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

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

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

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

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

• Last week, when Jerry Lewis would have turned a hundred, R. Emmet Sweeney republished his 2017 remembrance. “The Lewis figure,” he wrote, “is in a natural state of apartness and is in a fraught, oft destructive battle to join to the main stem of society.” The Anthology Film Archives series Metaphysics of the Pratfall: Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard is on through Tuesday, and at The Theater of the Matters, programmers Edward McCarry and Ethan Spigland talk with Chris Fujiwara (Jerry Lewis), who notes that there is “a kind of violence in both filmmakers. Not violence like Sam Peckinpah, but a violence of thought, a violence of images clashing.” Godard “once said that if Lewis had been alive in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, he would have made revolutionary films—great masterpieces.” For more on Lewis, see Joshua Peinado on Three on a Couch (1966) and Will Sloan on Smorgasbord (1983) at Screen Slate.

• Another Anthology series, Revelations of the Middle Ages, is on through April 4. Guest programmer Caroline Golum has put together a selection of films that have informed her own second feature, Revelations of Divine Love, whose title is taken from the collected writings of fourteenth-century Catholic anchorite Julian of Norwich. Writing about this “remarkable” film at In Review Online, Michael Sicinski notes that in its “visual style, Revelations echoes the Brechtian approach of Manoel de Oliveira, with his clear signifiers of the period coexisting with a haunted, atmospheric modernity. But probably the most apposite points of comparison are the late educational films of Roberto Rossellini.” “Medieval art is all about taking the sublime and making it recognizable to the viewer,” Golum tells InRO’s Brandon Streussnig. “People are wearing fourteenth-century costumes, even in scenes of the Christ, which happened 1,400 years prior. It’s all about adapting things so that people understand what they’re looking at because they can situate it within their own everyday lives.”

• The weeklong series Farewell to Béla Tarr opens today at Film at Lincoln Center in New York, and in Prague, the National Film Archive is currently presenting Béla Tarr: Satan’s Tangos through April 11. The Archive’s Film Review is running a remembrance by cinematographer Fred Kelemen, who worked with Tarr from 1995 through The Turin Horse (2011) and who argues that the late director’s films “are not gloomy, they shine, and their darkness allows us to see.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose new column Moving Places is now running exclusively at his site, has several stories to tell and focuses primarily on film.factory, the workshop Tarr established in Sarajevo. After one screening of Sátántangó (1994), Tarr delivered “a fascinating four-and-a-half-hour lecture (with two intermissions, like the film) about how it was filmed,” writes Rosenbaum, “shot by shot and take by take, using a kind of post-it storyboard on a blackboard as a narrative thread. Typically, he was explicit and precise about the film’s technique and had almost nothing to say about its meaning—although he agreed with me when I described it as a comedy.”

• The BFI’s Alex Ramon is spotlighting “ten great British films of 1976,” and one of them is Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth: “David Bowie—trailing Ziggy Stardust memories and Berlin-era vibes—is ideally cast as Newton, the extraterrestrial who splashes down in a lake in the U.S. southwest in search of water for his drought-afflicted planet, only to be distracted and damaged.” Sight and Sound has republished Tom Milne’s 1976 essay in which he proposes that “the way to tame The Man Who Fell to Earth is not by trying to perceive an intellectual logic which isn’t there, but by following the tangential, emotional continuity that orders its ideas into a tightly woven structure.” At Little White Lies, Payton McCarty-Simas surveys the initial (and rather perplexed) critical response to the film and suggests that “as the years pass, its vision of lost innocence, corporate greed, political corruption, and imminent climate apocalypse only feels more topical.”

• Club Ciné founding editor Tom Macklin has been in touch with “fifteen people whose taste I trust completely”—including Bruce LaBruce, Hari Nef, Nia DaCosta, and Wagner Moura—to gather their thoughts on upcoming films they’re looking forward to. The gist here, notes Macklin, is that “cinema’s libido is back, loudly and unapologetically, after what felt like a long, anxious absence.” Gen Z “has grown up bathing in images of desire while drifting further from touch, risk, embarrassment, breath, presence, and all the raw human static that makes desire real in the first place,” writes Megan Hullander. “That’s why films like Babygirl and Pillion hit with such force. They drag bodies back into the picture. They fill the screen with want, shame, heat, and hesitation. Then they throw all of it into a dark room full of strangers.”

At the center of these films is “a rumbera, a female protagonist and figure of escapist fantasy who exhibits her liberation through her sexuality and uninhibited dancing,” writes Avila. “But unlike other cabareteras from this period, Victims of Sin provides a twist: the film does not punish the rumbera. This unconventional narrative, on top of its extraordinary star power and musical and dance performances, has put Victims of Sin in a class of its own.”

• Directed and narrated by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux and opening today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lumière, Le Cinéma! features new restorations of more than a hundred short films made by brothers Auguste and Louis. “When you screen those Lumière films today,” says Frémaux in Marshall Shaffer’s interview for Slant, “filmmakers generally say, ‘We have to go back to that. We have to get back that simplicity.’ Picasso said, ‘All my life, I have tried to draw like a child.’ That’s why I mentioned Godard when he talked about how, if we want to reinvent language, we have to go and see those who don’t know what language is. [Louis] Lumière was the first filmmaker, so he had to invent his own language. What’s quite impressive is that it’s coherent, but always different. In two thousand movies, not one is similar to the other. But it’s the same idea of cinema, especially that those fifty seconds must mean something.”

• Made for PBS’s American Playhouse but picked up by Paramount for a theatrical release in 1983, Testament is documentary filmmaker Lynne Littman’s first and only fictional feature. Jane Alexander stars as a mother of three going about her day in the suburb of a northern California town when a nuclear blast takes out San Francisco, just sixty miles south. “It’s not about the bomb going off,” Alexander tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch. “It’s about what comes after—how you keep love alive, how you keep community alive in the face of this overriding catastrophe.” “For me,” says Littman, “it was about creating the images of what’s precious and that must not be destroyed. We can’t lose the breakfast table. We can’t lose singing a lullaby . . . The fear then for me was that we would be attacked. The fear now is that we will attack. And that’s more horrifying in some ways.”

• In Metrograph’s Journal, Curtis Tsui writes about The Most Terrible Time of My Life (1994), The Stairway to the Distant Past (1995), and The Trap (1996), all of them starring Masatoshi Nagase as detective Maiku Hama, “whose name is the Japanese phonetic equivalent of crime novelist Mickey Spillane’s pugilistic hero Mike Hammer,” and all of them “deliriously entertaining mystery-driven mashups of nostalgic cinephilia as well as clear-eyed sociocultural examinations of mid-’90s Japan, dreamed up by one of cinema’s most singular creative voices, Kaizo Hayashi.” The director “has entertainment under his magnifying glass across the trilogy, exploiting chiaroscuro-centric cinematography for film noir vibes; fabulous and sometimes hilariously clever costumes courtesy of Masae Miyamoto (bubble wrap has never been utilized more imaginatively); an energetic, jazzy score by Meina Co. (Yoko Kumagai and Hidehiko Urayama); and a surfeit of self-conscious metaness.”

• For e-flux, Nataliia Serebriakova talks with John Smith about Being John Smith (2024), a twenty-seven-minute riff on having one of the most common names in the English-speaking world. “Smith’s humor is black as onyx here, as he assesses the hubris of artists of his generation who are assembling their archives for a planet that is unlikely to survive,” writes Michael Sicinski for Notebook. In a terrific profile for the Quietus, David Moats writes that Smith’s films are “all about questioning the authority of the moving image, the way we are inclined to blindly trust what we see and hear. This makes his work increasingly relevant in an age defined by deep fakes, disinformation, and generative AI slop. But Smith’s ideas extend further. Even in the late twentieth century, when journalistic institutions and political discourse were apparently healthy, we’ve had good reason to doubt the camera’s unblinking gaze.”

• We began the week with Christian Petzold’s trip to New York, and at 4Columns, Melissa Anderson writes about the “strange, mesmerizing power” of Miroirs No. 3. Petzold has been talking with Daniel D’Addario (Variety), Saffron Maeve (Screen Slate), and Nick Newman (Film Stage), and at Letterboxd, he tells Isaac Feldberg that he’s thinking about casting both Paula Beer and Nina Hoss in an upcoming project. The conversation naturally turns to the film that haunts Petzold’s entire oeuvre, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). “I love it so much, and I hate it so much at the same time,” says Petzold. “I have seen it a hundred times in my life, and twenty times I’ve hated it. This movie, it’s too much. There are other movies by Hitchcock, like Notorious or Rebecca, that I simply love. But Vertigo is a movie about movies, about cinema itself. Hitchcock’s other movies are about human beings, but the characters of Vertigo are just one part of this nightmare, a fantastic nightmare, the best nightmare ever told in the history of cinema.”

• Following an “unofficial” hiatus of a little more than two years, Another Gaze has returned to relaunch with a freshened-up design and a new issue that includes articles on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (2023) and interviews with Mary Helena Clark and Paula Gaitán, both of whom have selected work to stream on the newly revamped Another Screen. “As feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (1938–2026) put it,” write the editors, “‘how to effect another vision: [how] to construct other objects and subjects of vision’? In 2026, we are still asking ourselves this question.”

• June 1 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, and exhibitions are set to open in Paris (April 8 through July 26), Los Angeles (May 31 through February 28), and London (June 4 through September 6). New York’s Museum of Modern Art is presenting a series of films starring Monroe through March 25, and MoMA’s Magazine is running curatorial associate Francisco Valente’s piece on the echos of the star’s legend in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001). “You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe,” wrote Lynch in Room to Dream, “and that Mulholland Dr. is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe.”

• Throughout last month’s Berlinale, MUBI’s Daniel Kasman asked filmmakers “to select a memorable image or moment from their film and describe why it is particularly special to them.” The result is an amazing Notebook collection of reflections from, for example, Charles Burnett, who says that “the saving grace of My Brother’s Wedding [1983]” is his lead character’s relationship with his grandparents. Alain Gomis (Dao) shares an unsettling moment, while for Radu Jude (Shot Reverse Shot), “the whole architecture is crucial.” Angela Schanelec (My Wife Cries) focuses on her ensemble, and Gore Verbinski (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) talks about an accidental discovery he intuitively incorporated “like an infant grabbing candy.”

• Written and directed by the late Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Nobody’s Fool), Places in the Heart (1984) is “one of the great films of the 1980s, and the greatest Texas movie of all time,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a fantastic piece for the Southwest Review. Set in 1935 Waxahachie, this story of an ad hoc family led by Edna (Sally Field) is “a Texas movie in every way. It’s set in a specific Texas city during a specific time, and written and directed by an artist who didn’t come to the material as an outsider but was a native son with a compassionate but unsparing eye. It has larger points to make, of course. But for the most part, it’s a splendid example of how to illuminate the universal by drilling down on specifics.”

• Juliette Binoche is in Copenhagen, where her directorial debut, In-I In Motion, a collaboration with dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, is screening at CPH:DOX. New York’s Metrograph is currently presenting a series of films starring Binoche, and in the Journal, Elissa Suh writes that “Binoche’s great gamble has been to play emotions straight, without quotation marks. It works because of her uncanny ability to impart both self-awareness and uninhibitedness, a paradox that scholars like Shonni Enelow have traced in her performances. There is, too, that cosmopolitan glibness—a light, quick intelligence so often, fairly or not, ascribed to the French, which flickers at the edge of even her most stricken heroines and grounds her more extreme emotions in something unmistakably real.”