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

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

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

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

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

• In the Hollywood Reporter, Thomas Doherty, the author of a good number of books on Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century, tells the story of the triumphant arrival of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) in the U.S. at a time when reviewers and distributors “were careful to explain to the first-time foreign filmgoers that ‘English titles translate the dialogue.’” Doherty maps the film’s road to a nomination for an Oscar for Best Picture in 1939 and then relates how, in 1940, Franz Hensel, head archivist for the Reichsfilmkammer, ignored Goebbels’s order to seize and destroy the original negative and helped Henri Langlois save it for posterity.

• A new restoration of Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957), the first of many adaptations of Dostoyevsky’s 1848 short story, opens today at New York’s Film Forum. “Dostoevsky told a claustrophobic story of lonely souls lost in a metropolis,” writes Eli Friedberg for Slant, “but Visconti’s reimagining frames the Livorno-like postwar Italian city at his film’s center as a shimmering nocturnal dream shared by all. Filmed on a massive, gorgeous set, actors and extras continually weave their way through a world molded by chiaroscuro lighting and dotted by blazing street lamps, through crisscrossing canals, stout old apartments, and bombed-out building husks.” Marcello Mastroianni stars as Mario, a new man in town who catches sight of—and immediately falls for—Maria Schell’s Natalia, who is waiting to reunite with her lover. In the New York Times, J. Hoberman notes that Schell “was then one of Europe’s most popular actresses, but Visconti’s real star and the object of his adoration is his enormous rain-slicked set. White Nights anticipates the artificial extravaganza of Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, even as Nino Rota’s emphatic score confirms Visconti’s mock operatic aspirations.”

• Melissa Anderson, the film editor at the late great 4Columns and the author of The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024, has launched a new column for Film Comment that “delves into the career of a cinema luminary, past or present.” Though she’s most famous for a performance she delivered half a century ago, Ronee Blakley is still very present at eighty, having released an album, Atom Bomb Baby, in 2020 and appeared in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese in 2019. Blakley’s turn as the fragile country music star Barbara Jean in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1976) “was so exceptional that Hollywood conflated the real Ronee with the fictional creation she had brought so vividly to life,” notes Anderson, who proposes that her work with Dylan in Renaldo and Clara (1978) may have “led Blakley to realize that films with porous boundaries between fact and fiction were the ideal vehicles for her acting talents.”

• A couple of years ago, Carey Baraka attended a literary event in India. “As often happens at such gatherings,” he writes in an essay for Equator, “the Africans found each other. We were four, and gathered one evening to drink: two South African poets, a Congolese artist, and me, a Kenyan.” Conversation turned to The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), an unlikely global hit comedy about a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari Desert ridding his community of a troublemaking Coca-Cola bottle. The film spawned a sequel and three knockoffs. “Everyone had watched them, it turned out, though it had been ages,” writes Baraka, “and we spent a while recounting our favorite scenes, round-robin. When we exhausted this, we were a little flushed with embarrassment. There was something deeply uncomfortable about thinking back on those films now, cultural products of apartheid-era South Africa that peddled undeniably racist myths about indigenous Africans.” Baraka soon found himself heading to the films’ locations to investigate the tall tales behind their making.

• Mike Mills has taken time out from preparing his next project to talk to Nick Newman at the Film Stage and the Playlist’s Rodrigo Perez about the new box set I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills. For admirers of his work, producer Kim Hendrickson’s conversation with Mills about the documentaries and music videos included here is essential reading. Talking to Mitchell Beaupre at Letterboxd, Mills says that Beginners (2010), 20th Century Women (2016), and C’mon C’mon (2021) “became an unintentional triptych of not just my family interrelations, but this idea of parents and children and families that are not just biological, but a little constellation of people who happen to fall together and help and cocreate each other. That theme was so much [stronger] in those three movies. I was really writing from my life, I wasn’t adapting something else. In that way, it felt like the same plant or soil or something.”

• Newly remastered and restored films made by John Woo and producer Tsui Hark are currently screening in London as the season Bullets and Brotherhood: The Films of John Woo rolls on throughout the month. “Commingling global influences—Akira Kurosawa, Chang Cheh, and Patrick Lung from the East; Jean-Pierre Melville, Martin Scorsese, and Sam Peckinpah from the West—into a singularly exhilarating brew of friendship, honor, and sacrifice, Woo’s violent (but morally rigorous) bullet ballets established the template for a Hong Kong subgenre dubbed ‘heroic bloodshed,’” writes Matthew Thrift at the top of his interview with the director. “I was hugely influenced by musicals,” says Woo. “I saw West Side Story thirty-one times in the cinema. So when I’m shooting an action scene, I think that I’m making a dance sequence. I never learned any kung fu or karate, I just love dancing.”

• By happy coincidence, profiles of three collectives have appeared recently. For Ultra Dogme, Alonso Aguilar writes about Archivistas Salvajes, a trio “dedicated to the preservation of amateur Cuban cinemas; in plural. Their focus is the works of the cine-enthusiasts and cine-club movements that rose in the Caribbean island during the 1970s and 1980s.” For more than twelve years, the Ukrainian collective Babylon’13 has been “filming history while making it, following the escalation from Maidan to the annexation of Crimea and conflict in Donbas, all leading into the ongoing war,” writes Sonya Vseliubska in Documentary. And in the new Filmmaker, Botagoz Koilybayeva tracks the history of La Clef Revival in Paris.

• When Jeffrey Wright was in Karlovy Vary to accept a President’s Award, the festival screened Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996) and Robert Daniels took the opportunity to interview him for RogerEbert.com. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “art is so encrypted, and it resonates with things that seem like they are not there on the canvas, things that are greater than the sum of their parts,” says Wright, who will play Basquiat’s father in Julius Onah’s forthcoming Samo Lives. “There’s a kind of mysticism within his work that hearkens back to Caribbean ideas and African ideas. But there’s also this stuff that resonates out of it, and that’s not by accident.” Daniels just has to ask Wright about his scenes in Schnabel’s film with Courtney Love. “Courtney showed up fully Courtney,” says Wright.

• The Fantasia International Film Festival is on in Montreal through August 2, and one of tonight’s international premieres is The Origin of Ultraman, a documentary spearheaded by Hirokazu Kore-eda, codirected by Yutaka Nakamura and Kazuki Yoshida, and featuring interviews with Kore-eda, Hideaki Anno, Guillermo del Toro, Shinji Higuchi, Hideo Kojima, and Nicolas Winding Refn. Ultraman, a sci-fi series that premiered on the Tokyo Broadcasting System in 1966, centers on “a silver, forty-meter-tall alien from Nebula M78 who merges with Shin Hayata, a member of the Science Special Search Party, to become Earth’s unlikely defender against a parade of spectacular monsters,” as Sebastien Raineri explains in his profile of the team behind the new doc in the Japan Times.

• An “AI sloppycat of The Odyssey is attempting to capitalize on Christopher Nolan’s work,” notes the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller, who sees this increasingly common development as “less of a curiosity for the schadenfreude-prone and more of an omen for the future of the cinematic bargain bin.” Quickie cash-ins are nothing new, of course. “Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 is more than a Psycho copy, even if it was commissioned as such by Roger Corman,” writes Oller. “Even if it’s a dishonest day’s work, filming a knock-off means making choices, which means creating something. The incursion of generative AI robs even the most rapacious industry leech of the ability to accidentally stumble into something interesting. Robbery and deception at least used to take a little bit of work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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