in contemporary cinema. The summit of his achievement is that he makes his new language sing.”

Red Sorghum, a winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, was Zhang Yimou’s own directorial debut, and it launched Gong Li’s acting career as well. She plays Jiu’er, a young peasant sold to a sick old man who runs a wine distillery. When he dies, she takes over and rallies the workers—one of whom is murdered by the invading Japanese army as the Second World War breaks out in Asia. Jiu’er incites the workers to avenge his death.

“It ends tragically, of course. It’s also absolutely beautiful,” wrote Elizabeth Kerr when she revisited Red Sorghum in the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “Zhang may not have invented imagery hinting at the cycle of life and death, of rebirth and renewal of both people and systems, but he certainly made it more visceral. The swaying of the sorghum field grass, blood mingling with wine, and a landscape bathed in the otherworldly light of a solar eclipse for the operatic finale announced a singular new voice.”

Set in the Tibetan mountains, Tian’s The Horse Thief centers on a tribesman torn between what he knows is right and the needs of his hungry family. “The relatively small role played by dialogue and story line and the striking uses of composition and superimposition make it evocative of certain films of the ’20s,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in a 1987 review for the Chicago Review, “although it is anything but a silent film: the chants, percussion, and bells of Buddhist rituals and the beautiful musical score that incorporates them form an essential part of its texture.”

Writing for Film Comment in 2014, Grady Hendrix noted that “while Zhang, Chen, and Tian still premiere their movies at Berlin and Cannes,” Huang Jianxin remained “largely forgotten . . . Why does everyone ignore Huang? Because he’s a comedian.” In Huang’s first feature, The Black Cannon Incident (1985), a translator at a mining company is fired after sending a simple telegram that the local party chief suspects is written in some sort of code. “Dry as the desert, this was a bureaucratic farce of a type that hadn’t been seen in China for decades,” wrote Hendrix. “Two conferences to discuss Black Cannon were organized in January 1986, one by the editors of Film Art and one by the China Art Research Center, but critics couldn’t embrace how radical the movie was. Huang’s satire was too barbed, so they pretended they didn’t get it.”

Hong Kong New Wave

In his 2008 book Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978–2000), Pak Tong Cheuk, like most historians of the movement, divides it into two generations, and HKIFF50 will focus on the first. Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, and Allen Fong all spent time studying overseas, either in the U.S. or the UK, before returning to Hong Kong to work in television and eventually shoot their first features.

Released in the summer of 1979 and set in some fantastical distant past, Tsui’s The Butterfly Murders is a dazzling story actually sparked by poisonous killer butterflies. Tsui “cracks the chrysalis, as it were, just the mélange of wuxia combat and Gothic whodunit and vengeful-Nature horror for a freewheeling novice,” writes Fernando F. Croce.

Ann Hui’s The Secret (1979), starring Sylvia Chang and loosely based on a real-life double murder, followed a few months later. In a 2018 survey of Hui’s filmography for M+ Magazine, Long Tin wrote of The Secret that “beyond the twists, turns, and awe-inspiring narrative of the mystery genre—not to mention the various ingenious designs of characterization, setting, and mood—the true emotional power of the film lies in its keen sensitivity towards human nature and the dauntlessness with which the camera captures the darker side of the human heart.”

“By the time of The Sword’s release in 1980,” writes Jake Cole at Slant, “the wuxia genre had begun to fall out of favor in the Hong Kong in favor of kung-fu movies and more contemporary-set action films that would define the province’s genre cinema for the next two decades. In many ways, Patrick Tam’s film, with its blend of melodrama, weapons-based action, and wire-fu choreography, is a throwback to the genre’s heyday.” But Tam “complicates the story with an emotional dimension rare to even the most florid wuxia of years past.”

Allen Fong’s Ah Ying (1983) hews tightly to the life of its lead player, Hui So-ying, who splits her time between working in her parents’ fish stall and her acting classes at Hong Kong’s Film Culture Centre. For Koel Chu, writing for Notebook a few years ago, the “significance of Ah Ying lies in its embodiment of a type of realism that is marginalized in the international understanding of Hong Kong cinema, which is a very different manner of romanticization than foreign audiences are used to.”

Taiwan New Cinema

Of the three Chinese-language new waves, Taiwan’s New Cinema comes closest to having been launched intentionally. By the late 1970s, the local industry was floundering, and the Central Motion Picture Company set up a program engaging a fresh generation of filmmakers. The first project, In Our Time (1982), gathers four short films written and directed by Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, and Chang Yi, each set in successive decades from the 1950s through the 1980s.

In Our Time “works perfectly as a defining opening statement by a new generation of filmmakers,” writes Sean Gilman for Notebook. “Yang is the most successful of the directors, so his short will draw the most attention, and deservedly so. His patience with the narrative and attention to the smallest details of setting and performance stand out from the other, more conventional films.”

Wan Jen’s Ah Fei (1983), based on the novel by Liao Hui-Ying, who cowrote the screenplay with Hou Hsiao-hsien, “depicts the severe gender inequality and hardships women once silently endured, bitterly resigned to their fate and passing on the trauma to their daughters,” wrote Han Cheung in the Taipei Times when a new restoration was released in 2023. Hou’s own Dust in the Wind (1986) stars Wang Chien-wen as Wan, described by Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot in 2008 as “a quiet intellectual-in-the-making patterned after the film’s cowriter Wu Nien-jen (the screenwriter/director/actor fondly remembered as NJ in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi).”

Wan and his girlfriend Huen (Xin Shufen) leave their rural coal-mining town for Taipei, where they contend with a myriad of challenges together until Wan is called to serve his time in the military. “The vastness of the onscreen world and the reticence of the narrative elevate the film’s emotion to a more crystalline level,” wrote Tracy. “We are moved not immediately, but cumulatively, with the full weight of what each individual pain articulates.”

Tsai Ming-liang’s first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), stars—as all of his subsequent features would—Lee Kang-sheng, here in his early twenties and one of four roustabouts bopping from video arcade to café to love hotel in contemporary Taipei. “Listlessness abounds in an atmosphere of sodden fluorescence,” wrote Jonathan Kiefer in the Village Voice in 2015, “with even the most built-up environments apparently defenseless against water pouring from the sky or oozing from the ground, but Tsai never seems pompous. Rebels of the Neon God inaugurates the filmmaker’s multi-movie study of urban alienation not with showoff chops but quiet, enduring compassion.”

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