<![CDATA[The Daily | The Criterion Collection]]> en-US Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9266-bibliomania-a-preface-to-chronovisor
Jack Auen and Kevin Walker Chronovisor (2026)

When Chronovisor premiered this past winter at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Zach Lewis, writing for In Review Online, called it “one of the most formally inventive and genuinely thrilling new movies in years.” The film—the first feature from directing duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker—is set to open in New York on September 4, and in the run-up to its theatrical release, Film at Lincoln Center will present Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor, a fifteen-film series starting Friday and featuring a free public book fair on Saturday.

The first thing to know about Chronovisor is the last thing you’d expect if you were to walk in cold. There actually was a Benedictine monk and musicologist by the name of Pellegrino Ernetti who, in the 1970s, claimed to have worked with a dozen scientists over a period of several years to invent an instrument, the Chronovisor, that could pick up on ancient vibrations and translate them into moving images. Ernetti claimed that he could tune into and then witness historical events such as the Crucifixion or a speech being delivered by Cicero himself—as if traveling through time.

But the film’s protagonist, Columbia scholar Béatrice Courte, is Auen and Walker’s invention, and she’s played by Anne-Laure Sellier, a professor of behavioral studies at HEC Paris. During the course of her research, Courte comes across documents (all but one of which are authentic, according to the directors) related to the machine and its supposed suppression by the Vatican. And she’s intrigued.

“Like an internet crank,” suggests Michael Sicinski, “Courte certainly does her own research, and part of the intellectual architecture of Chronovisor pertains to the thin line between curiosity and belief, legitimate scholarship and esoterica. To be clear, Walker and Auen take Courte’s project very seriously, and it is truly rare to see a film that dramatizes research—interviews, phone calls, poring over old manuscripts—so heroically.”

Introducing his interview with Auen and Walker for Notebook, Vadim Rizov writes that Chronovisor “has the starting points of a conventional thriller—an academic on an unpredictable research path, a mysterious lost object suppressed by the Catholic Church, an inventor whose fate is unclear—and the conceptual outlandishness of science-fiction upon reaching its final destination.”

Chronovisor “isn’t too far removed from creepypastas, liminal horror, cosmic horror, and other subgenres that online communities have formed around,” observes C. J. Prince. And at the Film Verdict, Carmen Gray finds the film to be “a fitting parable for our era of disputed facts, conspiracy theories, and identity-consuming virtual realms. In this bibliophilic mystery with shades of Umberto Eco, the only red blood splurge comes from a paper cut.”

The Bibliomania series may skimp on the gore, but not on the scares. Martin Scorsese once put The Changeling (1980)—starring George C. Scott as a composer in a haunted mansion—on his list of eleven of the scariest movies of all time. Steven Spielberg screened it for Tobe Hooper and his crew when they were making Poltergeist, and Guillermo del Toro has told director Peter Medak that his film is “a masterpiece.”

Philip Horne spots The Changeling, “with its tense mood and story of infanticide,” as an influence on Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), and the FLC series includes Amenábar’s debut feature, Thesis (1996). Ana Torrent stars as Ángela, a film student who discovers a murder recorded on VHS. “Ángela descends into a labyrinth where academia, voyeurism, and genuine brutality intertwine,” writes Eliana Abdel-Khaleq in Double Exposure. “We willingly witness these boundaries dissolve and now fester within each other.”

Program notes for each film in the series include comments from Auen and Walker, who note that Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957) is “the only feature-length adaptation of the work of M. R. James, the unimpeachable doyen of the short ghost story. No one combined the literate and the ghoulish with as much command of tone as James. Without him, it is possible that the ‘haunted library,’ a crucial element of Chronovisor’s image-grammar, may have never entered the cultural consciousness.”

The series offers comedy (Howard Hawks’s Balls of Fire), adventure (Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Jon Turteltaub’s National Treasure: Book of Secrets), crime thrillers (Phillip Noyce’s The Bone Collector and Jon Amiel’s Copycat), murder mysteries (Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose), and a good handful of films in which bibliophilia is neither a motif humming in the background nor the subtext but the actual text.

David Gatten will be on hand next Wednesday to discuss three of his films. “Few filmmakers have more thoroughly explored the possibilities of ‘text-based cinema’ and its psychological impact on audiences than David Gatten,” write Auen and Walker.

Alain Resnais’s 1956 short All the Memory in the World, shot in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, will screen with Ted Fendt’s Classical Period (2018). As Christopher Small writes in his introduction to a Notebook interview with Fendt, the latter film follows “a trio of introverted Dante enthusiasts whose lives are lived—seemingly, at least—precisely for their esoteric, specialized interests in the literature of antiquity . . . Fendt has no agenda other than to portray these passions with a schlubby finesse worthy of his heroes.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9264-isabelle-stever-s-i-rarely-wake-up-dreaming
Tania Myronyshena and Markus Bright in Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming (2026)

When the awards were presented in Locarno earlier this month, both Variety’s Guy Lodge and RogerEbert.com’s Robert Daniels noted that they were surprised that Fabrice Du Welz’s jury had overlooked a clear critical favorite, I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming. Written by Anna Melikova and directed by Isabelle Stever—the married couple who previously collaborated on the daring incest story Grand Jeté (2022)—I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming heads next to the New York Film Festival.

Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright) are a queer couple in Kyiv already working through a personal crisis when, in February 2022, Russia launches its invasion of Ukraine. “I entered a heterosexual relationship against my will,” Olya tells Oleh, who has come out as a trans man. “You promised me you’d stay the same person.”

As missiles pummel Kyiv, the couple first flees west to Olya’s parents, and from there, they intend to head to Berlin. But at the border, guards insist that Oleh—despite his officially documented gender dysphoria—declare himself either a woman or a man. As a woman, he would be free to move on to the EU. As a man, he would have to stay and fight. This confrontation presents “the kind of set piece that has every opportunity to become sensationalistic but never takes the bait,” writes C. J. Prince.

For Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter, I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming “succeeds not only as an examination of the extraordinary quandary facing the couple but also simply as a compelling wartime drama featuring excellent performances from the two leads, who are, like most of the cast, nonprofessional actors.” Myronyshena is a journalist working with the Kyiv Independent, and Bright is a cofounder of The Third Place, an NGO for autistic adults.

“A Crimea-born curator and novelist, Melikova is also known as a gifted ex–film critic, the kind who published long, knotty interviews with such deep-cut German directors as Stever,” writes Sonya Vseliubska for IndieWire. “From Melikova’s intimate prose and local industry connections arises an essential sensory texture of national belonging, alongside a moral register sharp enough to carry a critical charge and light enough to keep it wry.”

At DMovies, Nataliia Serebriakova finds that Melikova’s screenplay “captures not only the dramatic events of the beginning of the invasion but also the everyday reality of Ukrainians who continued to live, love, argue, celebrate, and make plans despite the catastrophe surrounding them.” And Stever’s direction is “based on observation, physical details, and emotional authenticity rather than explanation. The result is a film that feels deeply rooted in Ukrainian life.”

At the Film Stage, Leonardo Goi senses that the film “wants to trace a correlation between Oleh’s identity crisis and his own country’s, between an individual and a nation that are both trying to find themselves and resist forces that would rather wipe them out altogether. That’s an apt analogy, if one that Dreaming seems frustratingly engineered to draw. Its dramatic logic is almost transparent in its forceful connection of the micro and macro; and Oleh, for all the intricacies of his existential struggle, sometimes registers as a chess piece moving along a monotonously literal trajectory.”

“A third-act development that again redefines the couple’s place in heteronormative society is somewhat rushed, leaning too heavily into melodrama to be wholly convincing,” writes Guy Lodge. “But it’s moving just the same, underlining the filmmakers’ interest in unorthodox found-family structures, and their foregrounding of minorities whose rights are often the first to be disregarded in times of national crisis. As the conflict in Ukraine trudges on, Stever’s stark, surprising film is a reminder that we’ve barely skimmed the surface of the country’s war stories.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:27:00 +0000 <![CDATA[August Books]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9259-august-books
Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010)

Let’s open this month’s overview of new and noteworthy titles with a glance over at Film Comment, where we find a Summer Books Roundup. Maybe—we can hope!—this feature will be a part of each seasonal issue of the magazine’s new incarnation as a digital quarterly.

Whitney Strub’s Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema “presents Kramer as an ambivalent figure,” writes Benjamin Crais, “a major filmmaker in the history of committed cinema, a frequent embodiment of his milieu’s worst tendencies, and an artist who discovered his humanism amid the rubble of the revolutionary left.”

Reviewing On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s, Jay Gabler notes that for author Matthew I. Thompson, “the ‘long 1970s’ filmmaker who most productively probed the relationship between humans and the environment is David Cronenberg. In movies like Shivers (1975), The Fly (1986), and Naked Lunch, ‘the body is porous: despite our best efforts to police its boundaries, the ecosystem flows through it,’ writes Thompson.”

The Curse of Queen Kelly—a sort of critical biography of Erich von Stroheim’s 1929 film that, newly reconstructed and restored, has been a staple of repertory programs over the past year or so—is the latest book from Pamela Hutchinson, one of dozens of contributors to The Silent Film Companion: A Recovered and Expanded History. The collection, edited by Liz Clarke and Martin L. Johnson, is slated for release in January.

Writing about The Curse of Queen Kelly, Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that the “mythological status of three roguish, double-dealing con artists—producer-star Gloria Swanson (the book’s heroine), her lover and coproducer Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s dad and the book’s villain), and writer-director Stroheim (Swanson’s muse and my own principal interest)—ensured an organizational challenge to even a silent-movie specialist as seasoned as Hutchinson. She does a superb job of following Queen Kelly’s multifaceted history and afterlife, including such matters as the repurposing of its bordello set in Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1930) and the use of a Queen Kelly clip in Sunset Boulevard (1950).”

Over at the Realm of Silence, Paul Cuff finds The Curse of Queen Kelly to be “a superb book, impeccably researched, engagingly written—and incredibly insightful. It will be of huge value to anyone interested in Stroheim, Swanson, or Kennedy; in the Hollywood of the 1920s; in troubled film productions; in studios and stars and stardom; and in the kind of mad stories of meteoric success and devastating catastrophe that seem to characterize the silent era. Throw bricks by the hour into the most densely populated areas of film literature, and you would struggle to hit a more appealing read than Hutchinson’s book.”

Élisabeth, the first and only novel by Eric Rohmer, was published in 1946—fifteen years before the Cahiers du cinéma editor made his first feature—and has now been translated by Aaron Kerner. “Élisabeth’s flaws are not flaws of content, but of form,” finds Shreya Khullar in the Metropolitan Review, “and it was indeed his mode of expression that shifted radically, and to staggering effect.”

Back in Film Comment, Annie Berman writes that, as a novelist, Rohmer “adeptly pulls focus to various sensual details that aggravate the tensions of [his characters’] fraught relationships: the fleshy curve of a girl’s knee caked with mud (a taste of the genuphilia that will pervade his oeuvre), the flavor of cool peppermint liqueur (like a ‘mild electric shock’), the odor of ‘leaves in the first flush of rot.’ This insistent encroachment of the physical world into the narrative anticipates the so-called ‘thingness,’ or chosisme, of the Nouveau Roman, popularized by writers of the 1950s and ’60s, including other eventual cineastes like Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.”

Two More Novels

The novel of the moment, though, is Rachel Cusk’s Life of M. “The reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged,” Cusk is “renowned for her cool, glassy prose and her stark austerity of vision,” writes Becca Rothfeld in the New Yorker. In a 2017 review of Transit (2016), the middle entry in a trilogy for which Cusk is best known—the other two books are Outline (2014) and Kudos (2018)—the New York Times’ Dwight Garner referred to Cusk as the author of “dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice distilled.”

Over the course of eleven novels, Cusk has been chipping away at the idea of character, assigning her narrators and the people with whom they interact initials rather than full names. At the beginning of Life of M, the first narrator, “I,” who will eventually pass the mic on to “We,” tells M, a famous movie star, that he or she—the genders of the narrators are explicitly left undefined—intends to write M’s autobiography. M is intrigued, or at least amused, and plays along until she reads a passage.

“I don’t like the way you portray me,” M tells the narrator, who replies, “But it isn’t you . . . It isn’t anyone.” For Rothfeld, who finds Life of M to be Cusk’s “weakest novel yet,” Cusk’s “crime is not that she has used a real person as inspiration for a character, as writers have done since time immemorial, but that the protagonist of her novel ‘isn’t anyone,’ that she is little more than a device for thematizing the dissolution of the self.”

The real person Rothfeld is referring to is Natalie Portman, who has enthusiastically recommended Cusk’s novels to her many fans but is reportedly unhappy to be the barely disguised subject of this latest one. As Fran Hoepfner points out at Vulture, the identity of M’s real-life counterpart is hardly even dusted over, never mind buried or hidden in any way.

Talking to Alexandra Alter in the NYT, Cusk more or less argues that all that is beside the point. “The book explains itself and defends itself pretty comprehensively,” she says. And writer Sheila Heti tells Alter: “Everyone who is projecting onto Natalie Portman a sense of betrayal over her alleged appearance in the book is in fact enacting the very projection and storytelling that the book is thinking about, and is critiquing as kind of dehumanizing.”

Writing for the New Left Review, Ryan Ruby notes that in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord “describes celebrities as ‘spectacular representations of human beings’ and ‘specialists in apparent life.’ Their function is to ‘act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.’ In doing so, they serve as objects of identification and as compensatory mechanisms for those who spend their leisure time consuming images of and stories about them while being deprived of the power to lead free lives of their own. This, at any rate, is the function M serves for the narrator . . . M is at once the narrator’s ego-ideal, an object of envy, and a screen on which to project the fantasy of living in a culture in which being a successful writer of literary fiction comes with the same privileges as being a successful actor. The we-narrator claims not to care about social recognition, but, then, they are unreliable.”

“Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity,” writes Slate’s Laura Miller. “To my mind, only one true mystery remains: Was Portman in on it? Is she just pretending to be offended for a lark, or in a bid to drive interest in her friend’s book? As of this writing, neither woman has made a public statement on the matter, but I’m not sure if we can believe either one of them when they do.”

Hollywood, Ending promises to be a less prickly affair. Arriving at the end of September, the latest novel by John Green—best known for The Fault in Our Stars, the 2012 novel that became a 2014 film starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort—will be the story of two rising actors cast in a movie with a tell-me-more title: Andy Warhol Never Gets Old.

Critics and Scholars

The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, a new collection from Erika Balsom, one of the most incisive and rewarding critics writing today, will be out next month. “Assembling a selection of essays and reviews written between 2014 and 2025 about experimental moving-image practices that depart from industrial norms and established conventions,” writes Balsom in her introduction, “this book argues that what has been a period of panic in the mainstream has been a time of growth, renewal, and buoyancy on the liminal fringe.”

Each contributor to the recent issue of Projections dedicated to the work of the late David Bordwell “addresses fundamental assumptions and questions underpinning Bordwell’s research,” writes Colin Burnett at Observations on Film Art. “In doing so, the authors get at something more. They implicitly highlight two sides of Bordwell’s questioning approach, his pluralism—the more questions we pursue, the richer the field—and his heurism—our methods matter to the extent that they promote and answer questions. Admittedly the second aspect isn’t as widely appreciated as the first.” December will see the publication of another collection, Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell.

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale, in the meantime, talks with David Thomson about his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies.

New and Forthcoming

Andreas Halskov’s Directed by Miloš Forman: An Oral History of His Life and Films—featuring more than seventy interviews with such collaborators as Michael Douglas, Courtney Love, Annette Bening, Woody Harrelson, Stellan Skarsgård, Louise Fletcher, F. Murray Abraham, Oliver Stone, Mike Leigh, Mia Farrow, Michael Stipe, Bo Goldman, and Twyla Tharp—is out now.

A revised and expanded edition of David Sterritt’s The Films of Alfred Hitchcock will be released this month, and the second edition of Whitney Crothers Dilley’s The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life will hit shelves on September 1. Debra Levine will be talking about her new book, Jazzed: Jack Cole and Twentieth-Century American Dance—an appreciation of the choreographer who worked on such films as Gilda (1946), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)—in Los Angeles on September 6.

Documentary is running an excerpt from Persheng Vaziri’s Documenting Iran: Filmmakers and Social Change, which arrives this week. And in an excerpt from his new book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans up at RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya traces a line influence from Andrei Tarkovsky through video games to the French director’s work.

In the MIT Press Reader, Joshua M. Greenberg gives us a taste of his forthcoming book, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. “The traditional story told about home video is that its sudden appearance fragmented the moviegoing audience into individuals,” writes Greenberg. “What this argument misses, however, is the shared practice of acquiring those tapes and then watching them at home—in its early years, the video store became a third place where customers, retailers, and clerks met, talked, and shared a common experience of movies on videocassette.”

In October, OR Books will begin rolling out a series of six “short, elegant” volumes, and one of them will be Voice Over: The Language of Chris Marker, Sasha Frere-Jones’s guide to the work of “filmmaker, writer, photographer, historian, orange cat, internet enthusiast, narrator, CD-ROM advocate, [and] fugitive,” Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve.

Looking way ahead to May 2027, Jason Bailey, the author of books on James Gandolfini and New York in the movies, will have a new one out, Yippee Ki-Yay: Die Hard, Bruce Willis, and the Reinvention of the Action Movie.

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:45:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Somewhere In-Between]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9258-somewhere-in-between Did You See This?

Laura Elena Harring in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Many have spent much of this week reflecting on the tragic end of the difficult life of Hayden Panettiere, whose acting career began with a toy commercial she appeared in when she was just eleven months old. Her “momager,” as Panettiere called her in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, kept her busy with a steady string of soap-opera roles throughout her childhood, and she eventually came into her own playing a figure skater in the 2005 Disney movie Ice Princess and a high-schooler crazy about horror movies in the Scream franchise. Panettiere is probably best known for her work on television shows such as Heroes and Nashville.

And she was only thirty-six when she died on Sunday. In the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara notes that in her book and in countless interviews, Panettiere openly addressed her struggles with addiction, the abuse she endured at the hands of her first boyfriend, and most importantly for McNamara, “society’s seemingly willful ignorance of the symptoms and realities of postpartum depression . . . She called out a truth that has been too long ignored and gave millions of women a chance to ask for help.”

Mark Rydell, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-seven, was an actor who appeared with John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo in Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956) before turning to directing for television. Rydell will mostly likely be remembered first and foremost for directing Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Jane Fonda in On Golden Pond (1981), but he also made The Reivers (1969) with Steve McQueen and The Cowboys (1972), a western notorious for the killing of John Wayne’s character by Bruce Dern’s—with forty minutes of the movie left to unreel.

At one point during the making of The Cowboys, Wayne called “Action,” and Rydell snapped at him in front of the entire cast and crew. “Rather than being sacked as Rydell expected,” notes Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian, “he was instead congratulated by the actor for having had the guts to stand up to him. ‘He took to calling me “Sir” for the rest of the picture.’” Rydell also directed The Rose (1979), starring Bette Midler, who calls him “the actor’s whisperer; just a few words was all it took to understand what was needed.”

Keiko Kishi, known for her work in Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring (1956) and Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) and for cofounding the independent film company Ninjin Club with Ineko Arima and Yoshiko Kuga, has died at ninety-three. And we can be glad that Ardak Amirkulov saw his 1991 historical epic The Fall of Otrar restored and revived before he passed away earlier this month. He was seventy.

Writing for Slant, Jake Cole calls The Fall of Otrar, which depicts Genghis Khan’s conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, “one of the greatest movies ever made about irreconcilable culture clash, of what happens when two civilizations have such radically different values that neither can comprehend the other and sees annihilation as the only logical response.”

Festival Updates

Looking back on this year’s Locarno for Film Comment, Imogen Sara Smith writes about three standouts—Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die, Isabelle Stever and Anna Melikova’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, and Gurvinder Singh’s Rehmat—before turning to the retrospective, Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, “a bountiful selection of feature films, documentaries, and newsreels that urgently remind us of an all-too-familiar era when the U.S. government shredded the constitution, enforced ignoble rituals of capitulation, and branded political dissent as dangerous treason.” Marya E. Gates surveys the full program at RogerEbert.com.

Venice (September 2 through 12) will open in less than two weeks, and artistic director Alberto Barbera has issued a statement in response to Ukrainian criticism of the selection of Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau for the main competition. “Dau is not a Russian film; it is not pro-Putin propaganda,” argues Barbera. “It is a film that denounces totalitarian regimes” and “the work of a Russian dissident who ended up on the regime’s prohibition lists as a terrorist and enemy of the state.” In his own statement, Khrzhanovsky emphasizes that he has been publicly supporting Ukraine since 2014.

The New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12) has announced a Revivals lineup that includes Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950), the late Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966), Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses (1992), and one of the most talked-about restorations in this year’s Berlinale Classics program, director Pradip Krishen and screenwriter Arundhati Roy’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989).

The Official Competition of the seventieth BFI London Film Festival (October 7 through 18) is set and will feature new work from Hirokazu Kore-eda (After Life), Sergei Loznitsa (Two Prosecutors), Lili Horvát (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time), May el-Toukhy (Queen of Hearts), Giovanni Tortorici (Diciannove), and Benjamín Naishtat (History of Fear).

This Week’s Highlights

  • David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. turns twenty-five this year, and on the New Books Network, J. M. Tyree and Eileen G’Sell discuss a dossier they’ve put together for a forthcoming issue of Film Quarterly. Lynch “loved the old glamour of Los Angeles,” writes Amanda Karkoutly, who conducts a generously illustrated tour of the city in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. “The majestic Tower Theater in downtown Los Angeles was used in Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return. His characters lived in equally memorable spaces, with the women of Mulholland Dr. going from the grandeur of the Il Borghese apartments (architect Charles Gault, 1929) to meet tragic endings in the fairy-tale-esque ‘Snow White’ apartments (architect Ben Sherwood, 1931) that are believed to have also inspired Walt Disney.” Stops along the tour include Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, Franklin Canyon Park (an occasional stand-in for the northwestern woods surrounding Twin Peaks), the Doheny and Greystone Mansions, and Lynch’s own Pink House, designed by Lloyd Wright Jr.

  • San Sebastián (September 18 through 26) will open with the world premiere of Fatih Akin’s Ghost Song, in which a woman who has died too young meets her living lover in his dreams. Akin’s previous feature, Amrum (2025)—named for the island just off Germany’s North Sea coastline—was cowritten with Hark Bohm, the late actor and director best known for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Set at the end and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Amrum is essentially the story of Bohm’s childhood. In the New York Review of Books, J. Hoberman notes that Akin has succinctly summed up the gist of the film with a question: “What do you do when your mother is a Nazi?” Hoberman: “That a child might recognize a parent’s unrepentant, criminal complicity and love her nonetheless is Amrum’s heart of darkness, and perhaps Amrum’s as well.”

  • When Samy Burch was nominated for an Oscar for her screenplay for Todd Haynes’s May December (2023), she seemed to have come out of nowhere, but in fact, she’d been working for years in casting and making her own short films—and had written several spec scripts. Now two more films she’s written are in theaters, Late Fame (2025), directed by Kent Jones, and Coyote vs. Acme, “the first movie I’ve written for hire,” as she tells Filmmaker’s Chloe Lizotte. It’s also, she emphasizes, very much director Dave Green’s movie. “There is a tendency to want to understand what a character is about, or what a film’s tone is,” says Burch. “I see that kind of response to movies all the time. There’s this critique: The movie didn’t know what it wanted. But maybe that is what it wanted.”

  • In New York, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) screens tomorrow and Sunday as part of the Metrograph series Gary Oldman: The Protean Man and on August 28 and 31 and September 5 at Film Forum, which is currently presenting a twenty-five film retrospective of Francis Ford Coppola’s work. Coppola “endows his vampire with something approximating a soul,” writes Genevieve Yue in Metrograph’s Journal. “Oldman’s Dracula broods with pathos and melancholy. Undoubtedly, as he says, he loves. Maybe it’s the way Oldman hangs his head while lifting his eyes, a posture that suggests a combination of weariness and madness, but here, as in Sid & Nancy (1986) and Immortal Beloved (1994), it seems like he loves harder than everyone else, whether he’s playing someone dead, alive, or more often somewhere in-between.”

  • Ahead of the Adam Curtis Party Conference taking place in Bournemouth on September 12, David Moats offers a primer at the Quietus on how the filmmaker “assembles his monumental films out of found archive footage and compelling events you’ve never heard of” to reveal “the many ways elites, technology, and finance have foreclosed on our political future.” Curtis is “often parodied for his well-known turns of phrase [such as] ‘this is a story about,’ ‘but it was all a fantasy,’ ‘unleashed powerful forces’; his weaponization of grainy, Kodachrome nostalgia, ambient music, and non-sequitur pop; and his monomaniacal commitment to sans-serif fonts. But this vulnerability to parody is simply because no one in the last thirty years of documentary filmmaking has developed such a recognizable style, worked with such big ideas, or pushed the documentary form further (at least within the limits of mainstream TV). There are parodies but no imitators.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:12:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Graham Greene at the Harvard Film Archive]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9257-graham-greene-at-the-harvard-film-archive
Joseph Cotten in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949)

The Harvard Film Archive returns from its summer break with a selective yet robust retrospective, The Cold Heart Is More Precious Than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene. Running through September 19, the series opens on Friday with The Fallen Idol (1948), the first of three collaborations between director Carol Reed and the prolific novelist, book and film critic, and screenwriter.

As Howard A. Rodman has noted, Greene once described Reed as “the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling of the right face for the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathizing with an author’s worries.” In The Fallen Idol, based on Greene’s 1936 short story “The Basement Room,” an ambassador’s young son (Bobby Henrey) befriends the family butler (Ralph Richardson), who quarrels with his wife (Sonia Dresdel) and has been seeing another woman (Michèle Morgan) on the side. Death, suspicions, and misunderstandings ensue.

“The shifting of viewpoints, from shot to shot or within the same shot, is what The Fallen Idol is made of,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien, adding that “Greene’s vision of betrayal as central to human experience found its perfect corollary in Reed’s characteristic tilted angles, which here serve as constant, sometimes brutal, reminders that someone else is watching or overhearing. A sense of dread permeates ordinary life; the slightest gesture or most innocuous object can trigger disastrous consequences.”

Directed by Reed from Greene’s original screenplay, The Third Man (1949) stars Joseph Cotten as a pulp-fiction writer who arrives in Vienna to take up a job offer from his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to discover that Harry is dead. Lucy Sante has called the film “one of that handful of motion pictures (Rashomon, Casablanca, The Searchers) that have become archetypes—not merely a movie that would go on to influence myriad other movies but a construct that would lodge itself deep in the unconscious of an enormous number of people, including people who’ve never even seen the picture.”

“No director ever served a screenwriter as well,” declared novelist Philip Kerr in a 2008 essay on The Third Man. “But it’s still Greene’s picture. You may not see him in the film, but Greene is always there, lurking in every shadowy, bullet-scarred doorway, watching the action with a raised eyebrow and a cynical smile.”

Reed and Greene reteamed ten years later on an adaptation of the latter’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana—shot on location just two months after the overthrow of the Batista regime. Writing for TCM, Frank Miller suggests that the film’s “high-octane cast—including Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Noël Coward, Ernie Kovacs, and Maureen O’Hara—and witty Graham Greene script make it a standout, well worth rediscovery and reevaluation.” Miller also has stories to tell about Fidel Castro’s set visit and O’Hara’s long chats with Che Guevara about Irish rebellions against the British.

The earliest adaptation in the series is Frank Tuttle’s classic noir This Gun for Hire (1942), based on Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale. “Alan Ladd’s transformation from stubbly fleapit dweller to angel of death (trench coat, fedora, faint smile) is a severe trick, and a rare chance to see an icon being whipped up right before your eyes,” writes Fernando F. Croce. “Veronica Lake’s musical numbers are similarly svelte sleights of hand.”

Released seven months later, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942) is based on Greene’s 1940 story “The Lieutenant Died Last,” in which a small English town thwarts a German troop’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a Nazi invasion. In 2008, Tom Huddleston, writing for Time Out, found that the film “remains a jaw-droppingly subversive and efficient piece of work, as former documentarian Alberto Cavalcanti establishes, with loving care and the occasional wry wink, the ultimate bucolic English scene, then takes an almost sadistic delight in tearing it to bloody shreds in an orgy of shockingly blunt, matter-of-fact violence.”

Greene’s “dismissal” of Fritz Lang’s 1944 adaptation of the 1943 novel Ministry of Fear “can be seen to derive, depending on your perspective, from either critical detachment or enlightened self-interest,” wrote Glenn Kenny in 2013. “As for Lang’s own mis­givings concerning this actually quite excellent picture, they could have had something to do with the kind of film­maker he aspired to be at the time.”

The story of an Englishman “drawn into a Nazi espionage machination in Blitz-battered Britain must have appeared to Lang to present opportune mate­rial with which to continue his own war effort,” added Kenny, but “the absence of standard-issue Menacing Nazis is one of the distinguishing char­ac­teristics of Ministry of Fear . . . Just as this is not a propaganda film, it isn’t a puzzle film either. It’s a nightmare film, pure and simple.”

On the poster for Broadway producer turned director Herman Shumlin’s Confidential Agent (1945), based on Greene’s 1939 novel, Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall—who play a spy and the bored rich woman who teams up with him—kiss, and Warner Bros. promises that “You’ll see the screen Cook when ‘The Lover’ meets ‘The Look’!!!” Writing for Cineaste, Leonard Quart finds the film “static and somewhat stolid, but there is nevertheless enough of Greene here to make it of interest.”

Quart has similar reservations about John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947), starring Henry Fonda as an outlaw priest and filmed in Mexico by the great Gabriel Figueroa with assistance from Emilio Fernández, the renowned director working here as an associate producer. Based on The Power and the Glory (1939), “arguably the best novel Graham Greene wrote,” as Quart puts it, The Fugitive is “an exquisitely shot film, whose indelible beauty cannot save it from being one of Ford’s lesser works.”

Richard Attenborough was twenty-four when he played Pinkie, a low-level gangster, “with frighteningly volatile perversion” in John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1948), writes Jeremy Carr in a 2018 deep dive for Notebook. Brighton Rock “had its roots in real-life Depression-era gangland activity, but arguably more than that, it had its thematic foundation in Greene’s deep-seeded Catholicism, manifest here by pervasive guilt and the predominance of a tortured soul.”

The Heart of the Matter (1953), directed by George More O’Ferrall, is adapted from Greene’s 1948 novel about Harry Scobie, an unhappily married deputy police commissioner in Sierra Leone who falls for a survivor from a torpedoed ocean liner (Maria Schell). “Despite its betrayal of Graham Greene’s concluding chapters, this is still an atmospheric adaptation,” found Time Out’s reviewer in 2012, “and as the tormented Scobie, Trevor Howard gives what is possibly his finest screen performance.”

In her program notes for the series, Sidney Dritz points out that the screenplay for The Stranger’s Hand (1954) “was born from a few chapters [Greene] had submitted under a pseudonym to a writing competition in the manner of Graham Greene (he came in second). In it, Greene distilled his own style thus: a little boy with a wide-eyed, innocent view of the world must search for his missing father, which leads him into a seamy underworld of international espionage and interpersonal double-crossing. Mario Soldati’s subsequent film, extrapolated from these chapters, was an attempt to out-Graham Greene all other Graham Greene adaptations by shooting on location in the twisting streets of a European city—lending a distinct character of place to the narrative—and by casting Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, stars of other successful Greene adaptations, in key roles.”

The series wraps with an oddity starring Maggie Smith, George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt (1972), “a whimsical romantic fantasy that works,” as Roger Ebert described it—“which is to say, if you are not a fan of whimsical romantic fantasy, it’s going to be too much for you. It was nearly too much for me—I found myself wincing from time to time when one of the movie’s ornate props seemed about to bean me—but in the end I was won over, I guess.” Andrew Sarris, on the other hand, admired “the bursts of color amid assured pacing and grading that mark Cukor’s mastery of the medium.” Writing in the Village Voice in 1973, Sarris called Travels with My Aunt “a resonant enchantment.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:32:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Art-House Sci-Fi]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9256-art-house-sci-fi
Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965)

Starring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution—a secret agent whose mission is to take out the inventor of a near-omniscient and seemingly sentient fascist computer—Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) is a scrappily inventive amalgam of film noir and science fiction that, as Eric Hynes put it in Reverse Shot in 2008, “refined a lexicon for subsequent big-budgeted, high-concept offspring (Soylent Green, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey). It’s only fitting then that in its offhanded, thrift-store approach Alphaville is still cooler, stranger, and more prescient than them all.”

And it’s doubly fitting that on Friday, Alphaville will open Art-House Sci-Fi, a weeklong series of a dozen films at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2007, Jonathan Romney saw in Alphaville traces of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963) in its “visual transformation of the mundane into future dystopia.” Here, another man on a mission, albeit unnamed, is sent through time in a search for a way to salvage humanity in the wake of a world-destroying catastrophe.

La Jetée will screen with John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996), which Ashley Clark has called “a tantalizing blend of sci-fi parable and essay film which also happens to be a crucial primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism.” Clark had put together a list of five essential Afrofuturist films for the Guardian that naturally included John Coney’s Space Is the Place (1974), featuring Sun Ra in “a brilliant and bizarre melange of comedy, musical performance, and occasionally lurid blaxploitation aesthetics. It also, crucially, has a number of serious points to make about the plight of young urban Blacks in a harsh, post–civil rights climate: ‘Space’ is unambiguously posited by Ra as a utopian refuge for African Americans.”

Space is a refuge for no one in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), a film “saturated with grief,” as Phillip Lopate wrote in 2011. Before a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) leaves the planet for the space station Solaris, Tarkovsky offers “haunting shots of freeways” and “disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb when the estranging future has already arrived?”

BAM will also present Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), which tracks the journey of three men into the Zone, where they hope to have their deepest thirsts quenched. In 2012, Geoff Dyer wrote Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and five years later, he told Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in Sight and Sound that he was still convinced that “very few films, in the last however-many years, have done more to expand the possibilities of what a film is, what time is in film, than Stalker.”

If Wong Kar Wai has “an inescapable theme aside from failed love,” writes John Powers, “it is time, in its many permutations—minute-by-minute time, historical time, geological time, psychological-experiential time, not to mention the interplay among them. Celebrating evanescent moments in which ordinary reality yields glimpses of magic—few directors are fonder of gestures and grace notes—his work is flush with clocks, chronological leaps, and the workings of time’s teasing paramour, memory. All this comes together in 2046 (2004),” a film that “reworks and refracts” In the Mood for Love (2000) and stars Tony Leung as a writer of science fiction stories interwoven into the four main story arcs.

With Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton as a botanist searching in Colombia for the source of a sound that has rattled her to the core, Apichatpong Weerasethakul reminds us that cinema is “still a young art, one whose properties and possibilities are still in the process of revealing themselves,” wrote Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “A paean to the distant past that unfolds in a rigorous present tense, Memoria finally reveals itself as a vision from the future—a declaration of faith in a medium that hasn’t lost its power to astonish.”

In a 2016 piece for Notebook, Z. W. Lewis recounted the “turbulent production history” of Andrzej Zulawski’s “masterpiece,” On the Silver Globe (1988). Writing for Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber described the film as “a monumental adventure of astronauts marooned on the barren moon (key location: Gobi Desert), but really an immersion in the coming and going of an entire civilization in all its aspects. It is essentially indescribable, but as a heady tour de force it may be the ecstatic epitome of Zulawskian mise en scène.”

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law as a game designer and a publicist who delve into a virtual world she has created and find it nearly impossible to fight their way back out again. Time’s Richard Corliss wrote that eXistenZ “pulses with a furtive fury that’s pure Cronenberg. Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it’s addictive, and Lord, it’s alive!”

Shinya Tsukamoto has name-checked Cronenberg as an inspiration for his cyberpunk body-horror classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Tsukamoto himself plays a “metal fetishist” who drives rods into his body, runs out into the night, and is run over by a salaryman (Tomoro Taguchi) who hides the body but then discovers metal thorns erupting from his own body. “The film rushes at the viewer as an assault on the senses,” wrote the BFI’s Lou Thomas in 2019.

In Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), ten years have passed since a peaceful social-democratic revolution. “With its astute political critique of gendered, racialized, and classed exploitation,” writes Yasmina Price, “untamed punk temperament; electrifying pacing; and heterogeneous assembly of women, the film has few equivalents and remains—chillingly and thrillingly—contemporary. Boldly combining elements of documentary and a renegade reworking of science fiction, Born in Flames dreams a rebellious, pluralistic coalition of women appropriating the means of communication to rally a sweeping vision of liberation for all.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:37:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Presented in VistaVision]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9255-presented-in-vistavision
John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)

Two years ago, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold revived a long-dormant format when they shot The Brutalist in VistaVision. A year later, One Battle After Another hit theaters and Paul Thomas Anderson became the leading evangelist for the “very deep, rich, beautiful image” that VistaVision offers. Aligning frames horizontally along a 35 mm negative nearly doubles the size of the exposed surface area, and the impressive result is a finer-grained, higher resolution.

Most prints of The Brutalist and One Battle, though, are struck from VistaVision negatives onto IMAX, 70 mm, or 35 mm stock because there are no more than a handful of theaters in the world equipped to project in VistaVision. Now the Academy Museum in Los Angeles has outfitted its David Geffen Theater for Presented in VistaVision, a series of “ultra-rare VistaVision prints as well as 70 mm remasters and new 6K digital scans” opening on Thursday and running through August 31.

The series features One Battle as well as the first and last films shot in VistaVision during its brief run as Paramount’s big-screen answer to the perceived threat television posed to Hollywood’s bottom line. Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney, is “a standard putting-on-a-show movie with swinging tunes (courtesy of Irving Berlin), harmless misogyny, and a nice line in bitching at Rogers and Hammerstein’s expense,” wrote David Jenkins for Time Out in 2008. “It’s as sickly-sweet as an eggnog tsunami, but Bing’s brandy-butter baritone and Kaye’s incessant, proto-Jim Carrey clowning always manage to raise a smile.”

“A muted riot of sweaty brows and deadly stares,” wrote Howard Hampton ten years ago, “star turned director [Marlon] Brando’s ominous, custom-tailored western One-Eyed Jacks [1961] belongs to a line of conflicted, half-mad productions that appear doomed from the outset yet turn into more impactful film experiences than a barrel of cautiously wrought, fastidiously executed ‘classics.’” As it happens, both White Christmas and One-Eyed Jacks were also shot in Technicolor.

Between these chronological bookends, the series will offer more musicals and westerns as well as comedy, drama, and two of the five films Alfred Hitchcock shot in VistaVision. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly star in To Catch a Thief as a retired cat burglar and the heiress who’s caught his eye. “Hitchcock’s superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. These are “the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.”

In North by Northwest (1959), Grant is an advertising executive mistaken for a spy. “This is Hitchcock's longest film and also his most self-referential,” noted David Parkinson in Empire in 2000. “Little jokes abound about art and artifice, role play and reality, duty and duplicity, and each viewing reveals something new to enhance the pleasure of watching the Master of Suspense at his most mischievous and assured.”

The series will open with John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), widely recognized as one of the greatest westerns ever made. “Aside from directly confronting racist attitudes toward Native Americans,” wrote Jeremy Carr in his 2020 Notebook primer on the genre, “this film, through the personage of Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne in what is perhaps his finest performance, is a disturbing, multileveled look at barbarism and civilization and the conflicts raging inside one man. The picture’s stunning visuals provide a gorgeous backdrop for Ford’s penetrating delineation of familial responsibility, pathological destruction, and, in the end, the chance for redemption.”

On Friday, Peter Weller will discuss John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday, and on Saturday, Charlotte Barker, the senior director of film preservation and restoration at Paramount Archives, and Craig Barron, the executive creative director at Magnopus, will present Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), starring Charlton Heston as Moses. The burning bush speaks, the Nile turns to blood, the Red Sea parts, and John Fulton won an Oscar for overseeing the special effects.

Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire make an unlikely pair in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957) as a bookshop clerk and the photographer who discovers her, but who’s going to hold that against them as they whisk through a Technicolor Paris? “And the bubble-headed characters are comedy gold,” writes Cath Clarke for Time Out, “from the phony French philosopher sleazing over Hepburn to the fashion mag editor (‘think pink!’) who plucks her out of obscurity—a daffy, dancing version of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.”

More splashy color and song-and-dance numbers are on offer in Robert Lewis’s Anything Goes (1956), featuring Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor; Norman Panama and Melvin Frank’s The Court Jester (1956), starring Danny Kaye and Glynis Johns; Robert Pirosh’s The Girl Rush (1955), with Rosalind Russell and Fernando Lamas; and Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955), the great Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicle that also happens to feature Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine.

Martin and Lewis are “typecast to perfection as, respectively, Rick, a womanizing painter on a long losing streak, and Eugene, his idiot-manchild best friend and roommate,” wrote Nathan Rabin for the Dissolve in 2015. “Part of Artists and Models’ genius is that it taps into and exploits [a] pervasive fear that violent entertainment will breed real-life violence, especially where children are concerned—but it sends it up at the same time. That was part of Tashlin’s gift: His satires would feel sour and smug if their creator didn’t have such a genuine appreciation for low culture and cheap kicks.”

VistaVision is intriguingly paired with black-and-white cinematography in two films in the series. Shirley Booth, Anthony Quinn, and Shirley MacLaine star in Daniel Mann’s New Orleans-set drama Hot Spell (1958). “If it doesn’t cause plenty of doting mamas with unruly families to perspire, we’ll miss our guess about this picture,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times.

Charles Vidor’s The Joker Is Wild (1957) “features one of [Frank] Sinatra’s best dramatic performances since his 1953 career comeback in From Here to Eternity,” wrote Jeff Stafford for TCM in 2005. “It also reveals some obvious parallels between Joe E. Lewis, the gangland connected entertainer he is playing, and rumors of his own possible connection to the Mafia throughout his career.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:02:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Locarno’s Leopards]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9253-locarno-s-leopards
Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here (2026)

In the opening sequence of You Don’t Belong Here, the winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, thugs on bikes descend at night on a Roma community in Reșița, the postindustrial city in western Romania where director Florin Șerban was born. Tires are slashed, windshields are shattered, and as lights along the roused street flick on, a man runs out from his apartment to protest. He’s beaten and left for dead.

You Don’t Belong Here “opens with great promise and finishes with a stupefyingly misguided coda,” writes Jay Weissberg in Variety, but for Lida Bach, who interviews Șerban for RTL, that coda is the emotional crux of the entire film. For most of its running time—just over two and a half hours—You Don’t Belong Here plays like a self-aware homage to the Romanian New Wave, its long and static shots allowing tension to mount as viewers wait for Marius (Adrian Văncică), a respected surgeon, to realize that it was his son, Ioan (Teodor Butănescu, honored in Locarno with a Special Mention), who unintentionally delivered the fatal blow.

At Cineuropa, Giorgia Del Don calls You Don’t Belong Here “a powerful, precise film unafraid to expose the grotesque side of a masculinity in crisis.” Like Weissberg, though, Screen’s Amber Wilkinson is thrown off by that coda, which plays “like a strange left turn towards unnecessary theatricality.”

More International Competition Winners

The International Competition jury presided over by filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz awarded its Special Jury Prize to The Riverbank, codirected by Matheus Farias (who edited Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent) and his professional and life partner, Enock Carvalho. The Riverbank shares with The Secret Agent its setting—the Brazilian coastal city of Recife—and a few cast members, including Robério Diógenes, Rubens Santos, and Carlos Francisco.

When Izaquiel (Caique Copque) isn’t cleaning a church driven by a fiercely homophobic mission or partying with his queer roommates, he cruises the riverbank, where he finds himself irresistibly drawn to a fisherman, Jeremias (Ítalo Martins). The Riverbank takes viewers “on a journey that is at once hyperrealist and dreamlike, into the darkest recesses of a Brazil gripped by violence and religious fanaticism,” writes Muriel Del Don at Cineuropa.

Hong Sangsoo won the award for Best Direction for Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, and Variety’s Guy Lodge finds that the prolific filmmaker’s thirty-fifth feature is “as classically and welcomingly Hong as it gets: a brief, bittersweet comedy of familial distance and personal drift, crisply and candidly shot, and built around a marvelous performance of quiet, more-than-meets-the-eye feeling by his partner and longtime muse Kim Minhee.”

Kim won one of the two gender-neutral awards presented for Best Performance, and the other one went to Monica Bellucci, whose “sneer is a thing of wonder,” writes Jay Weissberg, “so why have so few directors used it properly? When allowed full rein to her sense of irony, as given her by Giovanni Tortorici in Ketticè, Bellucci has few equals in her ability to project self-aware drama queen with just the right dose of camp icon.”

We’ve noted the Special Mention given to Teodor Butănescu for his turn in You Don’t Belong Here; another one went to Xavier Bergeron for his supporting performance as a live wire who wins over Larissa Corriveau’s Mira—“a laconic wanderer who helps terminally ill people end their lives,” as Leonardo Goi puts it at the Film Stage—in Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence.

Filmmakers of the Present

The Golden Leopard for Best Film in the Filmmakers of the Present competition dedicated to first and second features and the First Feature Award went to The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, directed by the renowned photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. For twenty-five years, Sanguinetti chronicled the lives of cousins Guillermina “Guile” Aranciaga and Belinda “Beli” Stutz—who were ten and eight in 1999—as they grew up on the Argentinean pampas and eventually became mothers with children of their own.

Guile and Beli have been the subjects of several of Sanguinetti’s books and exhibitions, but in the Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin finds that this “luminous, indelible documentary” has “its own integral coherence and doesn’t feel like an addendum or just another chapter; it’s a freestanding, self-sufficient work in its own right.”

For nearly twenty years, Beatrice Gibson has been winning awards for her short films, and now she’s won the Best Emerging Director Award for her first feature, At Night. “The best movie I’ve seen in Locarno this year is set in Paris after dark, on sleepy side streets, in fluorescent eateries and nocturnal cafes and bars,” writes Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “At Night plays at the unhurried clip of a Rachel Cusk novel, and with similar shades of that author’s displaced POV and melancholic allure. As its images wash over you, you get a sense of an artist yearning for somewhere else while remaining resolutely curious for what’s around the corner.”

For Dazed MENA, Lujain Benatia talks with Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi about Revolutionaries Never Die, the winner of the Special Jury Prize. In 2018, Jocelyne Saab, who had spent fifteen years documenting the Lebanese Civil War, sent an email to Yaqubi, proposing a collaboration. Before Yaqubi got around to answering, Saab passed away. Yaqubi turned to Saab’s archive, and he found himself working through her 1982 film Beirut, My City when his own home in Gaza was destroyed. “Suddenly you feel like the two timelines, my timeline today and her timeline, just come together,” he tells Benatia.

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:56:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Inner Friction]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9252-inner-friction Did You See This?

Anton Walbrook and Michael Powell on the set of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

As Locarno heads into its final weekend, contributors to the Moirée critics grid have sent out their first podcast from the festival, and Christopher Small, who has a piece on Jean Epstein in Pontón, has profiled Asia Argento for Pardo, Locarno’s daily magazine. Earlier this week, I ventured up to the Madonna del Sasso—a Franciscan sanctuary perched above the city—with Hugo Emmerzael to talk about Transition, Peter Badel and Chris Wright’s vital portrait of documentarian Thomas Heise.

Edinburgh is on through Wednesday, and one highlight will surely be tonight’s thirtieth-anniversary screening of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting with live commentary from the cast and crew and a party afterward featuring DJ sets from Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, and Darren Emerson, who was the third member of Underworld when the movie’s soundtrack made “Born Slippy” a club standard.

Toronto (September 10 through 20) has topped off its lineup with the addition of eleven features, including Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s family drama The Road Not Taken and Martin McDonagh’s CIA buddy comedy Wild Horse Nine. And Lee Min-ho, Rachel Morrison, Chris Rock, Andrew Scott, and Hudson Williams will be taking part in TIFF’s In Conversation with . . . series.

Film at Lincoln Center has kept busy this week announcing lineups for the Spotlight and Currents programs in this year’s New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12). Among the Spotlight world premieres are Tom McCarthy’s A Statement, which dramatizes a 1980 meeting of scientists, activists, and policymakers on global warming; Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero; and several short and mid-length films: Kleber Mendonça Filho meets Jafar Panahi in South of Tehran, Charlotte Wells (Aftersun) profiles drummer Paula Spiro in New York Never Let Me Down, and Jonathan Glazer has reteamed with composer Mica Levi to oversee Joy of Joys, a film “by children, for children.”

The festival will launch filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid’s Bardi, which explores the world of horse-riders in central Morocco, as this year’s Currents Centerpiece. The other feature-length world premieres in the program are Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon, a collaboration with students at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris; Carlos Reygadas’s Heil Jupiter!, which the NYFF calls “a work of feral cinematic expression”; Tiffany Sia’s Overt Listening, a film charged with historical tensions between China and Taiwan; Dan Sallitt’s What Can’t Be Mentioned, a “sequel of sorts” to The Unspeakable Act (2012); and a new restoration of Fred Camper’s Suicide Note (1976–1984), shot in New York on Super 8.

This week’s highlights:

  • NYFF 2026 will open with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a film that many, including Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, have noted “nods to his marvelous debut film, Little Odessa, about a family in the grip of tough Russian Brighton Beach gangsters.” Made in 1994, when Gray was twenty-five, Little Odessa, “shot on 35 mm film as grainy and throwback as the idea of a hit man, is a movie divided by time, by commercial viability, by the cinematic interests of its maker,” writes the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller. “It’s split between past and present, between arty family drama and pulpy mafia story, between atmospheric melancholy and stark thrills. It’s inspired by the greats who used this environment to put forth their own auteurism (the Scorseses and Coppolas of New Hollywood), but has little in common with them. It’s a film whose inner friction is contained in a scene where its characters go check out the latest Nightmare on Elm Street—this is a world where hoary, old-school movie gangsters coexist with Freddy Krueger.”

  • “In half a dozen years of the 1940s, and under significant restrictions of theme, movement, and resources, a cosmopolitan Englishman and an exiled Hungarian produced half a dozen films that could each feature in a top ten of the finest British films ever made,” writes Robert Wilton at Bright Wall/Dark Room. “Over the two decades of their collaboration, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger emerged as the working out of a love affair with Britain and Britishness.” The “obvious analogue” to Pressburger is Anton Walbrook’s Theo in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), “a man who finds sanctuary and kindness and much to admire in Britain, but who sees the British more dispassionately and astutely than they do themselves.”

  • On the occasion of the recent L’Alliance New York series of films directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Isabelle Huppert, Vadim Rizov spoke with Huppert for Notebook about a collaboration that spanned seven films and nearly thirty years. “I always thought that The Swindle [1997] was one of his most autobiographical films, like a hidden self-portrait of himself and our relationship as a director and as an actress,” says Huppert. “It was also a movie about moviemaking. He would consider the cinema world and moviemaking as, sometimes, a world of little crooks—you know, people trying to make money and make their way. I think he was speaking about himself in that film and about the world of cinema, in a very fun and tender way. Everybody was trying to make a little business, you know?”

  • Catherine Breillat’s films “pose ethical questions about desire and aesthetic questions about representation; in particular, they ask how explicit cinema can be without becoming pornography,” writes Anahid Nersessian in the London Review of Books. “Yet for all their moral seriousness, they reject the trappings of high art. With their washed-out palettes, soft focus, and diffuse lighting, they sometimes resemble the smutty pastel covers of mid-century novels such as Bonjour Tristesse. This seems deliberate. Femininity is compelling to Breillat because it is so banal; its conventionality and dullness set the terms under which women are allowed to exist.”

  • “An expert practitioner of the spiritual sequel, Richard Linklater especially indulges in the delight of crafting movies that rhyme with each other,” writes Vikram Murthi at IndieWire. For Murthi, Linklater’s “best spiritual sequel” is Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), “a semi-autobiographical 1980s-set college baseball comedy that has no plot and stars relatively unknown actors playing horny, testosterone-fueled jocks.” The “pivotal difference” between Dazed and Confused, the 1993 film set on the last day of high school in 1976, and EWS!! is “a matter of tone. For all of its quotability and cozy atmosphere, Dazed exhibits a real dark streak in terms of casual violence and the unforgiving nature of social hierarchy,” notes Murthi. “Conversely, EWS!! assumes a palpable sense of optimism, visually epitomized by [cinematographer Shane F.] Kelly’s warm-toned digital photography that makes night scenes feel like they’re blessed by the sun.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:36:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Summer in Japan]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9251-summer-in-japan
Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959)

“Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams,” says the unnamed narrator of Haruki Murakami’s 1998 novel Dance Dance Dance. “I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

That ineffable quality of the season is captured in Summer in Japan, a series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music programmed by Jesse Trussell. As noted in the series description, “Japanese cinema has always had a special affinity for the floating time, exuberant joy, and quiet melancholy of the summer.” The series will open with Casting Blossoms to the Sky (2012), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi (House), the only filmmaker with two features selected for the program.

Obayashi once said that, after the Second World War, people in Japan would no longer “think materialistically” but would instead “learn to be compassionate and work together,” notes Hal Young at Senses of Cinema. The first entry in his late War Trilogy, Casting Blossoms to the Sky is an essay film “made with this mindset.” With The Island Closest to Heaven (1984), Obayashi reunited with pop idol Tomoyo Harada after their 1983 hit The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Here, Harada plays a teenager who travels to the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia as a sort of rite of passage following the sudden death of her father.

The historical span of the series begins with two undeniable classics. For Roger Ebert, Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959) was “like a familiar piece of music that I can turn to for reassurance and consolation,” and Karyn Kusama has called Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) “one of the greatest and most contained crime thrillers ever made.”

Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967) is “an almost Sartrean study of dead-end youth and the death drive in Japanese culture,” wrote Michael Koresky in 2010. “Featuring a cast of characters that includes some of the most eccentric outlaws in the director’s rebel-heavy oeuvre, it often plays like a damned-to-hell update of Oshima’s breakthrough Cruel Story of Youth.”

Shinji Somai’s PP Rider (1983) “follows summertime abandon to the extreme, as three high-schoolers pursue their bully’s kidnappers across Tokyo and Yokohama,” writes Patrick Preziosi in a 2023 piece for Notebook. “If a spoilt high-school bully is to be kidnapped, it’s best that it happens during the longueurs of summer, heavy on the fireworks and light on the adult supervision.”

When Film at Lincoln Center presented a Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective in 2022, the programmers noted that he had “amassed one of the most fascinatingly idiosyncratic and prolific bodies of work in modern Japanese cinema.” Starring pop idol Hiroko Yakushimaru and Hironobu Nomura, the road movie Main Theme (1984) “takes a grand and summery youthful meander through Japanese beach towns.”

Playing out over the course of a single day in late summer, Shinji Aoyama’s Helpless (1996) focuses, as Hayley Scanlon points out, on “refugees from the Showa era living on borrowed time in Heisei and intensely resentful towards the contemporary society which appears to have no place for them while the glamour of the bubble economy does not appear to have trickled down to their peaceful provincial existence.”

In Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro (1999), a boy (Yusuke Sekiguchi) goes searching for his estranged mother accompanied by a former yakuza (Kitano). In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote that “the result is a heart-tugger made totally irresistible because of the combination of Kitano’s wry, sly sense of humor and his rigorous detachment.”

Teens swoon for a pop star in Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). In the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson noted that “the camera succumbs to swooping perspectives, hyper-green grasslands, dust devils, desolate consumer aisles, and spasms of home-video horror.” All About Lily Chou-Chou is “itself an overripe pop song, mourning the despoiling tragedies of pre-adulthood and the infuriating inadequacy of nostalgia.”

The single animated feature in the series, Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars (2009), “flits between a fraught, soap-opera-ish saga about a family reunion near the city of Ueda and the metaverse of Oz,” writes Phil Hoad in the Guardian. “It isn’t as sophisticated perhaps in its understanding of the online/real-world interface as his 2021 film Belle, but the multilayered storytelling still shows plenty of panache, especially on the visual front.”

Marika Ito, yet another pop idol in the series, stars in Soushi Matsumoto’s It’s a Summer Film! (2021) as a teen making a movie, the sort of swordplay epic she’s loved all of her life. “In addition to being a sci-fi film and a loving homage to samurai cinema, It’s a Summer Film! is at heart a fairly standard teen comedy,” notes Selina Lee at In Review Online. Its “time-travel plotline may be a little muddled, but it doesn’t bog down its characters’ aw-shucks earnestness and cinema-loving charm.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:33:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Rob Tregenza’s Fast]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9250-rob-tregenza-s-fast
Madison Pankey in Rob Tregenza’s Fast (2026)

“Shoot it fast and hard and beautiful like Ida Lupino shot Fast, Hard, and Beautiful.” As Rob Tregenza recalls it in his wide-ranging conversation with Nick Newman at the Film Stage, that was the advice his producer, Jean-Luc Godard, gave him as they set out to make Inside/Out (1997). Of course, that was nearly thirty years ago, so Tregenza’s slight misrecollection of the title of Lupino’s 1951 film Hard, Fast, and Beautiful is certainly understandable.

The point is, Tregenza more or less set that directive aside while making Inside/Out, but as he tells Newman, Godard’s edict came back to him full force as he began production on his sixth feature, Fast, which will see its world premiere this evening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA, which launched Tregenza’s previous film, The Fishing Place, early last year, will screen Fast through Tuesday, the night that Acropolis Cinema will present Fast in Los Angeles with a prerecorded chat between Tregenza and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

On August 20, the LA screening series Mezzanine will present Tregenza’s debut feature, Talking to Strangers (1988), a film composed of nine thrillingly choreographed takes, each running around ten minutes. This was the film that caught Godard’s eye and led him to praise it as “remarkable and at times astonishing, that is, softly imbued with the marvelous.”

Madison Pankey stars in Fast as Sterling, a woman who has returned to her small town in Virginia, where she spots an old Lotus Formula 1 car and decides to get it up and racing again. She crosses paths with an old beau who has gone sour, reunites with a few relatives, and interacts with colorful locals in scenes—some in color and some in black and white—that alight here and there along a nonchronological timeline.

“There is not what we would typically consider a story in Fast, and each of its lengthy sequences maintains an almost maddening autonomy,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online. “Fast operates as a kind of tone poem regarding a woman’s thwarted desires.” It’s “a film that, in many ways, is about the failure of things to coalesce, the inability to get a dream off the ground. Perhaps Fast is an attempt to produce artistic meaning without perfectionism, to embrace the muddle and the imperfect connections between things.”

Fast “dazzles the mind with the speed and spectrum of inner experience it evokes,” finds the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Tregenza’s “technique puts key moments in a permanent present tense of suggestion, implication, and ambiguity. Unlike many intricate stories, there’s nothing puzzle-like about the complex drama of Fast: there’s nothing snippety or cut-to-fit about its expansive and extensive scenes. Rather, their time-switching variety and tone-shifting allusions suggest a trip through subjectivity—through Sterling’s inner life and through the collective memory of the town.”

“The fast part is: we shot the whole film in ten days,” Tregenza tells Newman. “We didn’t do any overtime, so there was no day that was more than twelve hours, ten to twelve hours max in ten days—so it had to be fast. And it had to be hard, meaning ‘difficult.’ The crane shots we were doing, the production value, the levels of it, and then cognitively, conceptually hard. I wanted it to be thought-provoking. And then I said, ‘This time, everything, if you can make it beautiful, make it beautiful. Don’t ignore—or if there’s an opportunity for beauty, do it.’”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:27:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Kyoko Kagawa Rarities]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9249-kyoko-kagawa-rarities
Kyoko Kagawa and So Yamamura in Mikio Naruse’s Little Peach (1958)

In a career spanning seventy-five years, Kyoko Kagawa has made lasting impressions as the youngest daughter of aging parents in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), the sister of an escaped slave in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), the wife of a wealthy industrialist in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), and the love of two men’s lives in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998). These are all vital supporting performances, but with Kyoko Kagawa Rarities, programmers Joseph Eusebio and Akinaru Rokkaku are putting Kagawa front and center.

The series opens in New York on Thursday evening at Anthology Film Archives with Mikio Naruse’s Little Peach (1958), and four more films starring Kagawa will screen from Friday through Sunday at Asia Society. Writing about Little Peach for Slant in 2005, Keith Uhlich suggested that Naruse was working through some of his own issues when he created the character of the struggling writer Ryokichi Urshiyama (Isao Kimura).

But Little Peach is “less Ryokichi’s story than it is his long-suffering wife Kyoko’s (Kyoko Kagawa),” wrote Uhlich. “Naruse details the couple’s courtship in the film’s romantic and intoxicating first half-hour,” and the film’s second half “plays as a sort of prequel to Naruse’s marital-strife drama Sudden Rain, with the director similarly illustrating the divide between houses via his superb compositional grasp of interior space and through his keen use of music as psychological demarcator.” Ultimately, Little Peach becomes “a loving portrait of a woman tragically caught between her wants and her responsibilities, fated to tread a potentially never-ending path between the trials of her marriage and the refuge of her past.”

Nobuo Nakagawa’s Farewell to the Highland Station (1951) will be seeing its U.S. premiere on Friday. A botanist (Michitaro Mizushima) heads to a sanatorium in the highlands, where he falls for Yuki (Kagawa), a nurse in white.

“Kagawa’s performance is extraordinarily subtle and richly nuanced,” writes Marcella Leonardi. “In Yuki we find the innocence of the protagonist of Five Sisters (1954),” the drama directed by Seiji Hisamatsu screening on Saturday; “the joyful vitality of the mischievous young woman in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women (1956),” Shiro Toyoda’s comedic adaptation of a text by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, screening Sunday; “but also the despair of the tragic Osan in [Mizoguchi’s] A Story from Chikamatsu (1954). Farewell to the Highland Station reveals an increasingly mature and self-aware actress, capable of modulating an emotion through a gesture, a smile, or a fleeting expression.”

On Saturday afternoon, Asia Society will present Tokyo Rendezvous (2008), the first feature directed by Chihiro Ikeda, who would go on to cowrite Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2016). In Tokyo Rendezvous, a salaryman (Hidetoshi Nishijima) aims to sell his grandfather’s land but instead finds himself living there. He seeks advice from local elders played by Kagawa and Sansei Shiomi. “Amidst glowing 16 mm frames shot by the great Masaki Tamura (Lady Snowblood, Eureka),” writes Joseph Eusebio in his program notes, “we feel the living charge of humble stardom across generations.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:50:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Intimate Epics: The Films of Patrick Wang]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9247-intimate-epics-the-films-of-patrick-wang
Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory (2018)

Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud, a one-man, three-hour biopic starring Blake Draper as the nineteenth-century French poet, has been gradually building a dedicated audience and selling out screenings since its premiere at the Roxy Cinema in New York back in May. A. Rimbaud will screen at the Roxy again on August 30 and on Friday in San Diego as part of the Digital Gym retrospective Intimate Epics: The Films of Patrick Wang.

“Even as Rimbaud’s life story unfolds in a straightforward chronological manner, Wang uses visual and aural elements to evoke the hallucinatory quality of his writing,” notes Kenji Fujishima at Book and Film. A. Rimbaud is “a biopic made in the manner of a psychological dreamscape, with Wang’s juxtaposition of linear narrative and surreal style doing more to suggest its subject’s inner life than most biopics’ literal-minded attempts at reductive cause-and-effect connections between biography and art.”

The San Diego series opens on Tuesday with Wang’s first feature, In the Family (2011), a “truly wondrous indie, which the multi-hyphenate writer-director-actor initially distributed himself after multiple festival rejections,” as Keith Uhlich noted in Time Out in 2012. “Every moment counts in this gripping tale of gay Tennessean contractor Joey Williams (Wang), who fights for custody of his nonbiological son, Chip [Sebastian Banes], after the boy’s father, and Joey’s partner, Cody [Trevor St. John], is killed in a car crash . . . Imagine a raw-nerved Cassavetes feature shot with rigorous Zen contemplativeness and you’ll have a sense of In the Family’s mesmeric style.”

The New Yorker’s Justin Chang was still at Variety when Wang’s follow-up, The Grief of Others, premiered at SXSW in 2015. Chang called it “a delicate, elliptically structured portrait of six wounded souls coping with the aftermath of tragedy. More experimental in form and wobbly in execution than its predecessor, this searching adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s 2011 novel nonetheless evokes a family’s fragile inner life in ineffably moving fashion, capturing how distant and isolated parents and children can feel from one another even when living under the same roof.”

“Though we are watching what often appear to be unnervingly even-keeled characters,” wrote Bilge Ebiri in the New York Times, “sometimes we’ll glimpse a painful flashback, or hear a person’s true thoughts. In one marvelous instance, the family gathers in their kitchen, and then, as they leave the room, a part of the frame opens up to reveal the scene’s touching conclusion elsewhere. As with the director’s other works, there’s a self-conscious, constructed quality to The Grief of Others, but it rarely veers into the precious or the phony.”

On August 24, Digital Gym will present both parts of A Bread Factory (2018), a portrait of a community anchored by their shared experiences at an arts space in a small New England town. Featuring a cast of over a hundred and a couple of song and dance numbers, the story is driven by the efforts of Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry) to retain public funding for the center.

There will be an intermission between each two-hour part of A Bread Factory in San Diego, but as Matt Zoller Seitz has noted at RogerEbert.com, “you can watch them independently and come away feeling that you’ve seen a complete work. Any way you watch it, A Bread Factory is a wildly ambitious yet self-effacing epic about a place and its people, written, directed, and acted in the spirit of Robert Altman (Nashville), Richard Linklater (Bernie), and Edward Yang (Yi Yi)—muralists who paint on wide canvases, yet still treat each character as individuals worthy of their own portraits.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:41:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Deep Dives]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9246-deep-dives Did You See This?

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

L ocarno has opened with the presentation of its Excellence Award to Isabella Rossellini, the cover star of the first issue of the 2026 edition of Pardo, the magazine that the festival publishes each day during its annual run. For Rossellini, “the choice of a role never depends on the plot premise,” writes Benedetta Pini, “but on the quality of her connection with the director.” And Rossellini adds that “when it comes to particularly unique visions, such as those of Guy Maddin—whose scripts are written in such a baroque style that you can’t really make out how the film will eventually look and feel—you have no choice but to trust your intuition.”

Also up on the festival’s site is Srikanth Srinivasan’s appreciation of Safi Faye’s “piercing debut feature,” Letter from My Village (1975); Filipe Furtado on Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990); and, in conjunction with this year’s retrospective, Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, an interview with filmmaker and writer Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil, 1948) that ran in a 1970 issue of Film Culture. Polonsky was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, and he refused to name names. Though he carried on writing, he wouldn’t direct again until he returned with Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969).

Toronto (September 10 through 20) has rolled out the lineups for its TIFF Docs, Midnight Madness, and Shortcuts programs. TIFF Docs will screen Union Town, Barbara Kopple’s latest report from the front lines of the struggling labor movement, and The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, the third film Sophie Fiennes has made with Slavoj Žižek—but everyone wants to talk with programmer Thom Powers about Alex Gibney’s Musk.

“We’re talking about someone who has a Marvel villain–like level of power over our lives, from electric cars to space travel to AI to government to social media,” Powers tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik. And talking to IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, Powers notes that most reporting on Elon Musk “will look at one thing. It’ll look at X, or SpaceX, or Tesla. Alex is doing something on a more epic scale. That is why the film needs and deserves the length that it has: over three and a half hours.”

On Wednesday, the New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12) unveiled its Main Slate lineup, a walloping program of thirty-two features. As always, the selection of some of the most critically acclaimed films to have premiered so far this year serves as an expertly curated check-up on the state of cinema. Perhaps the most intriguing surprise here is the decision to present the world premiere of Iranian director Mani Haghighi’s I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies, “a lively, stimulating, and unorthodox documentary” about painter, conceptual artist, and collector Nasser Bakhshi and his partner, the surrealist artist Roghayeh Najd.

The forty-fifth Pordenone Silent Film Festival (October 3 through 10) will open with Donald Crisp’s newly restored Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Astor, and will close with John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924). The orchestral scores of both films will be performed live. And the theme of this year’s retrospective will be Weimar Uncensored: Taboos and Transgressions in German Cinema, 1919–1920. To wrap this week’s round of festival news, let’s note that the seventieth BFI London Film Festival (October 7 through 18) will close with the UK premiere of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.

In May, we put together an overview of newly restored films by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, and from today through Thursday, they will be screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Starting tomorrow, New York’s Metrograph will present Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life, and Steve Macfarlane introduces his program of films marking their twentieth anniversaries: 2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die opens today at the Roxy Cinema.

Grace Chang, the Hong Kong singer and actor who was especially popular in the 1950s and ’60s, passed away on Monday at the age of ninety-three. In 2006, Michael Guillen put together an appreciative primer on Chang’s work, and when Edo Choi recently interviewed Tsai Ming-liang for Metrograph’s Journal, Choi asked about the director’s use of Chang’s recordings in The Hole (1998). “I had been watching a lot of films from the ’60s, not only Mandarin-speaking films but Hollywood films too,” said Tsai. “Grace Chang became someone I fell in love with.” For Tsai, “she really represents that era, and her songs have such sustaining power; even today, people are still listening to them.”

This week’s highlights:

  • After making We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Jane Schoenbrun returned this year to open the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Hannah Einbinder stars as a filmmaker out to reboot a horror franchise whose star (Gillian Anderson) has become a recluse, but as Alison Willmore points out in her excellent profile of Schoenbrun for Vulture, “summarizing Schoenbrun’s films can be tricky. Describing the elliptical plots only gets at a fraction of what unfolds onscreen, as Schoenbrun attempts to capture emotions and moods that are spongier, stranger, and less easy to place.” Neither of the first two features, for example, is “autobiographical in a conventional sense—instead, Schoenbrun describes them as the cinematic equivalent of ‘wails.’”

  • Newly restored, Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II The Terrordome (1995) is the first feature directed by a Black woman to open in British theaters. It depicts a near-future in which people of color struggle to survive in what Brandon Streussnig describes at In Review Online as “a prison ghetto where Black people live under white dictatorial rule.” Terrordome is “a blistering, unique debut,” writes Steve Macfarlane at the top of his interview with Onwurah for Filmmaker. “It has a pop sensibility, unapologetic in its references to Public Enemy and Do the Right Thing (1989), and uses a dystopian sci-fi hook to address very real concurrent crises of drug trafficking, gang violence, and police racism.” Thirty years ago, “people indicted me for being a nihilist,” says Onwurah. “I couldn’t just be angry, I also had to offer some ‘solution.’ I do not have the solution to violence or racism. Why can’t I tell my story without a ‘solution’? I don’t get to be silenced just because I don’t provide options to ‘solve’ the problem.”

“Jean Epstein was an aquatic filmmaker, an artist who saw water as embodying the kind of cinema he aspired to create: fluid, tempestuous, unpredictable,” writes Leonardo Goi, opening a rich critical survey for Notebook. The films Epstein made in Brittany “have an alien beauty to them. Out on the desolate islands dotting the Atlantic where Epstein brought his camera, nature reigns supreme. People do not live in Ouessant, Bannec, or Sein; they’re simply trying to survive them. Nine-foot tidal differentials, biblical winter storms, deafening winds and vertiginous waves: Epstein saw those unforgiving places as an apocalyptic outpost, and found communities virtually untouched by industrialization who were held together by ancient myths and superstitions. All the works that emerged out of those turbulent waters are drawn to the mysterious, and their director, who believed the fantastic should be unveiled rather than manufactured, did so through films perched along the border between magic and documentary.”

  • Nick Newman’s interview with Kent Jones for the Film Stage is a delightful, just-hanging-out sort of meander that naturally gets around to the matter at hand—this week’s release of Jones’s second fictional feature, Late Fame—but not before a chat about Roxy Music that eventually segues into a discussion of Jones’s Diane (2018) and the vital importance of establishing the world of a film. “There’s nothing deadlier than a movie where you’ve got the sense that the people talking is one thing and the room that they’re in is something else,” says Jones. The conversation then touches on John Carpenter, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), what Greta Lee brings to Late Fame, the prospect of more writing from Jones, and Bob Dylan.

  • A newly restored director’s cut of Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), starring Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu, a tragic legend of the silent screen, opens at Film Forum in New York today. “Less melodrama than meta-drama,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times, “Center Stage was the first movie to address the history of Chinese film—conflating the golden age of Shanghainese cinema (and Shanghai) with that of Hong Kong. It also has points of contact with classic Hollywood. The scenes in which producers plot Ruan’s career could have unfolded in Culver City. As a director of actresses, Kwan has been likened to George Cukor; his clever use of backdrops recalls Josef von Sternberg and his frequent mirroring suggests Douglas Sirk.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:28:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Technicolor Weekend 2026]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9245-technicolor-weekend-2026
Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Gene Kelly in Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Rivaled perhaps only by a silvery black-and-white nitrate show, a projection from a well-preserved Technicolor print is about as vividly memorable as a theatrical viewing experience can be. Perfected early in the twentieth century, the three-strip filming method was discontinued in 1955, but as a dye-transfer printing process, Technicolor was built to last. The depth and saturation of surviving prints offer, as the Chicago Film Society puts it, a “look” that is “effectively impossible to replicate using 2026’s digital or analog technologies.”

The CFS, founded by projectionists in 2011, will host its fourth annual Technicolor Weekend from Friday through Sunday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the opener is an immortal banger. In his Notebook primer on Hollywood musicals, Jeremy Carr isn’t exactly going out on a limb when he suggests that Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) “may be the greatest of them all . . . Bursting with energy, color, and infectious songs, Singin’ in the Rain was also a casting coup, with nineteen-year-old Debbie Reynolds at her most congenial, circus-trained Donald O’Connor at his most athletic, former ballet student Cyd Charisse at her most tantalizing, and Gene Kelly at his most buoyant.”

Horror of Dracula (1958) follows, and in 2007, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called this first entry in the Hammer Horror series “a fierce melodrama directed by Terence Fisher with Christopher Lee tremendously charismatic as the unspeakable Count and Peter Cushing playing his enemy, Professor Van Helsing. It’s madly over-the-top, with Dracula’s lovely brides resplendent in their naughty nighties and negligées.”

Saturday’s program begins just after lunch with Douglas Sirk’s Meet Me at the Fair (1953), one of the director’s “witty, light-hearted musicals nostalgically evoking small-town America around the turn of the century,” as Geoff Andrew has described it in Time Out. “Sirk’s customary concern with hypocrisy and intolerance is, given the genre and overall tone of the piece, surprisingly to the fore in a subplot about corrupt politicians.”

Fitting for a late Saturday afternoon, William Castle’s The Busy Body (1967), based on Donald Westlake’s novel, stars Sid Caesar as a Chicago crime boss and Robert Ryan as one of his low-level gangsters. The cast features Anne Baxter, Dom DeLuise, and in his film debut, Richard Pryor. CFS programmers note that the tagline nails it: “All this picture has is Sex, Gangsters, Strippers, A Million Stolen Bucks, 3 Stiffs in a Coffin, and some of the other little Happenings in life.”

The tone shifts for the evening with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), one of the last films printed in Technicolor. “Part II has the same mythic and operatic visual scheme as the first,” wrote Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. “Visually the film is, however, far more complexly beautiful than the first, just as it’s thematically richer, more shadowed, more full.”

A Siamese named D.C. costars with Hayley Mills, Roddy McDowall, and Elsa Lanchester in That Darn Cat! (1965), a live-action Disney comedy directed by Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, The Love Bug, Bedknobs and Broomsticks) and screening Sunday afternoon. “Starting with the titular opening upbeat jazzy theme number, sung with verve by famed crooner Bobby Darin over an opening credits montage of a night of D.C’s amusing hijinks,” writes Douglas Buck for Off Screen, That Darn Cat! opens in an “in engaging style” that “it never loses for a second.”

The weekend wraps on Sunday evening with Howard Hawks’s Hatari! (1962), starring John Wayne as the leader of a pack of game catchers in Tanzania. “Hatari! plays not only like a new spin on the director’s pet themes and motifs, but also as a deliberate fusion of reconfigured moments and gestures from his greatest works,” writes Derek Smith at Slant. “One could dismiss the film as a late-career victory lap were it not such a vibrant portrait of another typically Hawksian ragtag team of workers. While the collision of so many deliberately familiar beats and gags could have been hollowly nostalgic, it’s exciting in Hawks’s hands, as he and his collaborators inject new life into them.”

Just before last year’s Technicolor Weekend, Newcity Film’s Ray Pride spoke with the CFS’s Julian Antos. “Inspecting Technicolor prints and preparing them for screenings, one notices the emulsion is a little thicker and more supple,” noted Antos. “When you hold it at an angle to the light, you can physically see that the emulsion is raised like a relief print. When you hold a reel up to the light and look at it from the side, you can see a rainbow of color. Practically speaking, these prints are extraordinary archival records of how these films were exhibited. The color and visual texture of these prints is almost exactly as it was when they were made, and prints of this kind can never be made again. It’s a great joy to be able to bring them to audiences.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:38:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Restorations in Melbourne]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9242-restorations-in-melbourne
Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki-Bóbó (1942)

Opening tomorrow with Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s Wicker—a comedic fable starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård that Richard Lawson, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, calls “a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure”—the seventy-fourth Melbourne International Film Festival will present more than three hundred films before wrapping on August 23. Many of these will be highlights from this year’s festival circuit making their Australian premieres, and of course, many more will be Australian films seeing their world premieres.

Special events include a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch with live commentary by director and star John Cameron Mitchell and Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard performing his new score for Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). The Critical Condition strand offers three films focusing on performance: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950), Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), and Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969). And there are strands focusing on the work of Lisandro Alonso, Ulrike Ottinger, and Kim Novak.

MIFF’s Restorations, a program of nine films, ranges chronologically from Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki-Bóbó (1942) to Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). Oliveira’s first feature centers on a rivalry between two boys over the only girl in their gang. What Serge Daney found “striking” about Aniki-Bóbó is “how clearly it takes sides. I see two motifs: 1. The parents are deliberately eliminated from society. Adults only appear on their own, as exceptions. 2. The children experience adult dramas and also act like them.”

Geographically, the selection circles the globe. Lino Brocka’s Weighed but Found Wanting (1974) “chronicles the awakening conscience of a privileged teenager, Junior (Christopher de León), to hypocrisy and social injustice,” wrote Lawrence Garcia in a 2017 issue of Cinema Scope. The film is “a veritable catalogue of the director’s protean talents: the psychological terror of a forced abortion; the bawdy degradation of a wake and the bitter farce of a burial; and the thrilling, climactic reckoning, in which the entire town converges on an act of desperation.”

Mary Stephen, who would go on to work as an editor with Eric Rohmer, was twenty-four when she directed her first feature, Shades of Silk (1978). Set in 1935 Shanghai, the story tracks the uneasy friendship between two women. When Michelle Carey interviewed Stephen for Metrograph’s Journal, she noted that Shades of Silk “reveals already a masterful filmmaking sensibility at work. Its long shots, striking sense of space, and hypnotic musical score anticipates the work of the Taiwanese New Wave, with a distinct feminist and postcolonial gaze.”

Henry Jaglom’s Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) stars Karen Black as Zee, who’s mourning the end of her marriage when Eli, played by Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, strikes up a conversation. “And so begins, with a barbed-tongued tête-à-tête, this imperfect love story: not so much a match made in heaven as a match made in mutual wallowing,” writes KYK in the Journal. “Yet it’s an entertaining ride to spend time with them, perhaps because through all the ‘ugliness’ and ‘undesirableness,’ there is a sex appeal to the film that seemingly accidentally, though likely intentionally, slips through.”

Alone in her small apartment in Sydney, Liz (Jenny Vuletic) reflects on a recent breakup in Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986), “a story of solitude, pain and obsession, of raw emotions elegantly presented and endlessly interrogated,” as Philippa Hawker writes in Senses of Cinema. The film is “essentially an interior vision of some kind: a first-person narrative, an anguished, irritable, unsparing, self-centering contemplation.”

In Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Tilaï (1990), a man returns home after two years away and discovers that his fiancée has married his father. Tilaï is “something of a modern, West African version of a Greek tragedy, made in villages in Burkina Faso but set in an indeterminate, mythic past that offers some of the trappings of the modern world (notably, a rifle) but not others (such as electricity and automobiles) while also hinting at a clash in mores provoked by the impingement of modernity,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2018.

As early as 2003, Tasha Robinson, writing for Science Fiction Weekly, could call Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll (1993) “a classic, a common entry-level anime film.” It’s “an old tale, and a clear enough one: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl nearly die several times over while slaying evil creatures with power over wasps, snakes, shadows, explosives, human minds, electricity and the dead . . . The whole film drips with lurid avidity. Nudity is almost as common as arterial sprays, and both are depicted with Kawajiri’s typical bravura.”

Shot in New York with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camcorder, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) “transposes the premise of the 1936 chestnut Dracula’s Daughter to ungentrified, if elegantly black-and-white, NoHo,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. “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.”

I Shot Andy Warhol “was, for me, probably one of my favorite experiences,” Lili Taylor, who stars as Valeria Solanas, tells Christopher Aaron Blackmon in Interview. “I had come across the SCUM Manifesto in the early ’90s. I had found it in the City Lights Bookstore when I was doing Dogfight of all things.” Taylor bought it, read it, “and I was like, ‘This woman is so out there. I love this’ . . . What’s really wild is Mary [Harron], when she saw Dogfight, thought of me for I Shot Andy Warhol, which is also wild that she saw Valerie in that Rose character. I didn’t see it.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:22:00 +0000 <![CDATA[TIFF Classics, Wavelengths, and Centerpiece Lineups]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9241-tiff-classics-wavelengths-and-centerpiece-lineups
Sandra Wollner’s Everytime (2026)

One of the hottest tickets at Cannes this year was for the world premiere of the new restoration of Ken Russell’s director’s cut of The Devils (1971). The next stop on the festival circuit before Warner Bros. Clockwork launches a theatrical run on October 16 is Toronto (September 10 through 20), where The Devils will screen as part of the TIFF Classics program.

That lineup—announced today along with the selections for Toronto’s Wavelengths and Centerpiece programs—also includes the world premiere of a new restoration of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948), “universally acclaimed as one of the greatest of all Chinese-language films,” as Sean Gilman noted in his 2019 Notebook overview of influences on Jia Zhang-Ke. Another restoration seeing its world premiere is Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed (1996), “a serene, civilized art movie about necrophilia,” as Michael Atkinson described it in Spin. “Corpse-fucking isn’t a perversion here so much as a way to transcend death and touch the cosmic. I’m not kidding: Stopkewich has chutzpah enough to bench a car, and in terms of social taboos, her mysterious movie is a wrecking ball in perpetual swing.”

TIFF Classics will present North American premieres of a program of five short films by Artavazd Pelechian, John Abraham’s Report to Mother (1986), and Kon Ichikawa’s Ten Dark Women (1961), in which the nine mistresses of a television executive team up with his wife to kill him. “Following a noir-parody opening,” wrote Emiliano Morreale when Ten Dark Women screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in June, “the film develops through a series of plot twists toward an unexpected ending, with an ironic and paradoxical style that inverts male and female roles through virtuosic direction (the director produced a meticulous manga-style storyboard) and assembles a gallery of female characters and stereotypes, with touches of satire aimed at the television world.”

Wavelengths

Foregrounding “artist-driven works that embrace risk, defy convention, and challenge cinematic form,” this year’s Wavelengths will offer eleven features and four programs of short and medium-length films. Attendees will be treated to a sneak peek at Once Upon a Time in Harlem—David and William Greaves’s lively document of a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries—before the film sees a theatrical release on October 16.

There are two world premieres among the features, Yuula Benivolski’s The Black Box is Orange, which Wavelengths is calling “a multimodal essay film” that “balances the political with the poetic,” and John Torres’s The Remotes. According to its logline, The Remotes is set on “an island where humans are controlled as avatars by a mysterious voice in a driving app.”

Curators Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming have selected three films first seen in Berlin. Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries “draws from her work in the theater, where cataclysmic events often occur offstage, a convention dating back to the Greeks and cut to the measure of the material realities of what kinds of scenarios can practically be mounted before a live audience,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online. “In a way, this film could be seen as Schanelec’s attempt to bring her Bressonian frame to bear on the sorts of scenarios that might have appealed to Cassavetes.”

Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, featuring Bobby Sommer (Museum Hours) as a driver striking up conversations with the people he picks up along his regular route between Vienna and Salzburg, is “a peculiar kind of road movie,” finds InRO’s Chris Cassingham, “less about the limitless possibilities of the open road than it is about confinement. The result reveals as much about the state of the world as it does the man in the driver’s seat.” And Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise, a comedic chamber piece in which a musician hosts a television crew, has so far chalked up an impressive score of 4.1 on the Moirée critics’ grid.

Directors’ Fortnight launched Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom and Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel, in Cannes. At IndieWire, Vadim Rizov finds Alonso “dramatizing with very direct clarity his previously stated conviction that life in Argentina has become harder in the twenty-five years since his first film,” La libertad (2001). Writing for Film Comment, Beatrice Loayza senses that Jude is “less interested in the original’s bourgeois psychodramas of sex and murder than in wryly foregrounding its class divisions and adapting them to modern European dynamics of labor and exploitation.”

At Night, which artist and director Beatrice Gibson calls an “autofiction” in “the shape of a question,” and Denis Côté’s Nobody's Violence, starring Larissa Corriveau as a loner who helps people kill themselves, will both premiere in Locarno on Saturday. And Mariano Llinás’s five-and-a-half-hour Life of Jorge Luis Borges is slated to premiere out of competition in Venice.

Centerpiece

Fifty-four titles are lined up for Centerpiece, the program formerly known as Contemporary World Cinema. Ten of these are world premieres, and a record-setting eight are animated, including Sébastien Laudenbach’s Viva Carmen, a reimagining of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera that Variety’s Guy Lodge calls “a veritable triumph of movement, design, and above all, color.”

For the New Yorker’s Justin Chang, La Gradiva is “undoubtedly one of the year’s great discoveries.” Marine Atlan’s debut feature “follows a group of unruly French high-school seniors on a five-day class trip to Naples and Pompeii, where the weather is warm and the scenery gorgeous enough to keep college-admissions anxieties at bay. It’s a travel saga, a coming-of-age drama, and a movie of precisely drawn, superbly individuated young characters who are nonetheless locked in myriad crises of identity, flailing about for a deeper understanding of who they are.”

Another standout of the year so far is Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, in which a young woman’s mother, sister, and boyfriend struggle to cope with her sudden death. “Elevating low-key domestic portraiture with extraordinary technical finesse, toward a big-swing finale of radical conceptual daring,” writes Guy Lodge, “the Austrian filmmaker’s third feature felt like the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year’s Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, and duly won the top prize there.”

With The Dreamed Adventure, Valeska Grisebach “reworks the conventions of the gangster movie, spinning them into a grim, graceful, yet unassuming epic about the dangerous secrets of a community in Svilengrad, a dusty border town at the shared frontier of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey,” writes Beatrice Loayza at the top of her interview with the director for Film Comment.

And Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies “harks back in many ways to the captivating debut feature about adolescent ennui that put him on the map in 2004, Duck Season, not least in its appealingly unmanicured black-and-white aesthetic,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “It’s a movie whose relatively simple means of communication give it a disarming emotional directness.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:07:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Magnificent Melodramas]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9240-magnificent-melodramas
Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, and Robert Stack in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956)

Douglas Sirk “has made the tenderest films I know,” wrote Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1971. “They are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do.” Magnificent Melodramas: Douglas Sirk & Russell Metty, a series of six of the eleven films the director and cinematographer made together between 1952 and 1959, is currently running at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles through September 19.

For too many years before Fassbinder, Andrew Sarris, and others rescued Sirk from what Jon Halliday, writing in 1972, called “a kind of critical limbo,” the films “fell into the utterly disreputable category of ‘women's pictures,’” wrote Dave Kehr in the New York Times in 1999. “Though few, if any, critics registered what Sirk was up to, his work, seen today, amounts to a careful, Technicolor cataloguing of the fears and anxieties, the frustrations and contradictions, of an America then at the height of its postwar power and prestige.”

Five of the six films in the series are in searing color, and Metty would go on to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Color—from 1939 to 1966, there were separate Academy Awards for black-and-white and color cinematography—for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). But Metty also collaborated with Orson Welles on The Stranger (1946) and Touch of Evil (1958), offering more than enough evidence of his mastery of black and white.

Sirk and Metty decided to go monochrome with There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), starring Fred MacMurray as a businessman whose family suspects that he’s having an affair with an old employee (Barbara Stanwyck). The film “depicts the suburbs as a charming, cheerful, prosperous, frivolous wasteland,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2013.

“It’s very hard for me to pick a favorite Douglas Sirk movie,” noted novelist Megan Abbott in 2016, but in the end, she went with All That Heaven Allows (1956), which screens Thursday. Jane Wyman stars as a lonely widow who falls for her plaid-shirted gardener (Rock Hudson) but can’t bring herself to cross the social barriers between them. “No one understood melodrama like Sirk, or how to sharpen it into the dagger it’s meant to be,” wrote Abbott. Ryusuke Hamaguchi finds Metty’s work here “sublime. The way indoor spaces are flooded with warm colors while the outdoor ones are cool and blue creates this beautiful dynamic.”

Wyman and Hudson first appeared together in Magnificent Obsession (1954). He’s a playboy who crashes his speedboat and is then saved by the town’s only resuscitator—just when the doctor who’d been keeping it suffers a heart attack; without it, he dies. Wyman is the doctor’s widow who—spoiler alert—is going to end up with the playboy.

“Perhaps 1954 was the last time this material could have been filmed with a straight face, and Sirk films it with a ferociously straight face, one might say a demonically straight face,” wrote Geoffrey O’Brien in 2009. “Nothing could be further from the mood of Magnificent Obsession than cynical mockery, no matter how acute the director’s awareness that ‘this is a damned crazy story if there ever was one.’ Crazy it may be, but so were the situations favored by so many of the playwrights whose work Sirk had staged: Calderón, Kleist, Strindberg, Pirandello. He forces the questions: What if this weren’t crazy? What if it were real? What sort of a world would that be, and how different would it be from the one we inhabit?”

“American life is melodramatic,” writes Blair McClendon, “full of color, music, desire, pressure, and violence.” Depending on who’s doing the remembering, America in the 1950s was “either a populuxe wonderland or a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Written on the Wind (1956), starring Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone and “based on Robert Wilder’s racy 1946 novel, was the perfect vehicle to see how far Hollywood could go. It is a frenzied dance among changing partners who all want badly and behave poorly.”

John Gavin, who would later become president of the Screen Actors Guild and a U.S. ambassador to Mexico, stars in Sirk’s 1958 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1954 novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Gavin plays a German soldier wrestling with his conscience while fighting on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. With this film, Sirk “confronted Nazism more directly than ever before, creating one of his most psychologically perceptive and profoundly personal works,” wrote David Sterritt for Film International in 2014.

Ann Sheridan stars in Take Me to Town (1953) as Vermilion, a singer and dancer on the run in the wild, wild West. She finds work in a theater run by Rose (Lee Patrick), and the three young sons of a widowed preacher (Sterling Hayden) decide she’d make a great mom. “Sirk’s direction of the boys is among his loopiest comic inventions,” wrote Richard Brody in 2015, “but he uses the full Technicolor palette to display Vermillion and Rose in deep shadow and lurid streaks, conjuring vast depths of feeling and funds of wisdom arising from tawdry circumstances.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:52:00 +0000 <![CDATA[The Contemplative and the Corporal]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9239-the-contemplative-and-the-corporal Did You See This?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)

Described by the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard as “one of the most hotly anticipated dramas of the year,” Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone (The Dig) and written by Stephen Beresford (Pride), will open the seventieth BFI London Film Festival on October 7. Andrew Scott stars as Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor best known to movie fans for his winning turns in Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982).

Charleson’s Hamlet, though, is the stuff of London theater legend. He first played the melancholic Dane in the 1970s and then, when Daniel Day-Lewis bowed out of a 1989 National Theatre production, he took up the role again. Three years before, Charleson had been diagnosed with HIV, and it was clear that he only had months to live; director Richard Eyre overcame his initial hesitation and let him go on.

“Charleson’s performance, which ran for six weeks until mid-November, was widely felt to be one of the finest ever seen on stage,” writes Shoard. “The day after his final show, Ian McKellen refused the Evening Standard award for best actor and instead gave his statuette to Charleson.”

Behemoth!, directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Andor) and starring Pedro Pascal as “a cellist picking up the pieces of a fractured life,” will see its world premiere as the Centerpiece presentation of the New York Film Festival on October 2. San Sebastián (September 18 through 26) has announced an Official Selection that includes new work from Nicole Garcia, Hans Petter Moland, Pablo Larraín, and Mike Leigh, who, via IndieWire, has delivered deeply sad news: Tender Loving Care will “very likely” be his final film.

This week’s highlights:

  • Jimmy (2024) is the first feature from photographer Yashaddai Owens, who wrote, directed, edited, and shot his fleet-footed portrait of James Baldwin—who, at twenty-four, left Istanbul for Paris in 1948—on black-and-white 16 mm. Jimmy is now seeing a weeklong run at IFC Center, and Owens will be taking questions today, tomorrow, and Sunday. Benny O. Arthur “embodies Baldwin with an avid grasp of the contemplative and the corporal,” writes Lisa Kennedy in the New York Times. “Jimmy sees anew. He saunters. He pokes around parks and outdoor markets. In his room, he dances birdlike—a duckling turned swan! He conjures Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain as he moves along a boulevard. Only there’s no rain pouring down, just love bubbling up. And, finally, vitally, he begins writing. The scratching of pen to paper heralds a history beginning—his and ours.”

  • “The past inexorably haunts the present; it’s the idea that, most obviously, sits at the heart of [Kiyoshi] Kurosawa’s ghost stories but is often just as present in his ambient thrillers, his dramas, his comedies, and even his romances,” writes Fred Barrett. Amazingly, after spending more than forty years making nearly thirty features, Kurosawa has directed his first period drama. Adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel, The Samurai and the Prisoner is set in the besieged court of a samurai nobleman in sixteenth-century Osaka. When it premiered at Cannes, Jessica Kiang, writing for Variety, called it “a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse, and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice.” The New Yorker’s Justin Chang finds that “Yonezawa’s novel allows Kurosawa to do what he has always done best: track down killers, investigate lovingly detailed crime scenes, and apply the mechanics of murder plots toward gravely existential ends.”

  • After a brief shoutout to “one of my all-time favorite films,” Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet (1955), Michael Sicinski turns to Roberto Rossellini’s “amazingly lighthearted” The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). “By Rossellini’s reckoning,” writes Sicinski, “living in imitation of Christ makes one an outcast, an oddball, utterly at odds with the standard laws of society. In appealing to a higher law, Christianity makes you ungovernable, a bit of an anarchist.” David Hering, in the meantime, revisits Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983). While it’s “far from a direct adaptation” of Tolstoy’s The Forged Coupon, “one senses Bresson’s ongoing engagement with transferring the metaphysical conflicts of the nineteenth-century novel to a world in which religion is in retreat. There is no interventionist God in Bresson’s world, but God might nevertheless be present at all times: ‘There is the feeling that God is everywhere,’ he said in a 1973 interview. This quantum God, both absent and present simultaneously, is how I account for the simultaneously oppressive and trancelike qualities of Bresson’s films. Silence can be golden, and it can also be suffocating.”

  • As Brian De Palma’s Carrie turns fifty, Sitges (October 8 through 18) is paying homage with this year’s poster and a screening of a 4K restoration. Sissy Spacek’s “bloodstained, ramrod-straight body is the film’s signature image,” writes Matthew Eng at Reverse Shot, “though what endures in my memory is not so much the havoc that Carrie unleashes as the warmth radiated by Spacek. Her surplus of sensitivity, her alien tenderness, deepens the film and gives it an emotional immediacy that it would not otherwise possess.” De Palma’s Obsession was released just three months before Carrie, and at IndieWire, Jim Hemphill gets screenwriter Paul Schrader to explain to him why he and De Palma had a more or less permanent falling out over the project. Also: At Screen Slate, Patrick Dahl notes that De Palma’s Hi, Mom! (1970) “hilariously dunks on revolutionary art and activism without ever siding with The Man.”

  • A new issue of Senses of Cinema doesn’t need a dossier to be packed with reading to last to the end of summer. Salvador Carrasco takes a sixtieth-anniversary deep dive into Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, a film that figures into Pritish Das’s appreciation of the “enduring relevance” of Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968). Leonard Schwartz takes a close look at Susan Bee’s 2013 painting Pickpocket, in which an image from Bresson’s 1959 film “becomes other than what it was.” Colette de Castro finds in Dag Johan Haugerud’s 2024 Oslo trilogy Dreams, Sex, and Love “a utopian portrayal of consent in an ideal world, one in which consent is not based on power dynamics or gender and heterosexual norms but rather on desire and love.” And then, of course, there are the interviews, festival reports, book reviews, program notes, and new inductees into the Senses collection of essays on Great Directors: Abel Ferrara, Khavn, and Masaaki Yuasa.

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:47:00 +0000 <![CDATA[July Books]]> https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/9238-july-books
Gene Tierney in John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

As noted yesterday, Robert Kramer’s Walk the Walk (1996) will screen tomorrow and again on Monday at Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the Film Comment Live series Hold Everything Dear: John Berger and Cinema. Two years ago, as Re:Voir was restoring and rereleasing Kramer’s films, the Viennale was presenting a retrospective, and the Austrian Film Museum had just released Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer, Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais to take part in a discussion of Kramer and his work for the Film Comment Podcast.

“Amid the recent spate of screenings, books, and retrospectives tied to this sudden Kramer renaissance is Whitney Strub’s Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema,” writes Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, introducing his interview with the author for Screen Slate. “Strub has spent over a decade researching the life and work of the New Left filmmaker turned wayward expat, and his biography on the man is rigorous.” Films That Explode “assembles an incredible portrait of a veritable New Left Zelig, balancing out that chronicling with insightful commentary on a figure whose history has always been more akin to legend.”

Strub notes that Kramer cowrote and appeared in Troublemakers (1966), a documentary about organizing for change, and “was able to use that film to connect with Jonas Mekas, who then took him to the Pesaro Film Festival in 1967. He met all of the Italian filmmakers there. His datebook in his papers has phone numbers for Bertolucci, Pasolini, Straub-Huillet, and Agnès Varda. He knew how to make it into a scene and it helped that he was extremely attractive. People were drawn to him; he was smart, articulate, and charismatic. But no one is actually Forrest Gump. No one randomly sleepwalks through history. He would never admit it, because he was so anti-careerist rhetorically, but he knew how to be in the right place and meet the right people.”

Screen Slate is also running Andrea Torres’s interview with Collier Schorr, an artist and photographer whose work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial as well as on the covers of Interview and Rolling Stone. Schorr has documented her latest project—a reimagining, six years in the making, of Chantal Akerman’s first feature, Je tu il elle (1974), as a dance piece on video—in Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1.

“I think the reason why Chantal’s work, and Je tu il elle, was so inviting to me was that it was like a self-gaze,” says Schorr. “It’s very documentary-like, but also very unconscious because she’s the performer. She’s aware of being scrutinized and she has some kind of desire to be scrutinized. You don’t really get the sense that there’s a desirous exchange between her and the cinematographer, because I think she’s so clearly directing how the camera is operating in the room.”

Sprinting Through a Century

The memoirs of Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, spanning six volumes, “remain one of the most astonishing testaments to the first half of the twentieth century,” writes Paul Cuff, who has been spending time lately with Usine de rêves, the 1936 French edition Ehrenburg’s “cultural analysis of the film industry as it stood at the dawn of sound. More than a simple history of Hollywood or a report on the evolution of filmmaking, Ehrenburg creates a vivid picture of the key players dominating the industry and the ideologies shaping the marketplace.”

In Staging Nuremberg: How the United States and the Soviet Union Fought Over the Portrayal of Nazi Crimes, Sylvie Lindeperg, the author of Night and Fog: A Film in History, tracks two competing staging concepts. The Americans, of course, aimed to tell this story with the drive of a Hollywood narrative, while the Russians had plenty of show-trial expertise.

Farran Smith Nehme is pretty sure that Alfred Hitchcock saw Lawrence Huntington’s Wanted for Murder (1946), “given (among other points) the similarities between the fairground climax of Strangers on a Train (1951) and Huntington’s crowded, menacing scenes at a carnival.” Nehme’s essay on Huntington, a too-often overlooked but “highly effective stylist,” first appeared in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945–1960.

In his piece for the London Review of Books on Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema, Jonathan Coe notes that author Steven C. Smith naturally covers “the triple whammy of Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho.” Smith “analyses both the scores and the collaborative processes behind these three films in detail, but works of genius, oddly, are less interesting to read about than misfires and wrong turnings. Despite the fact that his book is written in a somewhat breathless journalistic style, its narrative tempo doesn’t really get lively again until we move past The Birds (soundtrack-wise, an interesting experiment in electronica, into which [Bernard] Herrmann entered wholeheartedly) and on to the ill-fated Marnie. Perhaps the best book written about this broken-backed film is Evan Hunter’s short memoir Me and Hitch, which tells the story of why he was fired from it.”

Will Scheibel’s Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front is “an engrossing read, starting with Tierney’s wartime efforts and tracing her successes and challenges as she alternated between fame and illness,” writes William Blick at Retreats from Oblivion. “Always thorough and painstaking in provision of details, the book prompted this reader to take a second look at World War II–era filmmaking and the studio system from a new perspective.”

The evolution of a great director is “beautifully delineated in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Cronin’s new book Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews, which assembles twenty-one interviews with Pollack conducted from 1970 to 2017,” writes Jim Hemphill for IndieWire. “The breadth and depth of the interviews and their arrangement in chronological order give the book the quality of an autobiography told in real time, as Pollack forms, tests, rejects, and rediscovers his own theories about filmmaking from his breakthrough hit, the harrowing Depression-era tragedy They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, to his final triumph, the smart and bittersweet thriller The Interpreter.”

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tim Brinkhof writes about Tom Sito’s Drawing Life Back Into Animation: A Personal Journey Through the Toon Renaissance of the 1990s and finds that the author has “a large repertoire” of “anecdotes to pull from.” Sito was “an animator on classics such as Disney’s Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), as well as Shrek (2001) from DreamWorks. He also worked closely with an animation director whose impact on the field is second only to Walt Disney: Richard ‘Dick’ Williams, remembered, among other things, for his contributions to Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and The Thief and the Cobbler, an unfinished passion project that consumed the bulk of his six-decade career. The first helped bring feature animation back from the dead. The second, despite its troubled development, remains one of the most ambitious and impressive animated films of all time.”

Rough Fictions

In the New York Times, Sam Lipsyte recommends oncologist, filmmaker, and writer Roshan Sethi’s debut novel, The Simp, the story of an unemployed actor, Raj Ladlani, who takes a job as a personal assistant to Jim and Anna, “white Hollywood A-listers” and a “performatively sensitive power couple” with a “heartbreakingly neglected child.” Lipsyte: “Beneath the novel’s deadpan, stinging depictions of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, The Simp also explores the painful but, in Sethi’s hands, bleakly comic ways race and colonial history collide with the dream of fame.”

In 1956, Bob Wade and Bill Miller, writing under the name Whit Masterson, wrote Badge of Evil, which Orson Welles then reworked as Touch of Evil (1958). “Every admirer of Welles—that is, every lover of cinema—will find endless fascination in perusing the point of origin of one of his greatest films,” writes James Morrison for Film International. “Every devotee of film noir should be grateful to Stark House Press for their judicious and varied curation of a series of books from which some of the classics derived.”

“LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.” So says Jake Deal, a livestreamer racing between crime scenes and one of three main characters in Jordan Harper’s fourth thriller, A Violent Masterpiece. “In some ways the novel is a classic LA noir, with three characters confronting secretive forces that run the city,” writes Carolyn Kellogg in the Atlantic. “At the same time, it is a vivifying refresh, with ripped-from-the-headlines villains.” Kellogg argues that noir “can’t get by on plot alone. Almost every page of A Violent Masterpiece has a spark and crackle of language, detail, idea.” With Red Sheet, on the other hand, James Ellroy “tries to get by on plot alone.”

Forthcoming

Next month will see the publication of Body Horror: Biology, Biopower, Biotechnology, in which Xavier Aldana Reyes tracks the evolution of the subgenre from David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) to Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). The official release of Drew Pisarra’s Diabolically Good: The Movie Career and Afterlife of Horror Icon Vincent Price is slated for next month as well.

Persheng Vaziri’s Documenting Iran: Filmmakers and Social Change arrives on August 25, and Cheshire on Film—a cross between a memoir and a critical anthology from critic Godfrey Cheshire, a crucial champion of Iranian cinema—will be out on September 1. Two days later, two additions to Bloomsbury’s Movies Minute by Minute series will be released: Stephen Lee Naish’s Point Break, a detailed study of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action movie, and Johanna Isaacson’s Sisters, an analysis of Brian De Palma’s 1972 horror classic.

The rollout of Decadent Editions from Fireflies Press will be back on track with the September 22 publication of Anwen Crawford’s Morvern Callar, a study of Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 follow-up to her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999). Lauren Theisen and Emily St. James’s Every Time a Bell Rings: The Legacy and Meaning of It’s a Wonderful Life, America’s Most Beloved Holiday Film will arrive on September 29.

Elaine Kagan, who started out as a secretary to John Cassavetes and later landed roles in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), and dozens more films and television shows, has stories to tell. They’re collected in The Picture Business, which hits shelves on October 6.

Variety’s Alex Ritman reports that MUBI Editions has teamed up with the Cinémathèque française to publish The Faust Bible: The Making of F. W. Murnau’s Masterpiece on October 17. The book will “bring to light a recently unearthed artefact of film history,” notes Ritman, “a visual diary of approximately four hundred photographs and original illustrations documenting the making of the film almost step-by-step.”

Listening

Notable recent guests on Guide for the Film Fanatic include Sarah Welch-Larson, the author of Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, and Isaac Butler (The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars), who chats with hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull about Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).

John Bleasdale, the host of Writers on Film, talks with Samira Ahmed about her new book on Richard Lester’s first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Nick Dawson, host of the Talkhouse podcast Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, spends some time with Abel Ferrara, whose memoir, Scene, was published last fall. And Tony Lee Moral is in the Projection Booth, discussing his new book, A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy.

Endnotes

Jonathan Rosenbaum has a newsletter now, and subscribers are privy to the esteemed critic’s thoughts on new releases such as Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and writing from the archives such as a 2010 review of Tony Pipolo’s Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film for Cineaste that’s never appeared online before. Jonathan Monovich’s interview with Joseph McBride for Film International, in the meantime, is sparked by the recent publication of the film historian and screenwriter’s I Loved Movies, But . . . , an extended look back on his life and work in a conversation with film critic and sports writer Danny Peary.

To go out with a bang, let’s flag Bram Van Beek’s big summertime roundup of new releases for Sabzian. Here we find notes on stories by Eric Rohmer; essays by Louise Brooks and Erika Balsom; a portrait of Maurice Pialat; collections of writing by Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki, and Michael Almereyda; and much more.

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000