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Alex Gibney’s Musk

David Hudson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:53:00 +0000

Alex Gibney’s Musk (2026)

In a recent cover story for the Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik calls documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney “the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward.” Gibney won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, and he’s won Emmys for Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), which traces the history of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015).

In 2022, Gibney and his team began working on a film about Elon Musk for HBO. Within two years, they had what they considered to be a pretty solid account of the South African–born software engineer who developed an uncanny talent for turning money-losing companies into personal cash cows before cofounding PayPal (and then stepping away), founding SpaceX, taking over Tesla and the satellite network Starlink, cofounding OpenAI (and then stepping away), and taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, where his own account is boosted while others—particularly those expressing views he disagrees with—are throttled.

By 2024, though, Musk was actively campaigning for—and to a considerable degree, helping to finance—the reelection of Donald Trump. Dressed in black and describing himself as “dark, gothic MAGA,” Musk joined the second Trump administration as the overseer of the newly launched Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is widely believed to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands around the world.

HBO encouraged Gibney to carry on working on Musk, whose running time swelled from two hours to six before being whittled back down to around four. Immediately after the film’s premiere in Venice, Alex Spiro, an attorney acting on behalf of Musk, issued a legal threat. Gibney was not fazed. He’s been down this particular road many times before. But as THR’s Etan Vlessing reports, Gibney is worried about the eventual fate of his film.

It’s screening this month in Toronto and is slated for a theatrical release next month, but Paramount’s eventual takeover of Warner Bros. may lead to a dead end at HBO Max. “Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter,” noted Gibney on Sunday. “And his son David Ellison,” the current CEO of Paramount Skydance, “has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi who happens to be the President of the United States. So that is a deep concern. But so far, so good.”

If the Ellisons turn out to be a roadblock, reviews will certainly not be. “If most of what [Gibney] presents here about Musk isn’t particularly new,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times, “there is a fearsome power to the way the director brings it all together. Musk isn’t just a pesky fixture in the news cycle. Gibney’s mega-portrait asks us to look at the sum of his actions and take him seriously as a threat to democracy.”

“None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here,” writes Steven Zeitchik. Musk is “an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches—but [he] can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.”

“Predictably,” writes Leonardo Goi in his Notebook dispatch from Venice, “Gibney could not land a tete-à-tete with his subject, leaving Musk to summon a second-hand portrait sketched by reformed disciples and longtime skeptics. It also resorts to deep-fake technology to stage talking head–style segments where a digitally created Musk spouts some of the deranged stuff he’s said in public, a choice that befits the fake persona he’s nurtured and opportunistically tweaked through the years.”

Addressing Musk’s hard swerve to the right—especially during and after the pandemic, Musk established close ties with Argentina’s Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the ascendant right-wing parties in France, Germany, and the UK—Slate’s Sam Adams points out that Gibney shows how Musk “found on Twitter an endless stream of pseudo-information to rationalize his own biases, the ultimate resource for a man who had come to believe that his own gut was the most reliable source of all. He discovered that his most unrestrained statements—which is to say, often, his most racist or sexist or simply cracked—got the biggest response, and he followed the trail his followers laid out for him.”

Ultraconservative and anti-trans influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has had a child with Musk, is one of Gibney’s interviewees, and as Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri notes, she “utters the film’s most terrifying line when she discusses the danger that Musk represents through his collusion with the government and his harnessing of the satellite technology that now effectively runs much of the world: ‘Elon is a nuke,’ she says.”

“This declaration comes near the end,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear, “and by that time, there’s more than enough evidence from the prosecution to suggest St. Clair’s sentiment should be taken very, very seriously. It’s not just that Musk has amassed a staggering amount of money, power, and influence. By this point, he seems to be all in on using these things to push an agenda that goes beyond self-preservation and enrichment, and now flirts with annihilation. Most portraits simply give you a sketch of the subject. This one gives you existential chills. It’s designed to scare the living shit out of you.”

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Jeremy Thomas: An Astonishing Career

David Hudson — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:53:00 +0000

Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021)

“One of the greatest film producers, Jeremy Thomas, died last night,” posted writer and filmmaker Mark Cousins on Saturday. “I made it back from America to be with him at the end. We drank red wine and cried. Truly loved him.”

Cousins is probably best known for his epic 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, but he’s also made “more, shall we say, idiosyncratic works,” as Matt Zoller Seitz puts it at RogerEbert.com. The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018), for example, is framed as what Glenn Kenny has called an “unabashedly, unapologetically personal” letter to the director.

For Seitz, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021) is “one of Cousins’s best and most entrancing films. It’s a ‘road movie’ that follows Thomas, the producer of The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Sexy Beast, Crash, Naked Lunch, and other notable features, as they drive from the UK to the Cannes Film Festival, with both Thomas and his biographer ruminating on what the work means and where it came from.”

“The job of film producer has always been notoriously hard to define,” wrote Mark Olsen at the top of his review in the Los Angeles Times, “because it can be so many different things: creative coach, finance manager, general facilitator, problem solver.” So, which is it? The Storms of Jeremy Thomas “basically answers ‘all of the above.’ At one point in the film, Thomas himself describes producing as ‘putting together people, ideas, and money.’”

A few years ago, Glenn Kenny hosted a Q&A with Thomas following a screening of Cousins’s film and hung out with him a bit outside of the theater bar while the legendary producer fired up a joint (and for the record, Kenny abstained). On Saturday, Kenny reflected on Thomas’s legacy in a piece with a killer title, “Come On, Don’t You Want to See a David Cronenberg Movie of Naked Lunch?”

“Thomas had filmmaking in his blood,” writes Kenny. “His dad was Peter Thomas, who directed Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn in The Iron Petticoat on the one hand, and the penis-transplant-movie-with-a-Kinks-soundtrack Percy on the other. His uncle Gerald Thomas directed a slew of Carry On comedies. He spoke of his relatives with pride, and gratitude for what they had taught him; he wasn’t the least bit abashed by their work. He knew, as the best film workers do, that the love and the heartbreak and the headaches and the just damned hard work of picture-making is largely the same no matter what genre or register you’re working in. The last thing to be in this business is a snob.”

“A brilliant and inexhaustibly creative man,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “self-effacingly charming and quietly spoken in a world of loudmouths and show-offs, and hypervigilant for new talent,” Thomas “was more like a cross between an entrepreneur, an enigmatically clever and kindly Cambridge don, and the movie world’s favorite cool uncle, or maybe cool great-uncle.”

Raised in London, Thomas began working right out of school as an assistant editor on such films as Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972). The first film he produced was Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan (1976), starring Dennis Hopper as a real-life outlaw in 1850s Australia.

When he returned to England, Thomas teamed up for the first time with Jerzy Skolimowski on The Shout (1978), and the pair would reteam—with Thomas serving as either producer or executive producer—on Essential Killing (2010), 11 Minutes (2015), and EO (2022). In 1980, Thomas made the first of three features with Nicolas Roeg, Bad Timing, followed by Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985).

After producing Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1982), Thomas turned to Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth as British gangsters in Spain. “Frears turns this fish-out-of-water phenomenon of nouveau riche cockney gangsters seeking Shangri-La in Andalusia into a moral fable fraught with fatalism, an idea that clearly fascinated Jeremy Thomas,” writes Graham Fuller. “Sixteen years later, he and director Jonathan Glazer made Sexy Beast, in which the good life enjoyed by retired safecracker Gal (Ray Winstone) on the Costa del Sol is rocked by the psychotic Logan (Ben Kingsley), sent by his boss to bring Gal to London for a heist.”

Then came the towering milestone of an astonishing career, The Last Emperor (1987), independently produced, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and the first—and so far, only—Western production that the Chinese government allowed inside the Forbidden City. “This was an epic of foreign coproduction, filled with the hope that China was ready to be a part of the whole world again,” wrote David Thomson in 2009. “And, yes, this is the film that won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay,” but “don’t be misled by all this pomp and glory. The Last Emperor is better than that—especially if you realize early on that it’s not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.”

Further Thomas and Bertolucci projects include The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), Stealing Beauty (1996), and The Dreamers (2003). In 2014, Sight and Sound’s Nick James sat down with Thomas for a long and relaxed chat. One anecdote segued into the next, and when it came to Bertolucci, Thomas noted that “there was a gaiety around his shoots. Lunch was a very important part of the filmmaking experience. It was a great lesson in how to handle talent.”

“A Jeremy Thomas production should always be pleasurable,” suggested James. “There’s no point otherwise,” said Thomas. “This is why I have trouble with minimalist cinema. For me a film should have aspirations to be grand. What’s going on is a privileged collaborative creative moment between a group of people. Travelling and arriving are very different. The travelling part is always magnificent in the memory, the arriving just okay.”

Luca Guadagnino interviewed Thomas for his seven-hour-plus documentary on Bertolucci, Joie de vivre, which has just premiered in Venice. “Jeremy Thomas’s death leaves a gigantic void,” Guadagnino tells Variety. “The space he was fulfilling was a space of pure cinema. Someone who knew how to collaborate with filmmakers and make them better, and how to be himself—a great filmmaker.”

Thomas did, in fact, direct one feature, All the Little Animals (1998), starring Christian Bale as a mentally impaired young man who takes shelter in the home of a recluse played by John Hurt. Roger Ebert noted that the film “has a fearsome single-mindedness that suggests deep Jungian origins.”

Thomas “loved directors,” Terry Gilliam tells Variety. Gilliam, who worked with Thomas on Tideland (2005) and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), adds that the producer was “fearless in getting some very unlikely films financed and released, often to worldwide success . . . Most of all, he was a joy to work with. You always felt protected and encouraged, rare qualities to experience, especially when lack of time and money are swirling around you, raging at your head. Filmmaking is not cheap, and the pressures are intense, but Jeremy always remained calm and supportive. He was a rare and very unique gem in the world of producers.”

Further collaborations hammer home Gilliam’s comments: Karel Reisz (Everybody Wins, 1990), Cronenberg (Naked Lunch, 1991; Crash, 1996; A Dangerous Method, 2011), Takeshi Kitano (Brother, 2000), Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation, 2006), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013), Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, 2015), Matteo Garrone (Tale of Tales, 2015), and Takashi Miike (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, 2011; Blade of the Immortal, 2017; First Love, 2019). And Miike’s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo has just premiered in Toronto.

“We promised to celebrate the world premiere here in Toronto and have a good drink together,” Miike tells Variety. “This sudden news came out of nowhere, leaving me completely in shock and deeply saddened. Jeremy gave me my wings—he was a great mentor and an irreplaceable friend. Rest in peace for now. Until we meet again.”

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Underrepresented, Women Triumph in Venice

David Hudson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:59:00 +0000

Mathilde Arcel and Flora Yde Sander in May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown (2026)

“I actually didn’t see Woman Unknown,” quipped jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal at a press conference following Saturday night’s presentation of the awards at the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. “I just was like, ‘It’s made by a woman and so, Golden Lion!’”

Launching the always-teeming fall festival season, Venice opened nearly two weeks ago with another press conference in which Gyllenhaal was asked to address the paucity of women filmmakers in the main competition lineup. Only one of the twenty-one contenders, May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, was directed solely by a woman, while NAZA, a late addition, was codirected by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham. “There’s a systemic problem,” said Gyllenhaal. “It’s harder for women to get films financed.”

On Saturday, Gyllenhaal noted that she naturally “anticipated” being asked whether she and her fellow jury members—filmmakers Kaouther Ben Hania, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat, and Johnnie To; composer Daniel Blumberg; and theorist Francesco Casetti—had given the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Woman Unknown because May el-Toukhy is a woman. “I just want to celebrate a beautifully made movie that I felt was like a laser beam just for the well-made movie that it is,” she said.

El-Toukhy broke through in 2019 with Queen of Hearts, which was remade in 2023 by Catherine Breillat as Last Summer, and she has told the Hollywood Reporter’s Lily Ford that she worked “sixteen hours a day for more than a year” to make Woman Unknown. “I’ve spent all my savings. I’ve used every part of me to make this film and all the resources, all the muscle power I have.”

Her story is set in Copenhagen in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Danish women accused of consorting with Nazi occupiers—“often regardless of evidence or circumstance,” as Hannah Strong notes in Little White Lies—were dragged out onto the street by the Resistance to be publicly shamed, their hair shorn, their clothes shredded, their naked bodies smeared with swastikas. “This is an angry, despairing film,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at IndieWire. “The spectacle of a supposedly freedom-fighting group, not so much over-correcting in the wake of collective trauma, but weaponizing that very trauma to unleash hell on a vulnerable group evokes Haneke-level bleakness in its assessment of human nature.”

Mathilde Arcel, who won the Coppa Volti for Best Actress, stars in her first feature as Marie, a housemaid and nanny engaged to her employer (Carsten Bjornlund), a widowed clothing manufacturer. Marie “carries herself as if permanently bound in a corset,” writes Beatrice Loayza in Variety, “breath held, mouth tight, her eyes shifty as if dreading the next reprimand. It makes sense given her workplace’s exacting standards, in which place settings are arranged according to centimeter-precise measurements and stony head maid Esther (Marina Bouras) is always watching.”

The screws are tightened when an old classmate (Thorbjorn Hedegaard) threatens to reveal a secret from Marie’s past. “Shot by Jasper Spanning,” writes Jonathan Romney for Film Comment, “this is a rigorous, intensely claustrophobic film, and Arcel’s performance is terrific—at first inscrutable, then agonizingly intense as Marie’s inner conflicts lead her to the point of explosion.” Woman Unknown screens tomorrow, Thursday, and Sunday in Toronto and next month in London.

Jury Prizes

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, which explores the tense and complex dynamics between two married couples, won the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize. We took a first look at early reviews last week, and we’ll likely hear a lot more about Lee’s first feature since Burning (2018), especially when it screens at the New York Film Festival. For now, though, let’s simply note that Jessica Kiang, who has turned in an outstanding review for Variety, expands on her enthusiasm—engagingly and at length—in a conversation with Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw.

The Special Jury Prize went to NAZA, whose title references an Israeli military acronym for the number of civilian casualties expected with each strike against a single target in the country’s ongoing campaign against Hamas in Gaza. “At one point,” notes Xan Brooks in the Guardian, a producer of the film, “approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.”

Introducing his interview with Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—who codirected the Oscar-winning No Other Land (2024) with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and are now being accused of treason by Israel’s culture minister, who is threatening to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship—the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough calls NAZA “one of the most shocking and controversial documentaries of the year. It may also prove to be one of the most indispensable.”

“The film’s setup is disarmingly simple,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. On rooftops in Tel Aviv, Abraham talks with twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers. It’s night, so they can’t be seen, and their voices are altered to safeguard their anonymity. The interviewees explain how they use AI to determine targets and then send out drones to complete the job.

“They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll,” writes Ebiri. “These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents. The murders were, again, part of a system. ‘Do you think it’s a genocide?’ Abraham asks one of his subjects. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ is the response.”

Director, Screenplay, and More

The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who has spent twenty years working on a project inspired by the life and times of quantum physicist Lev Landau, spawning plenty of controversy as well as two features, a television series, and an installation in Paris—so far. More features and series are planned, but the latest iteration, entitled simply Dau, presents itself as a sort of summing-up.

“Weighing in at just over 200 minutes,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “and spanning four decades in the life of a physicist involved in the Soviet atom-bomb project, the film certainly announces itself as a grave and major work. But beneath the impressive, sometimes seizure-threatening sound and fury of its formal construction, Dau feels dramatically and rhetorically thin: It plays as an avant-garde counterpart to such American films as Oppenheimer and The Brutalist (whose Oscar-winning DP, Lol Crawley, is one of three credited here), which likewise portrayed the social and ideological turmoil of a historical era through the portrait of a single tortured man.”

Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo, and Olivier Gorce won the award for Best Screenplay. Directed by Brizé, A Good Little Soldier stars Alba Rohrwacher as “a woman swimming in the turbulent waters of middle management, trying to both appease her superiors and deal with problematic employees who can’t seem to get along,” as Jordan Minter describes her in the Hollywood Reporter. “If the somewhat sardonic tone of A Good Little Soldier, as well as its focus on a female protagonist struggling to maintain her place in the hierarchy while also being a good mom, is something of a departure for the French auteur, this is very much a Brizé movie through and through. In other words, the film is tense, realistic, and compellingly performed . . . but also a bit schematic and didactic.”

John Malkovich, who costars in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine with Sam Rockwell, won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor. The year is 1973, and the CIA has sent a bickering pair of agents to Easter Island on a mission that has something to do with the destabilization of Chile’s democracy not long before a military coup will overthrow Salvador Allende and his governing coalition. Malkovich is “having fun here, and his pleasure becomes our delight,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek.

The Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress went to Malou Khebizi for her turn in Cédric Kahn’s A Place to Heal, which the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls “a docu-realist study” of a psychiatric facility for teens aged between fifteen and eighteen. In this “powerful and committed” film, writes Bradshaw, Khebizi plays Lucia, “a defiantly sexualized wild child with a clear issue of abuse in her background, permanently at war with her mum, involved in chaotic abuse for which the term ‘sex work’ is not entirely accurate.”

Orizzonti

In Diane in the Loop, the winner of the award for Best Film in the Orizzonti program spotlighting up-and-coming talent, twenty-eight-year-old Diane (Ninon Borsei) discovers that her mother (Sandrine Black) was raped a few years before she was born. And she’s out for revenge. The film’s producers are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and as Matt Zoller Seitz writes at RogerEbert.com, “writer-directors Anne Sirot and Raphaël Balboni not only honor the masters but also infuse the tale with dry humor and a playful air of mystery that is uncharacteristic of them, which makes the movie bearable when it goes dark.”

Jacqueline Lentzou (Moon, 66 Questions) won the award for Best Director for her second feature, A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra. Fifteen-year-old Jo (Evita Andriopoulou) is dealing with a series of everyday frustrations as well as a crush on a new friend, Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou), when nightfall brings “a devastating narrative left-turn,” as Hannah Strong puts it. The film’s “final moments are among its most affecting, carefully, quietly showing the void left by a senseless loss.”

Jury president Valérie Donzelli; our own president, Peter Becker; and fellow jurors Elizabeth Lo, David Pablos, and Barbara Ronchi presented a Special Orizzonti Jury Prize to House of the Wind, which also won the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for the best first feature in any competitive program at the festival. Writer-director Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu dedicates the film to his mother, Josette Kwanya, who turned in her starring role before passing away in 2024. House of the Wind is “a compelling study of old age, solitude, and solidarity between generations against the backdrop of contemporary economic challenges in the director’s native Cameroon,” writes Jonathan Romney for Screen.

Director Tommaso Landucci and cowriter Damiano Femfert won the award for Best Screenplay for Children of the Monkey, starring Riccardo Scamarcio, who won the Best Actor award, and Lidiya Liberman as a couple who devote their lives to caring for their disabled son. “This is a heart-wrenching but effective examination of a number of complex themes, carefully woven together into a lively, poetic depiction of the challenges that come with parenthood,” writes Matthew Joseph Jenner for the International Cinephile Society.

Giornate and Critics’ Week

Giornate degli Autori, the sidebar founded in 2004 and modeled on the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, showcases ten films each year, and this year’s GdA Director’s Award went to María Aparicio for Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion. Eva Bianco plays a woman passing through Madrid when she’s approached by an Argentine historian (Roger Koza) at the Reina Sofía Museum.

The jury headed by filmmaker Carla Simón issued a statement: “We left the cinema deeply moved, by a sadness and a spirit of rebellion that do not oppose one another, but coexist as two faces of the same disorientation.”

The winner of the Grand Prize at the forty-first Settimana Internazionale della Critica, the independent parallel section organized by the National Union of Italian Film Critics, is Tommaso Usberti’s Before the War. Piero Usberti, the director’s brother, stars as the young and proudly macho Guido, whose worldview is upended when he finds himself falling for Sonia, a Kosovar immigrant to Guido’s small town in northern Italy.

Jurors Chloé Barreau, Júlia Berkes, and Caterina Mazzucato praised Before the War as a film that “relies as much on silence as on words, where sound and music become a battlefield in their own right to explore urgently contemporary themes: toxic masculinity, impossible desire and the individual’s profound loneliness.”

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Turning Points

David Hudson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:35:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears (2022)

The trailer has racked up nearly six million views and become an instant meme. Codirected by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim, whose Primetime has premiered in Venice to mixed-to-positive reviews, You Can See Everything was the big surprise screening at Telluride last weekend and is now the latest addition to the lineup of this year’s New York Film Festival.

In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her health-tech company Theranos, and one month before she began serving an eleven-month sentence in the summer of 2023, she gave Fielder, Oppenheim, and their small crew wide-open access to her home. “What begins as a fascinatingly intimate portrait of a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals as something even wilder, more ambitious, and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all,” writes Angie Han in the Hollywood Reporter.

Around halfway into the three-hour running time of You Can See Everything, Holmes is off to prison, and “controlling partner Billy Evans takes center stage, along with the real star of the film, a celebrated actress that Fielder recruits to help him in his inquiry,” notes Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Moderating the Q&A after the premiere at Telluride, Emma Stone, Fielder’s costar in The Curse, “called this section of the movie a ‘rom-com caper’ and she’s not far off.”

As Venice heads into its final weekend, Toronto has opened with Being Heumann, starring Ruth Madeley as disability-rights activist Judy Heumann and directed by Siân Heder, whose Coda (2021) won four top awards at Sundance and three Oscars. Heder lets Being Heumann “get shaggy, which appropriately captures the smoky, late-’70s vibe of these hippy-ish protesters,” writes Richard Lawson for the Guardian. “Heder’s ensemble, perhaps the largest cast of disabled actors this critic has ever seen, grooves on this energy, having poignant fun with the anarchy of it all. Eventually, though, things have to get more serious, because these are serious matters, and Heder’s film flattens into something far more generic.”

We’re in Toronto, too—not with the Criterion Mobile Closet this year but with our first brick-and-mortar store. You’ll find Cinema Cellar at 129 John Street, not far from TIFF Lightbox and the Scotiabank Theatre. Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Silent Film Festival is on through the weekend, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting Alternative Visions through November 18. João César Monteiro, Poet-Provocateur is on at the Harvard Film Archive through October 30, and the Yale Film Archive is hosting Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series through December 17.

Andrei Ujică, “one of contemporary cinema’s finest film essayists,” is being celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through Wednesday just as Meridian, a collection of Claudia Nedelcu Duca’s interviews with Ujică, is coming out from Sticking Place Books. There are also series on in New York dedicated to the work of the late Anja Breien, and in conjunction with the publication of Music Sets You Free, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Sight and Sound is republishing its 1970 interview with Claude Chabrol as his films screen at BFI Southbank and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ICA will also host the UK premiere of Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS (1987) and screen two more films by Howard Brookner as well as Aaron Brookner’s 2016 tribute, Uncle Howard. And in Vienna, the Austrian Film Museum is presenting The Early Spring of Chinese Cinema 1922–1964 through October 22.

Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that, with TCM, we’re copresenting a new season of The Plot Thickens, the podcast hosted by Ben Mankiewicz. Stanley Kubrick, an eleven-episode series, begins on September 24.

“Iranian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century inevitably calls to mind poetry, stillness, contemplation, nature, and illumination,” writes Ali Farahmand in the new Brooklyn Rail. “From Sohrab Shahid Saless to Abbas Kiarostami, from Amir Naderi to Bahram Beyzaie, and across much of post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmaking, one encounters a common faith in omission and narrative economy—a faith that strips the image of immediate spectacle to create space for reflection.” But in the twenty-first century, films by such directors as Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, and Mohammad Rasoulof share “a common impulse: a movement away from metaphor and toward lived reality . . . In a world where the street, the prison, violence, and death continually intrude upon everyday life, can metaphor still remain the privileged path to truth, or must the poet inevitably become a witness?”

Mark Asch has a terrific piece in the Baffler on films about researchers delving into archives. “Shot in large part in the Gothic environs of academic libraries,” writes Asch, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor “chases a nagging, marginal query into the dimmest parts of the stacks, where a narrative is reanimated for posterity, page by page.” The “satire of academia” in Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (2018) is “more acid,” while an “on-screen academic’s feeling of communion with the past, and commensurate anxiety over her obligation to it, is also a major component of a series of films made by the director Sofia Bohdanowicz and star Deragh Campbell,” including Veslemøy’s Song (2018) and MS Slavic 17 (2019).

Taking Steven Shaviro’s new book Neptune Frost: Movies Minute by Minute as an inspiration and guide, Charles Tonderai Mudede writes in the new e-flux Journal about “the most important Afrofuturist work of this decade, poet Saul Williams and playwright Anisia Uzeyman’s 2021 film . . . What Neptune Frost—and Shaviro’s analysis—make clear is that for an interpretation of technological development to be meaningful, it must not be universalized but specific to capitalism. Advanced technologies do not come from the stars (Black Panther) nor from the distant past (Sun Ra), but from ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in an economic system that came into existence four hundred years ago. If this fact is missed, then the future, and therefore science fiction, is also lost. And if the future is lost, then Afrofuturism as a movement is worthless. Our battles are in front of us, not behind us.”

When Alan Jacobs reads James Agee, David Thomson, or Pauline Kael, it “doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.” Jacobs’s essay in the Hedgehog Review on the critics he returns to most often focuses primarily on Kael: “Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her ‘reviews’ was a chapter in her autobiography—an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions. For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life.”

At Defector, Vikram Murthi looks back on three summer hits, all of them tinged with horror and made by extraordinarily young men. Curry Barker’s Obsession attempts “to critique misogyny while playing up ‘crazy girlfriend’ clichés for shocks or laughs,” while Kane Parsons’s Backrooms “fares slightly better with regards to subtext, but its obliquely creepy vibes run headfirst into a trite pop-psychology framework and some insipidly unreal monsters. In sharp contrast,” the “allegorical surface” of Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, in which four recent graduates find themselves stuck on a seemingly endless road to nowhere, “allows for multiple universal and generation-specific interpretations.” Murthi notes that in a 2024 Filmmaker profile, Ullom remarked: “The promise of a future or nuclear family is dead, so enter the world and form your own moral system, and good luck.”

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Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar

David Hudson — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:53:00 +0000

Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar (2026)

“Simply put,” wrote Robert Greene for Sight and Sound in 2020, “all movies are hybrids.” By that point, Greene had made a string of features—Fake It So Real (2011), Actress (2014), Kate Plays Christine (2016), and Bisbee ’17 (2018)—that delved further and further into the conviction that he expressed in a 2014 essay for the same magazine, namely, “that I prefer to see the relationship between fiction and nonfiction more as an unstable continuum.” And as “the kind of marketing term” that “might be useful in some vague branding sense,” hybrid is “ultimately reductive and potentially damaging to the films to which it becomes attached.”

In 2021, Greene pressed deeper into a realm where fiction and nonfiction are doing much more than blurring the lines between them with Procession, in which six men who had been abused by priests collaborated with Greene and his crew to create reenactments of the most traumatic episodes of their lives. Now, with Too Much Sugar, which has premiered in the Orizzonti program in Venice, Greene is enriching his collaborative process with his subjects.

Or, as Jordan Mintzer puts it in the Hollywood Reporter, Greene is “creating a unique form of cine-therapy that has become the indie auteur’s trademark. Here, he turns the camera on a pair of friends from the tiny rural enclave of Moberly, Missouri, revealing working-class men marked by euphoria and heartbreak, love and family trauma, pranks and pathos in a seldom-depicted pocket of small-town America.” Greene encourages ex-convicts and best buds Ryan “Holli-wood” Holliger and Michael “AccRite” Midgyett as well as members of their families to make short films depicting their own lives as they wish they could be.

“We might see Holliger yelling instructions to his son as he teaches him how to punch,” explains Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, and “a few minutes later, we see the son doing the same to Holliger, a role reversal for the movie they’re making. Elsewhere, a realistic fight breaks out—until someone yells cut. Pretend tears become real tears. The movies these people make have one foot in genre and another in the awful truth. One kid wants to make a supernatural fantasy, another a gangster movie, another a boxing movie. Holliger’s mom, diagnosed with breast cancer, wants to make a horror movie about her cancer, called Die Cancer, Die!”

For Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com, what ultimately makes Too Much Sugar “powerful, as opposed to merely intriguing, is its mid-narrative pivot toward AccRite. He’s been a broken husk ever since he lost one of his sons, then sixteen, in a senseless shooting after a house party. AccRite wants to make a time-travel thriller in which he rescues his son and brings him forward into the future where he can live a full life. The agony emanating from AccRite’s haunted face and often watery eyes is almost too much to take . . . That so many of these moments could be either real, caught-on-camera eruptions of pure pain, or improvisational theater exercises that mutate into primal scream therapy further emphasizes the film’s belief that, deep down, everyone knows how to act, and would use it for therapeutic purposes all the time if they only knew how.”

“By the time I got to seventh grade, when I was about twelve years old, I had lived in fifteen different places,” Greene tells Nataliia Serebriakova in an interview for the International Cinephile Society. “So when you move around that much as a kid, you learn that you are a different person in every single one of those places . . . That was something that, through the process of making these films, I realized I had done, and I realized that is why I was obsessed with it. Through making films that are about people’s realities, but then watching them perform what they want to be, what they hope to be, what they dream to be, and all these other things, you realize that that is what we all do. That is survival.”

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Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love

David Hudson — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:50:00 +0000

Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong in Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love (2026)

Throughout the Labor Day weekend, premieres of some of the season’s most promising films were popping off in Venice and Telluride. The first episodes of the fall marathon are out from the Film Comment Podcast and The Last Thing I Saw, and critics are posting ratings to the grid at Moirée. While some are scoping out Oscar prospects for a few standout performances—for example, Julianne Moore’s in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, Robert Pattinson’s in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, and Andrew Scott’s in Simon Stone’s Elsinore—others have been enthralled by what the Hollywood Reporter is calling the “sensation” of Venice, Possible Love, the first feature from Lee Chang-dong since Burning (2018).

“Clocking in at 164 minutes, it’s a huge, novelistic work,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Lee, already a master of absorbing dramas, has made what might be the most powerful, political, hypnotic film of his career.” Venice’s eighty-third edition, “and awards season in general, is filled with bravura performances, with brilliant actors doing high-wire acts that pull us into their characters’ realities while also allowing us to admire the risks the actors themselves are taking. By contrast, the characters and the performances in Possible Love creep up on us, steadily and slowly, until we’re so invested in their lives that even minor events can take our breath away.”

Sul Kyung-gu, who starred in Lee’s Peppermint Candy (1999) and Oasis (2002), plays Ho-seok, who has been laid off by SP Heavy Industries. When he joined a strike to protest, SP called in the state to conduct a brutal crackdown. Ho-seok is hurting—and drinking—and his wife, Mi-ok, does what she can to cope. The pair have a son, Cheol (Jung Seol), and a yearslong bond that is strong but strained. As Mi-ok, Jeon Do-yeon, “delivers another once-a-century performance less than twenty years since her first collaboration with Lee,” Secret Sunshine (2007), writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich.

Enter Ye-ji, an aspiring filmmaker who has decided to make the private lives of the laboring class the subject of her first documentary. Cho Yeo-jeong’s Ye-ji has reminded more than a few reviewers of her Yeon-kyo, the well-meaning woman who has married into wealth and privilege in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). Ye-ji’s husband, Sang-woo, is played by Zo In-sung, who has broken through internationally this year with a leading performance in Na Hong-jin’s Hope. And Ye-ji, who has befriended Mi-Ok and is dead sure that Ho-seok would be the ideal subject of her film, convinces Sang-woo to have the working-class couple over for a weekend in their well-appointed home.

“The movie’s most potent scene occurs late in the film when, with Ye-ji’s camera rolling, Ho-seok finally lets his guard down,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Ye-ji may be getting the footage she set out for, but has she earned it honestly? Sul Kyung-gu is sensational here. If the character he’s playing is key to Ye-ji’s movie-within-a-movie, he’s also Possible Love’s anguished beating heart.”

“There is perhaps a subtle critique here, of the predatory instincts of the filmmaker towards their subject, of the desire to invade someone else’s life and shape their reality according to your own will,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. “These are instincts that Lee has somehow been born without. His subjects may be fictional creations but, especially as embodied by such a fine cast, they’re allowed to live and breathe their own private existences, their own personal idiosyncrasies, yielding characters who are almost as unknowably strange as, in your secret heart, you know yourself to be.”

“Through tipsy confessions and wistful recollections, Lee carefully unpacks the contrasting marriages, masterfully observant and tender in his approach,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies. “Under the surface, desire is a knife edge, whether it’s the blunt sense of ownership over everything that comes with generational privilege or the sharp ache of the working man for a sense of security. It’s a remarkable feat that Lee contains so many narrative threads within Possible Love without ever losing command of them.”

“In its scenes of factories, union gatherings, and ex-employee counseling groups,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “Possible Love at times seems to sit somewhere near the process-based approaches of, say, Laurent Cantet or Frederick Wiseman, while its unhurried build from low-key conversation-as-action into more emotionally charged territory reminded me of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s recent All of a Sudden. But comparisons aside, this is unmistakably a Lee Chang-dong film, its aching humanism reflecting the co-existence of despair and hope.”

Possible Love opens with a dedication to Dekalog: Ten (1988), the final chapter in Krzysztof Kieślowski and cowriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s series tackling each of the Ten Commandments. The dedication is a nod to an ongoing project to reimagine each installment, but Possible Love strays farther from the original than Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales has from Dekalog: Six. Following the premiere in Venice, Possible Love heads next to festivals in Toronto and New York and will see a limited theatrical release on October 23 before landing on Netflix on November 6.

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Holding Our Own

David Hudson — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:47:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Mike Leigh’s Bleak Moments (1971)

And we’re off. Venice has opened with Danny Boyle’s Ink, and Telluride, opening today and running through Sunday, has announced a lineup of more than sixty features. The Colorado festival with what IndieWire’s Anne Thompson calls a “Rocky Mountain summer-camp vibe” will host the world premieres of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, with Julianne Moore; Andrew Haigh’s Colm Tóibín adaptation, A Long Winter; Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, with Kate O’Flynn; Simon Stone’s Elsinore, with Andrew Scott; and David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s Alpha Gang, with Cate Blanchett.

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, will see its world premiere at the New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12). Artificial is one of more than 250 titles lined up for the seventieth BFI London Film Festival, slated to run from October 7 through 18. The festival will launch Ray Gunn, the long-awaited animated sci-fi mystery from Brad Bird (The Incredibles), and The Trip to the Northern Lights, the fifth season of Michael Winterbottom’s travel series featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

The Viennale, in the meantime, is previewing a 2026 edition (October 22 through November 3) that includes special programs dedicated to Jocelyne Saab and Austrian films of the 1990s as well as a Robert Aldrich retrospective copresented with the Austrian Film Museum. An accompanying book edited by Christoph Huber features a foreword by Dominik Graf: “We have been missing a director like Aldrich for decades. And we miss him especially now.”

This week’s highlights:

The new Yale Review features an essay by Bilge Ebiri on “what I’ll call reticent auteurs, directors whose scarce output lends them a certain mystique.” Víctor Erice, for example, or Lance Hammer, Charles Laughton, Barbara Loden, Elem Klimov, Julie Dash, and of course, Terrence Malick. “The category is a capacious one,” writes Ebiri, “encompassing reclusive geniuses, thwarted iconoclasts, and tragic shooting stars. Some of these artists make only one movie. Some make more but resist the temptations of a prolific career, because of their own exacting standards, the challenge of raising money to make films, or forces beyond their control. The idea of a reticent auteur has less to do with a filmmaker’s individual circumstances and more to do with our response to what they make.”

“Four city jerks, privileged and frustrated young men from Kolkata, head to the countryside for a few days of slothful rest and rowdy dissipation,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody as he revisits Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), “a teeming, turbulent, confrontational meld of emotion and observation, placing the eruptive pressure of societal conflict amid the seeming trivia of social life . . . As the story unfolds, relationships between friends, transactions with locals and bureaucrats, episodes of love and lust, and moments of painful self-awareness produce a subjective panorama of unredressed inequality, squandered energy, stifling tradition, and a restive quest for liberation.”

In a piece for Filmmaker on Universal Westerns, the Museum of Modern Art series that ran this summer, Ricky D’Ambrose notes that critic Philip French sensed in the genre “‘a pessimistic feeling about the fragility of American civilization and its problem in putting down roots.’ For French, the ghost town is emblematic here because it becomes the one place where ‘the central characters are doomed to die or emerge shriven.’ In our own time, this ‘pessimistic feeling’ has found another form: namely, the ‘elevated’ horror film, in which the ghost town has reached a state of immanence and in which dread is either domestic or dispersed into ambient trauma and grief. Perhaps the present glut of horror movies, many of them having zipped through the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline of recent years, will one day look as sealed and symptomatic as Italy’s waxen white-telephone movies of the 1930s, which perfected the comforts of the private world at the moment that the public one was being utterly dismantled, with fascism on the rise.”

Contemporary at 75 is a season of events happening this fall all across London celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Contemporary Films, a distributor founded in 1951 by Charles Cooper, “the East End–raised son of Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms” and “a Communist whose first involvement in film was with Kino, distributor of such titles as Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the 1930s, when anti-Soviet censorship was at its height,” as Henry K. Miller writes for the BFI. Contemporary has introduced Londoners to the work of Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mike Leigh, whose directorial debut, Bleak Moments, was picked up by Contemporary in 1971. “We were fresh on the block and innocent,” Leigh tells the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver, “and you take everything for granted in some way. But actually, when you think about it, they were pretty remarkable and they embraced this thing.”

To mark the twelfth anniversary of a film that took twelve years to make, select theaters have been screening Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) again, giving the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen an opportunity to chat with the director about his cast “actually having lived those years and earned those feelings”; what differentiates that epic shoot from one of his current projects, an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along that will take twenty years to complete; and about the endurance of cinephilia. “I started noticing this post-pandemic,” says Linklater. “The audience that came back was really strong and it was young . . . I’m glad to see cinema holding its own within the bigger struggle for what people think is worthy of their time.”

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Danny Boyle’s Ink

David Hudson — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:03:00 +0000

Jack O’Connell in Danny Boyle’s Ink (2026)

“I’m not sure it’s a Venice film,” Danny Boyle tells Luke Georgiades at A Rabbit’s Foot. “I’m certain it’s not a Venice opening film,” Boyle adds with a laugh, but of course, Ink—an adaptation of James Graham’s 2017 play about publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), who in the early 1970s transformed the British paper The Sun into a scandalous tabloid and the country’s highest-selling daily—has, in fact, opened the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. And it will go on to screen at festivals in Toronto and London as well.

Ink “compresses The Sun’s rise into a frenzied joyride of biblical proportions,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times. “It also has a healthy dose of good old-fashioned British self-deprecation, and a snappy, chaotic style with unsettling flashback sequences and energetic bits of grainy archival footage.”

“Goddamn it, Danny Boyle is so good at this,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. Boyle “takes a tale steeped in the minutiae of the English newspaper business and turns it into something anthemic and fearsome: Citizen Kane by way of Trainspotting. The music churns, the camera flies, flashes of the past and the future intrude alongside visions of events that may or may not be real. We feel the excitement of these characters, but we also sense that they’re gleefully opening the gates to hell.”

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek introduces us to the key players: “What, exactly, were working-class Londoners interested in reading about, Lamb would ask his assembled staff, including a starchily old-school deputy editor imported from Liverpool (Patrick Kennedy), a possibly over-the-hill sports editor (Christopher Fulford), and, most notably, the crackerjack newswoman Jules (Claire Foy, fierce as a firecracker), who’s been sleeping with the married Lamb for years in an arrangement that suits them both . . . If you’d prefer to think of Murdoch as an individual wholly devoid of sex appeal, Pearce’s performance might rattle you; his Murdoch is shrewd but not inhuman—even monsters were young once . . . And still, O’Connell’s Larry Lamb is a guy you want to root for, even if, as a modern person with a reasonable awareness of what’s happened to the news media in the internet age, you can see he’s making the snowball that starts the avalanche.”

Arriving in theaters on December 11 and streaming on Netflix from January 8, Ink “in many ways is a rise-and-fall story, played with aggressive self-determination but not monomaniacal monstrousness by O’Connell,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “The movie is also a chronicle of the degradation of what passes for news reporting; Sun staffers are told that every murder, rape, or theft has to be written up like a thriller. And for anyone with affection for the bygone newsroom, it’s a rich evocation of a milieu now on life support.” Ultimately, Ink is “a solid demonstration that if you want to give talky material pulse-pounding urgency, give it to Danny Boyle.”

“Boyle’s film is riveting and needling and leaves you feeling pretty awful, right up to a closing montage that connects Lamb’s and Murdoch’s legacy to the unregulated cacophony of today’s media and social media scenes, from Fox News to Facebook,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. “A final flourish that makes explicit what was already implicit is not subtle, but it lands with impact. Larry Lamb would approve.”

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Other Goings On

David Hudson — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:22:00 +0000

František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967)

The fall festival season kicks off with this evening’s world premiere of Danny Boyle’s Ink in Venice, which will be followed in rapid succession by Telluride (Friday through Monday), Toronto (September 10 through 20), and New York (September 25 through October 12). Before we’re swept away by this river of red carpets, let’s have a look at some of the other noteworthy events happening from now through the Labor Day Weekend.

In New York, Musclefest opens tomorrow at the Roxy Cinema and runs through Sunday. For AnOther Magazine, Elizabeth Purchell, the founder of Muscle Distribution, points out several highlights of this “four-night celebration of deep-cut restorations and underground trans and queer cinema.”

The festival will open with the New York premiere of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage. “Weard has created a cinematic extended universe,” writes Rachel Pronger for Sight and Sound, “a parallel world in which artists, incels, sex workers, and cult leaders collide in genre-hopping exchanges that range from cringe comedy to social satire to full-on horror-movie nightmare.”

The Rockaway Film Festival opens today and spotlights the work of Peter Hutton, Heiny Srour, and Caveh Zahedi, among many others. John Wilson will be there to talk about his Sundance hit, The History of Concrete, and musical and theatrical performances will be a lively part of the festivities as well.

Starting Friday, František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) returns to the big screen with a weeklong at Film at Lincoln Center. “Most films lay out a journey for us, take us for a ride, exhilarate or charm us, but give us some idea of where we are going,” wrote Tom Gunning in 2013. “Marketa Lazarová sweeps us up in a sort of rapture before we even get our feet on the ground.”

Also on Friday, Metrograph will launch surveys of work by Hong Kong “creative engine” Tsui Hark and cinematographer Darius Khondji. And on Saturday and Sunday, Asia Society will screen “five landmark films that reveal the fertile exchange between contemporary art and Chinese cinema from the late 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century.”

Out West

Mel Brooks turned 100 this summer, and to celebrate, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles will screen twenty of his favorite films from tomorrow through November 1. “The lineup spans nearly nine decades of Brooks’s own lifetime,” notes Josh Rottenberg in the Los Angeles Times, and Brooks tells him that putting together the list of titles “reminded me about why I first fell in love with the art of film.”

On Friday, Mezzanine and This Friday will copresent a screening of Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique (1989) at 2220 Arts + Archives. Programmer Micah Gottlieb calls the film a “singular attempt to capture the essence of the modern American Jewish diaspora in all its hangdog melancholy and anecdotal bliss.”

Presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Crossroads Film Festival (Friday through Sunday) is “a Bay Area sampler quilt of artist-made film and video,” writes Elise Schierbeek for Screen Slate. “The festival is a special occasion for eclecticism, remix, and craft. Crossroads’s dedicated quilt-maker is artistic director Steve Polta, who once again offers the city a visual feast of contemporary international avant-garde moving images that will include eight works screened on 16 mm. The programs are intuitive, bringing together themes related to alchemy, haunting, and automatism.”

Starting tomorrow, Alice Diop will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through September 13 as BAMPFA presents a retrospective running through September 18. And on Saturday, BAMPFA will launch two more retrospectives, Jean-Luc Godard’s Early Films (through November 19) and Martin Scorsese Pictures (through June 2027).

Overseas

In London, the BFI is launching seasons dedicated to the work of Claude Chabrol, Sarah Maldoror, and Harry Dean Stanton, and from Saturday through October 22, the Garden Cinema will present a series of landmark films that made the Czechoslovak New Wave one of the most enduring movements of the 1960s.

Christoph Hochhäusler will be at the Arsenal in Berlin tomorrow and Friday as a retrospective of his work runs through September 24 in conjunction with an exhibition opening at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein on September 10. On view through November 8, the exhibition presents storyboards, on-set photographs, film posters, and issues of Revolver, the film magazine Hochhäusler cofounded in 1998.

From today through October 22, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is presenting a five-film tribute to Michael Mann, “one of Hollywood's last great auteurist filmmakers.” And the Melbourne Cinémathèque is showcasing the work of Mario Bava, “the Diabolical Magician of Cinecittà,” through September 16.

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Venice Classics 2026

David Hudson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:39:00 +0000

TGeorge Sanders and Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954)

It’s becoming a tradition for the Venice International Film Festival to give its Venice Classics program a head start with a pre–opening night screening. On Tuesday, the festival will pay tribute to hometown director Tinto Brass—probably best known for his work in soft-core erotica and for overseeing the outlandish production of Caligula (1979)—with the world premiere of a new restoration of Deadly Sweet (1967). When a comely young woman (Ewa Aulin) is suspected of murdering a mobster in a London nightclub, an out-of-work actor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) takes her under his wing.

“Shot in England by an Italian director with a French leading man and a Swedish sex-doll leading lady (both dubbed into Italian), Deadly Sweet is advertised as a giallo (an Italian horror with cruel and flamboyant murders) but is really a vague murder-mystery romp directed as a pop-art object,” wrote Sean Axmaker in 2009. “The style is appropriated from comic books, experimental cinema, the French New Wave, and the British New Wave, with special attention to Godard and Richard Lester, Antonioni’s Blow-Up (a visit to a photography studio turns into an impromptu fashion shoot), and TV’s Batman.”

This year’s program spans more than half a century, beginning with Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). “Jack Benny against the Nazis?” asked Geoffrey O’Brien in 2013. “A farce set in occupied Warsaw? Jokes about concentration camps?” To Be or Not to Be “did something rare, then or at any time, by interweaving farce and disaster in such a rigorously structured fashion as to elicit, in the very same scenes, genuine anxiety and a hilarity so acute that it has something like an ecstatic kick.”

In his 2013 essay on Journey to Italy (1953)—starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a couple whose marriage unravels as they travel through the countryside near Naples—Paul Thomas noted that Roberto Rossellini was “transgressing boundaries others had long taken for granted—which is why Jacques Rivette insisted in the 1950s, and why Laura Mulvey was later to reiterate, that ‘if there is a modern cinema, this is it . . . With the appearance of Viaggio in Italia, all films have suddenly aged ten years.’”

“Gorgeously photographed by Raúl Martínez Solares,” wrote Slant’s Ed Gonzalez in 2004, Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1954) is “in many ways Luis Buñuel’s most visually intoxicating creation. A municipal transit company decides to retire one of its streetcars, but after a night of drinking, two of the company’s workers, Juan (Carlos Navarro) and Tarrajas (Fernando Soto), decide to take the streetcar out for one last trip, subsequently perpetuating a series of cosmic encounters around Mexico City.”

Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the third film in Andrzej Wajda’s war trilogy, captures a “typically Polish situation, where the urge to live clashes with the sense of duty, where hope is mixed with cynical despair,” writes Paweł Pawlikowski (Cold War, Fatherland). “The way that history gets in the way of love—that obviously stayed with me.”

In Simón Feldman’s Those at Table 10 (1960), lovers José (Emilio Alfaro) and María (María Aurelia Bisutti) defy friends and family to meet at their one safe spot, in a downtown café. Caligari notes that the film is “regarded as one of the defining works of Argentina’s ‘Generation of the ’60s’” and has been restored from just two 35 mm prints already in “an advanced state of deterioration,” with additional support from Argentina’s National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts.

Florestano Vancini’s Long Night in ’43, cowritten with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ennio De Concini, won the Best First Feature Award when it premiered in Venice in 1960. Set in Ferrara, in the German puppet state Italian Social Republic during the late stages of the Second World War, the film is a love story focusing “less on affairs of the heart and, instead, explicitly on holding Italy to account for the horrors of Fascism, something it does with a furiously savage bite,” writes Colin Edwards.

The winner of a Silver Lion, Yesterday Girl (1966), the first feature by the late Alexander Kluge, will head to the New York Film Festival after the new restoration premieres in Venice. A young woman (Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister), migrates from East to West Germany, and the NYFF programmers note that “Kluge adorns her meandering odyssey with a wealth of intertitles, references, citations, and documentary footage, yielding an allusive and polyvocal work about which one can say, simply, that there was a German cinema before Yesterday Girl and a German cinema after it.”

Kim Morgan has called Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac (1966) “so much weird, sexy, subversive, screwy fun” and a “a precursor to themes he would continually dabble in: tortured relationships, bizarre blonde behavior, infidelity, cross-dressing, even film noir via the stalwart Lionel Stander.”

Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) “may not have been the first movie in which a character exclaimed ‘Out of sight, man!,’” wrote J. Hoberman in 2015, “but, released three summers before Easy Rider and introducing much of the same iconography, this ‘brutal little picture,’ as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther characterized it, made the hippie youth film possible—and also transformed Henry Fonda’s twenty-six-year-old son, Peter, into Hollywood’s personification of the generation gap.”

Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), completed in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “has peeled off from its historical moment and been embraced by foreign audiences, who have kept it in circulation because of how irresistibly it combines some very soft-core delights with the trappings of horror,” wrote Jana Prikryl in 2015. “One of the pleasures of watching Valerie now, in fact, is seeing it through this bifocal lens: as the lyrical product of filmmakers who dodged certain limits on their freedom of expression, and as a semi-obscure cult film appreciated more wryly in the West.”

Gena Rowlands plays a museum curator who struggles to keep herself from falling in love with an eccentric parking-lot attendant (Seymour Cassel) in John Cassavetes’s Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). “Brutality is everywhere,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2013, “and there’s a special place in Hell for Minnie’s married ex-lover (played by Cassavetes, Rowlands’s real-life husband), yet, in this shambling tale of punch-drunk love, the rage is a part of romantic passion.”

Nino Manfredi stars in Ettore Scola’s Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) as Giacinto, the patriarch of a sprawling family cramped into a shack overlooking a highway on the outskirts of Rome. Giacinto comes into some insurance money after loosing an eye, but he refuses to share it with anyone. When Ugly, Dirty and Bad screened in 2016 at what was then the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the programmers noted that it “contains a pitch-perfect blend of hilarity and brutality, which amounts to a brilliant portrait of squalor and cynicism unlike any other.”

Ann Hui’s The Story of Woo Viet (1981) is “a romantic gangster/social problem film that in many ways established the kind of character that would rocket Chow [Yun-fat] to superstardom a few years later in his work with John Woo and Ringo Lam,” wrote Sean Gilman for Notebook in 2019. “He’s all charm here though, a Robert Redford or Cary Grant type, handsome and untethered by convention yet inescapably drawn to the independent-minded woman who he says represents to him an ideal of Chinese womanhood.”

“I can say with absolute conviction that no Japanese filmmaker makes a film without being conscious of Shinji Somai’s existence,” wrote Ryusuke Hamaguchi for Japan Society a few years ago. “That is how significant Somai’s presence is in the history of Japanese cinema.” And in 2016, Hayley Scanlon wrote that Somai’s The Catch (1983), an “opus of fishermen at home on the waves and at sea on land,” is “a complex examination of masculinity but also of fatherhood in a rapidly declining world filled with arcane ritual and ancient thought.”

When The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1992) screened at the Harvard Film Archive in 2022, Haden Guest called Flora Gomes’s second feature “a bold follow-up to Mortu nega [1998] that extends its critical scrutiny of postliberation Guinea-Bissau through a poignantly nuanced story of ardent dreams fractured across different generations.” Yonta “makes clear Gomes’s talent as both an intuitively astute chronicler of history in the making and a weaver of powerful nuanced allegories of nation and community.”

“Irreverent humor, frustrated idealism, and earnest compassion are blended with a keen sense of character, place, and political reality in the auspicious English, August [1994],” wrote Lawrence Van Gelder in his New York Times review of the first feature by Dev Benegal. Agastya Sen (Rahul Bose), known as August, is a well-educated civil servant from Kolkata dispatched to Madna in West Bengal, and Van Gelder found that Benegal “deftly manages the feat of using the scalpel of humor to lay bare a young man's painful but edifying immersion in an alien culture within his own land.”

The Uncle from Brooklyn (1995), the “deliriously weird” first feature from Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, “starts with the removal of a glass eye and the casual fucking (for money) of a donkey,” noted Geoff Andrew in Time Out. “It’s got great visual gags, and endless farting, belching, gluttony, mother-fixation, and masturbation. All the roles (including the mothers) are played by unattractive men. There are unexpected musical and Brechtian interludes, and allusions to various films including Bicycle Thieves.”

In 2008, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presented a retrospective of work by Ning Ying, and in the program notes for On the Beat (1995)—in which the Beijing police are charged with enforcing a ban on raising dogs—Juliet Clark wrote: “With compositions of low-key beauty and protagonists wonderfully played by actual policemen, the centerpiece of the Beijing Trilogy is a deadpan, subtle study of everyday frustrations in a social framework where the trivial is crucial.”

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Disappearing Moments

David Hudson — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:47:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994)

On Tuesday, we lost Dolly Parton, and then, hours later, Tim Curry. As the mad scientist and self-described “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” in writer Richard O’Brien and director Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Curry “didn’t simply play Frank-N-Furter,” writes Seth Abramovitch in the Hollywood Reporter. “He established the character’s entire vocabulary of seduction, danger, comedy, and camp, delivering every lyric and raised eyebrow with absolute conviction. The performance was outrageous without ever feeling unserious. Curry understood that the joke only worked if Frank believed completely in his own magnificence.”

“With a mischief-maker’s good looks, a casual athletic grace, and a supple and resonant voice,” writes Bruce Weber in the New York Times, “Curry was a favorite in roles calling for expressive villainy or general cartoonishness. In the first screen version of Annie (1982), he brought more than a dollop of slime to the part of Rooster Hannigan, the con artist who concocts a plot to kidnap the plucky orphan of the title. In Clue (1985), a suspense spoof derived from the popular board game, he played Wadsworth, a logorrheic butler who leads a cast full of murder suspects around a spooky mansion with the fast-talking fervor of a manic Sherlock Holmes.”

Both the Venice and New York film festivals have added the documentary NAZA to their lineups. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four codirectors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land (2024), NAZA “reveals the systems behind Israel’s bombing of Gaza and its mass killing of Palestinian civilians,” according to the official synopsis. NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim calls NAZA “an important investigative documentary about one of the gravest catastrophes of our time.”

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Martin Scorsese, Mike Leigh, Lee Chang-dong, Sofia Coppola, James Gray, and Valeska Grisebach are among the filmmakers who will be taking part in the NYFF Talks program this year. And in Toronto, a fresh round of Tribute Award recipients includes Helen Mirren, Seth Rogen, and Bassam Tariq.

This week’s highlights:

From Wednesday through September 13, UnionDocs in Brooklyn will present what it’s calling a “singular eleven-day minilab.” Wiseman’s New York is a series of nine films by the late Frederick Wiseman accompanied by talks from and with filmmakers, critics, artists, and community members. “Wiseman first came on the scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s with a series of bracing dissections of the U.S. welfare state, which was then at an apogee that looked like a nadir,” writes Mariana Mogilevich in the current issue of n+1. Seen now, though, “every unflinching depiction of once fraught institutional practices [begins] to look like competency porn, in which schools and courts and boards of directors executed their vexed tasks with comforting aplomb.”

The films of Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter are “like Fred Wiseman’s, but funnier and shorter,” writes David Schwartz. “With fly-on-the-wall techniques culled from the Direct Cinema movement and filtered through their offbeat sensibilities, Ganz and Streeter teamed up in the late 1960s to create a prolific body of short films—usually around five minutes in length—that comprise a cinematic cabinet of wonders.” Ganz and Streeter will be at Anthology Film Archives in New York this evening to kick off a series of two programs running through Monday: America—Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed of (and More).

“In the spring of 2017,” writes Jonathan Kiefer for the San Francisco Bay Area edition of Screen Slate, “after the first wet winter in many dry years, Nathaniel Dorsky walked with his Bolex through Golden Gate Park’s arboretum and noticed the blooming plants. Dorsky’s way of noticing often yields short experimental films of consecrated silence, in which attention becomes ceremonial. In this case, the plants took well both to drought relief and to being noticed, and eventually Dorsky had a series of seven films collectively titled the Arboretum Cycle.” The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will present the Cycle in full tomorrow, and Dorsky will be there.

Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994) “plays it very, very cool. Which isn’t to say Stillman’s second film, after his Oscar-nominated Metropolitan, is itself cool,” writes Ryan Chapman in the Guardian. “If you want cool, look to Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, where Chloë Sevigny frequents an unnamed Studio 54. Barcelona, on the other hand, is my feel-good movie because it’s several movies in one. An Austenesque romantic comedy, with wit dry as an albariño. A slow-boil cold war intrigue, where characters discuss the consequences of American foreign policy. A nostalgic, autobiographical portrait of young Americans abroad. And, however improbably, a defense of business-section self-help books. Where Stillman’s contemporaries riffed on Death of a Salesman, he offers us Willy Loman’s Homage to Catalonia.”

It’s road-movie season, and for the New York Times, Matt Weinstock asks “a range of creative people” for a few words on a favorite. Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) picks Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places (2017): “One thing we know about cars is that two people facing forward are able to say things that they’d never say if they were looking into each other’s eyes.” Theda Hammel (Stress Positions) goes for Peter Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber (1994): “The question in the Farrelly movies is: ‘Can a man who is silly and stupid and gross be loved by a beautiful woman?’ And in a lot of cases the answer is: ‘Maybe, but no. Not here.’” And for photographer Joel Meyerowitz, it’s Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957): “Bergman knew how to hold your attention with an image, but he didn’t linger. He had a sense of the disappearing moment.”

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We Will Always Love Dolly Parton

David Hudson — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:48:00 +0000

Dolly Parton in Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolias (1989)

“Instant sainthood,” declared Jack White when the news of Dolly Parton’s passing at the age of eighty broke on Tuesday. The White Stripes’ 2004 cover of “Jolene”—the second of many of Parton’s solo number-one singles on the country charts and first released in 1974—is one of the fiercest of the nearly three hundred of them, including covers by Olivia Newton-John, Beyoncé, and Parton’s goddaughter, Miley Cyrus.

For decades, legend held that Parton had written “Jolene” on the same day that she wrote “I Will Always Love You,” which Whitney Houston turned into the best-selling single of all time by a female solo artist when she recorded it for the 1992 film The Bodyguard. “Well, I don’t really know if they were written in the same night,” said Parton a few years ago, but the two megahits “were certainly written within a very short span of time.”

It hardly matters. “We will always love her, and there will never be another like her,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “Down home and brilliant, feminist and feminine, glitter-bedecked and generous, country and cosmopolitan, funny and soulful.” As Chris Willman puts it in Variety, “virtually every American on any side of any musical or cultural equation would unabashedly own up to Dolly love.”

Born the fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, Parton grew up listening to her mother singing Irish and Welsh ballads, and she wrote her own first song, “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” when she was just five. Three years later, she was writing and performing with her uncle Bill Owens, who taught her the guitar and got her on a local radio show when she was ten. At thirteen, she was being introduced at the Grand Ole Opry by Johnny Cash.

Porter Wagoner, a country star with a hit television show, brought her aboard around the time that her first album, Hello, I’m Dolly, was released in 1967. She eventually grew out of the gig, going on to record twenty-five number-one Billboard country singles, many of them crossover hits.

“All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to ‘three chords and the truth,’ as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize,” writes the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich. “Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy. Anyone can tell a story, but it takes a pure heart to make it mean something.”

In April, when the New York Times included Parton in its list of the thirty greatest living American songwriters, Lindsay Zoladz wrote that “there is always an earnest purity about Parton’s work and worldview. The sorrowful tonalities of Appalachia are alive in some of her most autobiographical music: The smell of honeysuckle wafts through the vivid ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’; her classic country ballad ‘Coat of Many Colors’ alchemizes a remembered moment of childhood shame into a sparkling badge of honor. Artifice and authenticity, Parton reminds us in her own down-home, high-femme way, are not mutually exclusive.”

As for the artifice, Parton was just as famous and beloved for that too. The rhinestones, the mile-high hair, the whole “country girl’s idea of glam,” as she put it in her song “Backwoods Barbie.” Parton was “simultaneously a naughty, playful southern gal from the hollows of Tennessee and a deep, soulful thinker who could see through people right down to their true selves,” wrote Jane Fonda on Tuesday.

Fonda was instrumental in recruiting Parton to the big screen. Fonda’s production company was developing a story inspired by 9to5, a Harvard-based association of women office workers that has since gone national. Early drafts came off too preachy, so Fonda decided to team up with Lily Tomlin to make 9 to 5 (1980) a comedy—and to broaden the potential audience by casting Dolly Parton in her first movie role.

“As Doralee Rhodes, the happily married secretary of Dabney Coleman’s lecherous corporate vice president, kept busy dodging his unwelcome advances, Parton was a natural,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Her luminosity, effervescence, folksy delivery, and innate comic timing infused the film with live-wire energy, whether she was fantasizing about hog-tying and spit-roasting the boss or bringing that fantasy to life, like a seasoned rodeo queen.” And the “eternally catchy country pop theme song Parton wrote and recorded for the film left its own mark, reaching number one on Billboard’s Country, Hot 100, and Adult Contemporary charts.”

Parton struck Roger Ebert as “a natural-born movie star” with “a quality of presence, a personal life force that seems to take over the screen.” Years later, in his 2011 memoir, Life Itself, Ebert recalled “an uncanny experience” he’d had while interviewing Parton in the run-up to the premiere of 9 to 5, and he told Gene Siskel about it.

As Ebert and Parton spoke, “I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing and comforting. Gene listened and said, ‘Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.’ We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer to it in wonder.”

As one of the creators of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Jad Abumrad interviewed Parton “a dozen times,” and in the New York Times, he recalls that he had a somewhat similar experience. “To sit with her was to watch (and then inevitably join) a person so completely inhabiting an earlier time that suddenly the air around you changed, the oxygen molecules shifted polarity,” writes Abumrad. “You saw the June bugs she was seeing and smelled the honeysuckle.”

But as Shima Oliaee, the producer of Dolly Parton’s America, points out, Parton’s life was not wall-to-wall ethereal grace and honeysuckle. “In the mid-’80s,” writes Oliaee in Time, “she opened up about her depression and suicidal thoughts following the end of an ‘affair of the heart,’ family issues, and a negative experience filming The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” In that 1982 musical comedy, Parton costarred with Burt Reynolds, and the overall critical consensus was that director Colin Higgins had fared far better with 9 to 5.

“It’s doubtful that anyone would try to make a case for the 1984 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rhinestone,” writes David Rooney. “I wonder if there’s even a living soul who managed to get through it. But Parton could sew a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, introducing two top ten country hits in the movie.”

As Truvy Jones, who runs a beauty salon out of her home in Herbert Ross’s comedic drama Steel Magnolias (1989), Parton more than held her own in a cast that included Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, and as Truvy’s husband, Sam Shepard. “In a story filled with quirky locals and big southern personalities, Truvy is its beating heart,” finds Lacy Baugher Milas at the A.V. Club. Revisiting the film in 2012 for Slant, Eric Henderson wrote that “the camaraderie of its six principal actresses more often than not keeps the entirely-too-neat mess afloat.”

For Marya E. Gates at RogerEbert.com, the standout in the filmography is Barnet Kellman’s Straight Talk (1992), a “Chicago-set workplace romantic comedy in which Parton plays a small-town dance instructor from Arkansas who leaves her stick-in-the-mud boyfriend, moves to Chicago with dreams in her eyes, and accidentally becomes a beloved national radio call-in therapist. The film is preposterous, but as a kid who loved preposterous rom-coms, and especially loved watching them with my mother, it was one we returned to time and again.”

Like “Mae West or Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli or Bette Midler or Cher,” suggests the NYT’s Wesley Morris, if “a movie had them, it had no choice but to flaunt them, these vocalists who never ceased to amuse themselves, oddballs who nonetheless found themselves sexy, stars who could make a kind of sex essential to the comedy. Stars who couldn’t disguise what they felt because, as very different singers, feeling is their currency.” But Parton’s two Oscar nominations were for her music rather than for her acting. Last year, the Academy gave her its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Imagination Library, her literacy program, has donated more than 150 million books to children, and in the New Republic, Edith Olmstead notes that Parton “urged her fellow Christians to accept and embrace members of the LGBTQ community and defended the rights of transgender people—making her a target for certain figures on the right. She was an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and she donated the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ to the Black community in Nashville. In 2020, during one of this country’s darkest moments, Parton donated one million dollars to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt University, which helped fund Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.”

“I try not to get into the politics of everything,” Parton told Mesfin Fekadu in the Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts—all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge . . . If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”

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Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor

David Hudson — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000

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.”

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Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming

David Hudson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:27:00 +0000

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.”

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August Books

David Hudson — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:45:00 +0000

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.

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Somewhere In-Between

David Hudson — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:12:00 +0000

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.”

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Graham Greene at the Harvard Film Archive

David Hudson — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:32:00 +0000

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.”

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Art-House Sci-Fi

David Hudson — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:37:00 +0000

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.”

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Presented in VistaVision

David Hudson — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:02:00 +0000

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.”

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Locarno’s Leopards

David Hudson — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:56:00 +0000

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.

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