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Shohei Imamura: The Lower Depths

David Hudson — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:52:00 +0000

Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder (1964)

Last month marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shohei Imamura, a key figure in what would retroactively be called the Japanese New Wave. Three years before Imamura died in 2006, Nelson Kim wrote in Senses of Cinema that in the nineteen features he’d made over a period of forty-five years, Imamura “probed the lower depths of Japanese society and ‘the Japanese consciousness.’ Not for him the tourist-friendly vision of Japan as the postwar economic powerhouse of Asia, the land of kimono-clad elegance, Zen serenity, and harmonious Confucian social hierarchies. Instead he has put on-screen a world populated by prostitutes, pimps, and petty thieves, peasant farmers and middle-class pornographers, serial killers and shamen. This is the irrepressibly ‘real’ Japan of his bawdy, ragged, sensual films.”

Kim’s profile opens with a quote from the director that also tops the program notes for The Lower Depths: The Cinema of Shohei Imamura, a series running at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London through December 13: “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life obstinately supports itself.”

The third son of a well-to-do doctor, Imamura neglected his studies to take an active role in theater, politics, and the black market that thrived in the wake of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. He’d buy cigarettes and booze from American GIs and resell them to his professors. The ICA credits Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 noir Drunken Angel, screening this evening, with sparking Imamura’s interest in cinema.

Almost immediately after graduating, Imamura started working at Shochiku studios as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu on the productions of Early Summer (1951), The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), and Tokyo Story (1953). In terms of hands-on technical know-how, Imamura gleaned quite a bit from Ozu, but temperamentally, the two men couldn’t have been more different. As the late critic and historian Tony Rayns noted, the moment Nikkatsu studios reopened in 1954, young and aspiring filmmakers, including Imamura, “flocked” to what soon became a powerhouse producer of films aiming to appeal to the rebellious spirit of young audiences.

At Nikkatsu, Imamura worked under Yuzo Kawashima, whose worldview aligned a lot more closely with his own than Ozu’s. He also began directing B movies that he had little interest in, but in 1961, he came into his own with Pigs and Battleships. Hiroyuki Nagato, who had appeared in Imamura’s directorial debut, Stolen Desire (1958), as well as a few other B movies of which Imamura was not proud, stars in Pigs and Battleships as Kinta, a roustabout that Haruko, played by then-newcomer Jitsuko Yoshimura, falls hopelessly in love with. Together, they navigate the underworld of the port town of Yokosuka.

“With its raucous visual and auditory effects and its strong, down-to-earth women,” wrote film scholar Audie Bock (Japanese Film Directors) in 2009, “Pigs and Battleships was a turning point for Imamura, as it showcased his full-blown distinctive style. Here he is no longer sentimentalizing downtrodden youth or romanticizing itinerant actors, as he did in his earliest works. He combines the backstreet neorealism of Shinsaku Himeda’s mobile camera work with a caustic humor all his own, buoyed by the parodic bombast of avant-garde composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score. No other Japanese New Wave director has the peculiar boisterousness of Imamura . . . The bawdiness, greed, selfishness, and just plain foolishness of Imamura’s characters form a welcome counterpoint to the austere righteousness of Ozu’s modest women and taciturn men.”

Pigs and Battleships screens on Thursday, followed on Saturday by The Insect Woman (1963). “There was no aspect of the official culture that Imamura sought more vigorously to revise than the depiction of women as passive victims who achieved transcendence through suffering,” writes Dennis Lim. The Insect Woman traces the hard-knock life of Tomé Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari) from her birth in a desolate village in 1918 through decades of her exploitation and her win-some, lose-some struggles to fight back.

Imamura “regards Tomé with an awed fascination,” writes Lim. “The point of this rapt scrutiny, as in almost all of Imamura’s films, is to see through to a repressed or unacknowledged essence of Japanese society, to assert that the distance between feudal and modern Japan is shorter than anyone, least of all the modern Japanese, would like to admit . . . That this essence is akin to a vulgar life force—a font of wayward desires and ingrained superstitions—explains why his movies thrum with an ecstatic energy, not least when they are at their most perverse and irrational.”

In Intentions of Murder (1964), Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), a housewife neglected by her husband and scorned by her mother-in-law, is raped by an intruder. But she refuses to become a victim. “As if to prove his pronouncement ‘I like to make messy films,’ Imamura’s teeming ’Scope frames can barely contain the outsize performances, hectic energy, and eccentric spectacle for which he is celebrated,” writes James Quandt.

The Pornographers (1966) is “vintage Imamura,” wrote J. Hoberman in 2003. “This lurid black comedy, which the director adapted in 1966 from Akiyuki Nozaka’s prizewinning bestseller (and which he typically subtitled An Introduction to Anthropology), is set in seediest Osaka; affably grotesque, it details the personal and professional trials of one Subuyan Ogata, a minor producer/distributor of 8 mm porn films. Perhaps because The Pornographers was the first movie Imamura made for his own production company, it feels giddy with sympathy for its harried protagonist, a would-be solid citizen whose assistants call ‘maestro.’”

“All of it is filmed with an aggressive, unrelenting elegance that puts the viewer through rigorous ocular gymnastics,” noted Jean-Pierre Gorin when he put The Pornographers on his list of Top 10 Criterion releases. “If you thought that Ozu was the alpha and the omega of the visual possibilities offered by Japanese home architecture, Imamura’s truculent epic will open your eyes anew.”

A Man Vanishes (1967) is ostensibly a documentary—Imamura’s first—“about a disappearance and the transformation of reality into an ever more mercurial mystery, a vertiginous drama, and the very stuff of cinema,” wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times in 2012. Tokyo salesman Tadashi Oshima was first reported missing in the spring of 1965, and as the search for him “extends to those who scarcely seem to know him—the location shifting from perfectly framed cramped interiors to dense city scenes and expansive country landscapes—A Man Vanishes kinks this way and that, growing knottier and more fascinating. Each interviewee has an (often unflattering) take on Oshima’s character, temperament, actions and motivations, yet the more he or she talks, the blurrier his portrait becomes, as anecdote leads to digression leads to a discourse on the Japanese character.”

In Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), a Tokyo engineer intends to drill a well on a tropical island where he encounters an eccentric family of outcasts, resulting in “nearly three hours of quintessentially Imamurian insanity, wryness, wisdom, and acute anthropological observation,” as Glenn Kenny wrote in his 2010 Notebook review. “Imagine a cross between God’s Little Acre, Local Hero, and the opening scorpion fight of L’âge d’or, then filter it through Imamura’s particular aesthetic/consciousness, wherein tragedy walks hand-in-hand with farce, always, and a perpetually bemused cynicism finds no contradiction in an ever-abundant sense of wonder at the world both natural and unnatural.”

Imamura spent much of the 1970s making nonfiction films. History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) delivers what the title promises, while In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers (1970/1971) is a pair of films featuring Imamura himself as the on-screen interviewer tracking down emigrants throughout Southeast Asia. The ICA will also screen a selection of shorter docs that Imamura made for television.

Based on Ryuzo Saki’s novel, which in turn drew from the real-life story of a con man’s seventy-eight-day killing spree, Vengeance Is Mine (1979) is “paradigmatic Imamura in that the movie evades codification at every turn,” writes Michael Atkinson. “Is it psychosocial critique? Serial-killer thriller? Nippononoir? Black farce? . . . Without playing to the cheap seats, or displaying righteousness, Imamura critiques his nation’s personality with a steel-tipped whip.”

Depicting the upheaval that led to the restoration of imperial rule in 1868 and the Westernization of Japan, Eijanaika (1981) is “witty, grotesque, relentless, and beautifully engineered,” wrote Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader. “Imamura follows eight major characters through a bright, bursting, impossibly dynamic mise-en-scene . . . A very important film, and possibly a great one.” For Kehr, The Ballad of Narayama (1983), which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and tells the story of a seventy-year-old woman sent by her village to a mountain to die, “marks a turning point in his career, away from the violence and confrontationalism of his earlier films and toward an almost Ozu-like acceptance of human fate.”

Zegen (1987) tells the true story of Iheiji Muraoka (Ken Ogata in his fourth Imamura feature), a pimp who opened brothels across Southeast Asia as a service to the Emperor and his forces in the run-up to the Second World War. The film’s “fierce condemnation of unchecked nationalism, here spreading almost like a contagion, is reminiscent of Nagisa Oshima’s work,” notes Derek Smith at Slant, “but as it pushes the limits of its absurdist premise, Zegen ultimately morphs into something more akin to pinku farce.”

Imamura’s “turn toward more straight-laced, prestigious material with 1989’s Black Rain is one of the more unexpected left turns in his oeuvre,” writes Smith. “While Imamura expresses a deep reverence and compassion for the atomic bomb survivors depicted in the film, he neither wrings their stories for cheap sentiment nor ignores the hardships they faced afterwards at the hands of their fellow compatriots, who often saw them as pariahs who had to be supported by others who worked themselves to the bone.”

In 1997, the Palme d’Or went to both Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Imamura’s The Eel, the story of a man who has served eight years for killing his wife and her lover in a fit of passionate fury. As he begins a new life in a small town, The Eel “swims with grace, insight and vast compassion along the ineradicable fault line that separates flawed mankind from the elusive realization of heavenly perfection,” wrote Lawrence Van Gelder in the New York Times.

The 1998 comedy Dr. Akagi was intended to be a final feature, and in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote that Japan’s “master of bawdy black humor and enigmatic raunch has chosen to sign off with a thorough and characteristically wild recapitulation of his favorite themes.” But Imamura returned with one more, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), a romantic comedy reuniting The Eel’s Koji Yakusho and Misa Shimizu.

Warm Water “may well be Imamura’s funniest film,” wrote Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times, adding that “it is also one of his most accomplished. It is the work of a mature artist who has kept his adventurous spirit alive, which he has expressed in a complex and risky work carried off with an effortlessness that comes only from wisdom and experience.”

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Mizoguchi and Godzilla in Tokyo

David Hudson — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:52:00 +0000

Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953)

The thirty-ninth Tokyo International Film Festival is opening today with the world premiere of Takahisa Zeze’s Sukiyaki, starring Taiga Nakano as singer Kyu Sakamoto, who in 1961 recorded the song that gives the film its title. Topping the U.S. Billboard charts for three consecutive weeks in 1963, “Sukiyaki” became one of the world’s top-selling singles of all time.

Junichi Okada costars as composer Hachidai Nakamura, and Tori Matsuzaka plays lyricist Rokusuke Ei. “Full of music and melodrama, including the alcoholic Nakamura’s tempestuous split from Ei and their tearful reconciliation,” writes Mark Schilling in his festival preview for the Japan Times, “Sukiyaki is squarely aimed at domestic fans, especially those old enough to remember the Showa Era (1926–1989) the film so nostalgically depicts.”

More than two hundred films will screen before Colony, another zombie movie from Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), wraps this year’s edition on November 4. When Colony premiered in Cannes back in May, Jessica Kiang, writing for Variety, called it “an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.”

The Centerpiece presentation, screening on November 1, will be Godzilla Minus Zero, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki’s follow-up to Godzilla Minus One (2023), the first non-English language film to win an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. “By dividing [Minus One’s] attention between mass destruction and the raw pain of post-WWII trauma, reconstruction, and societal reintegration—not to mention the atomic allegory—Yamazaki boldly reimagined the property while honoring the roots of the series’ 1954 original,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney.

“That same meticulously balanced duality is evident in the director’s approach to the scaled-up sequel,” adds Rooney, who finds Minus Zero to be “an equally thrilling jolt of marauding monster action anchored by tender themes of family, friendship, camaraderie, and personal courage. These are characters about whom we come to care deeply, and Yamazaki trusts his audience to know the value of time spent observing human relationships, ennobling the horror with tangible emotional stakes.”

Of the fifteen films screening in the main competition, Schilling singles out Two Cigarettes, Three Nights, an adaptation of Akane Chihaya’s 2014 novel Male Friend directed by Yukiko Mishima. Mayu Matsuoka (Shoplifters) stars as Kanna, a painter who reconnects with Haseo (Ryo Narita) after seven years. They wander Kyoto, Fukui, and Hiroshima, watch movies—including Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987)—and throughout, the nature of their relationship remains difficult to pin down.

Purposefully so, says Mishima. “I wanted to trace their emotions carefully, scene by scene, so that somewhere in there, people might recognize a piece of themselves,” she tells Sebastien Raineri in the Japan Times. “Not ‘I would do this,’ but ‘I know what it is to feel this way.’”

Among the festival’s eleven sections is Nippon Cinema Now, whose nine features include Yamazaki Riverside: Over an Actor’s Shoulder, Isshin Inudo’s documentary portrait of Tsutomu Yamazaki, who is best known internationally for playing the kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) and the truck driver Goro in Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985). Nippon Cinema Now—which, as of this year, is a competitive section—also offers Shinichiro Ueda’s Earthlings in Love, a feature fashioned from a widely viewed thirty-part vertical series about a film director with early-onset dementia who can only remember movies.

The Japanese Classics program features a sidebar celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of Roman Porno, a string of soft-core movies produced by Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu. Heads up, New Yorkers: From November 20 through December 6, Japan Society will present Nikkatsu’s Golden Age of Eros. “Adhering to a strict set of conventions—a sex scene every fifteen or so minutes, brisk seventy-minute runtimes, medium-sized budgets, and tight ten-day shooting schedules—the Roman Porno became known as one of the few avenues for aspiring filmmakers to make their debut and hone their craft as the studio apprenticeship system buckled,” note the programmers.

A major highlight not only of the Japanese Classics program but also of the festival’s entire 2026 edition will be the thirteen-film Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective. “One film not to be missed,” advises Schilling, “is a digitally restored version of Mizoguchi’s 1933 silent The Water Magician. This early masterpiece, featuring Mizoguchi’s signature mix of visual artistry and female-centered pathos, will be presented with a benshi (silent film narrator) and musical accompaniment.”

By the mid-1930s, Mizoguchi “had developed his own unmistakable style, avoiding close-ups and reverse angles and favoring a distant, mobile camera and prolonged, choreographed takes,” wrote Gilberto Perez in 2013. “A few years after the war, as if to confirm the opinion of critics who were calling him old-fashioned, Mizoguchi turned to classic Japanese literature for a series of films that, beginning with The Life of Oharu [1952] and continuing with Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), would win him a top prize at Venice three years in a row and make his reputation in the West, which was then belatedly discovering the cinema of Japan. Some Japanese critics at the time objected to the liberties he took in adapting national classics. But that an artist can take liberties and still remain true to a tradition only attests to its vitality. As a national storyteller, Mizoguchi has few peers among filmmakers anywhere.”

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Don’t Just Eat

David Hudson — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:29:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Léa Seydoux and Guslagie Malanda in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023)

“He’s got a weathered, expressive sort of all-American look as well as the rolling yet emphatic vocal patterns of a man who, once he gets going, likes talking,” wrote Michael Sragow in a 2016 issue of Film Comment. “He knows how to imbue a populist complaint with ornery wit.” Sragow was profiling Tom Skerritt, who passed away yesterday at the age of ninety-three.

Skerritt broke through in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), playing Captain Augustus Bedford “Duke” Forrest, a southern surgeon sharing a tent near the frontlines of the Korean War with Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland), Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), and Trapper John (Elliott Gould). He played the husband of Shirley MacLaine’s character in The Turning Point (1977) and the husband of Sally Field’s in Steel Magnolias (1989); both films were directed by Herbert Ross.

Skerritt was Dallas in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Viper in Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986). In Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992), he played Reverend John Maclean, a Presbyterian minister and the father of two boys who grow up to become young men played by Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt. And in 1993, Skerritt won an Emmy for his lead performance as Jimmy Brock, the sheriff of the small fictional town of Rome, Wisconsin, in David E. Kelly’s series Picket Fences.

A few days ago, Ava DuVernay broke off from a conversation about her new documentary, 14th, to remember Ann Hornaday, the film critic at the Washington Post from 2002 to 2025. Hornaday was only sixty-six when she passed away last Sunday. She “loved films and filmmakers so much,” said DuVernay, “that whatever stories she would tell, even if she didn’t like a movie, she did it with such humanity and dignity. There was a respect there.”

Hornaday was the author of Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies, and just before her health took a turn for the worse, she turned in the manuscript for a book about Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976). Her publisher hopes to have it out at some point in 2028. The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik remembers Hornaday not just as a colleague but also as a friend. “Was she a mentor?” he asks. “A role model? Ann would scoff at such designations. She was just being herself. Yet it always, unassumingly, felt inspirational. And aspirational.”

At IndieWire, Anne Thompson quotes from a piece Hornaday wrote in 2022: “Of all artistic mediums, cinema occupies the trickiest space between fabrication and reality, exploiting the porous nature of both to become a third thing entirely: the distortion of the literal truth that becomes internalized as consensus history.”

This week’s highlights:

Most would agree with Sean Burns when he writes for WBUR that, a dozen years on, Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This is “still one of the best” film-related podcasts around. Longworth is currently on a fifteen-city tour, screening movies and talking about her latest season—the twenty-first!—The Bisexuals, tracing the flaming path of Libby Holman, who was, as Burns describes her, “a 1920s torch singer who first hit it big with a racially ambiguous stage persona and a voracious sexual appetite that didn’t so much transcend gender boundaries as disregard them entirely.” Friends and lovers included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, and Nicholas Ray. Burns asks Longworth about the films she’ll be discussing on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Brattle in Cambridge, Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951).

Two pieces this week spotlight the LA Rebellion of the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s. For the Guardian, Adria R. Walker talks with Charles Burnett about his second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), and with Maya Cade of Milestone Films, who says that “the goal of restoration is to use every tool in our arsenal to make the song that you may be familiar with, if you will, sing anew.” And in her latest Film Comment column, Melissa Anderson writes about Barbara O. Jones, who starred in Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). “No matter the part,” writes Anderson, “all of her performances are distinguished by her extraordinary talent for nonverbal expression—a mien expertly calibrated to communicate imperious invincibility or tattered self-worth, a gaze capable of both vaporizing all in its trajectory and revealing limitless sorrow.”

Several Futures is a distributor founded and run by a single person, Graham L. Carter. For Verso Books, Benjamin Crais talks with Carter about several of the films he’s worked on, including Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves (1984), Pradip Krishen and Arundhati Roy’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), and Axelle Ropert’s Petite Solange (2021). Ghassan Salhab is “a cinephile who had made a film interviewing Jean-Luc Godard during the making of Notre Musique (2004),” says Carter, and his Phantom Beirut (1998) “struck me as one of the few films to demonstrate that its director has actually internalized and processed Godard’s work, not just aped him. I told Ghassan this and he was like, ‘Yeah, in Arabic we have an expression that’s like, “We don’t just eat our food, we digest.”’”

Inspired as a teen by Andy Warhol and mentored by Gregory Markopoulos, Warren Sonbert made films that would often feature friends such as Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. “At first glance,” writes Arindam Sen for Texte zur Kunst, “Sonbert’s kaleidoscopic filmmaking may seem like an act of crude assemblage at the service of decorative impressionism; upon closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that his compositions are carefully crafted—guided by metaphors, montage of soft resonances, deliberate chromatic variances, and basic formal dualities.”

Following a quick word from the editors, the new Senses of Cinema opens with a passage from Proust. From there, Milo Farragher-Hanks examines how two films from 2023, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, “evoke and revise the cinematic conventions of the haunted city.” The new issue also features articles on “the so-called Brazilian Super 8 boom” of the 1970s and childhood in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (2025), Shinji Somai’s Moving (1993), and Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000); festival reports from Karlovy Vary, Locarno, and San Sebastián; interviews with Marta Mateus, Lisandro Alonso, and Sebastian Brameshuber; two book reviews; and one new addition to the Great Directors collection, Ko Nakahira, whose Crazed Fruit (1956) “announced, with a nihilistic bang,” writes Andy Lauer, “the arrival of a new age of Japanese cinema.”

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Robert Aldrich in Vienna

David Hudson — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Robert Aldrich, Gaby Rodgers, and Ralph Meeker on the set of Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Claire Denis, Radu Jude, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pedro Costa, and Joanna Hogg are among the directors who have made trailers for the Viennale over the past few years. This year, the festival has turned to Kelly Reichardt. The new trailer, screening with Forever . . . Forever, a twenty-one-minute short from experimental filmmaker Johann Lurf that Michael Sicinski has called “a testament to deep observation,” is opening the sixty-fourth Viennale this evening.

Through November 3, 260 films—plus one surprise film that will be revealed in the coming days—will screen in five cinemas. And talks, roundtables, and parties—including a DJ set from Lars Eidinger—are sprinkled throughout the program. There are series dedicated to Jocelyn Saab and Abbas Kiarostami and a selection of revivals that includes Kon Ichikawa’s Ten Dark Women (1961), Paula Delsol’s La dérive (1964), John Abraham’s Report to Mother (1986), and two programs of films by Artavazd Pelechian.

Copresented with the Austrian Film Museum, the Robert Aldrich retrospective will run through November 30. “Spanning almost three decades and thirty films,” writes Museum curator Christoph Huber, Aldrich’s “directorial career was crowned by a series of global hits, including such famous titles as Vera Cruz (1954), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974). In between, he redefined entire genres with masterpieces like the apocalyptic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the world-weary late-phase western Ulzana’s Raid (1972).”

Huber, Dominik Graf, and Christian Petzold will be introducing some of the twenty-nine features, most of them presented in 35 mm, and Sunday will see the launch of Huber’s new bilingual book, Robert Aldrich: Hollywood Rebel / Rebell in Hollywood. In the first episode of the newly relaunched Viennale Podcast, Huber and festival director Eva Sangiorgi discuss Aldrich’s career, which began in the early 1950s. Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, “which were otherwise often at loggerheads,” notes Huber, “were unanimous in declaring 1955 the ‘Year of Aldrich.’”

That was the year of Kiss Me Deadly, “which, briefly described,” wrote J. Hoberman in 2011, “tracks one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most brutal detectives in American movies through a nocturnal, inexplicably violent labyrinth to a white-hot vision of cosmic annihilation. A crass private eye looking for the big score, Mike Hammer plays with fire and gets burned. From the perversely backward title crawl (outrageously accompanied by orgasmic heavy breathing) through the climactic explosion, Kiss Me Deadly is sensationally baroque, eschewing straight exposition for a jarring succession of bizarre images, bravura sound matching, and encoded riddles the likes of which had not been seen in Hollywood since Orson Welles kissed the industry good-bye.”

The Big Knife, also from 1955, is “the director’s earliest stab at the Hollywood psychodrama he continued to perfect in bleak, mordant satires like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Killing of Sister George [1968],” writes Screen Slate’s Jon Dieringer. Jack Palance stars as an actor whose career and marriage are falling apart, and the cast also features Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger, and Shelley Winters. “As Castle pugilistically fumes around his chic Bel Air pad,” writes Dieringer, “a carousel of assistants, attachés, hangers-on, and friends revolve in and out to level with him, press his thinking, and offer new revelations while boxing him into an increasingly untenable position.”

Baby Jane, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as former child stars who have soured in their rivalrous adulthood, remains a perennial favorite in part because its over-the-top energy is fueled by rumors of a feud between its stars. “While Baby Jane has long been appropriated by gay men, its most famous line (‘But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!’) repeated in bars and drag shows for decades,” wrote Melissa Anderson for Film Comment in 2009, “Sister George remains a lesbian cult classic that has the distinction of being the first ‘serious’ film to receive an X rating.” And it “endures not because it’s an example of bad, pre-Stonewall homo images but because of its sly way of celebrating dykes.”

“Aldrich often corralled an assortment of icons into close spaces and mined their charismatic visages for tableaux of striking emotional power, mixing neurotic expressionism with a smooth sense of studio craftsmanship,” wrote Chuck Bowen for Slant in 2017. “The films are the efforts of a working man’s artist: of someone who’s in touch with his uncanny side as well as with the practicalities of telling a three-act story in which the trains run on time, each incident revealing subtext and portraiture.”

Aldrich “made war films, westerns, noirs, melodramas, comedies, and more,” writes Gena Telaroli in her essay on The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). “But he returned to a particular kind of situation time and again: the struggle of an individual or a group of people to survive and to maintain their sense of themselves within wildly inhospitable circumstances, whether natural or created by other humans. As the director once described the characters he was drawn to, they ‘find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.’”

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October Books

David Hudson — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:15:00 +0000

Gösta Ekman in F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926)

A plague has struck a village in sixteenth-century Germany, and Faust, an aging alchemist, turns to prayer and science in his attempts to put a stop to the agony. To no avail. In a fit of desperate rage, he throws his books—including a massive leather-bound Bible—into a fire. The Bible was more than a prop in F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). It was also a scrapbook of production photos, notes, and illustrations that Murnau’s team was putting together to present to the director at the end of the shoot.

Murnau left the Bible behind in his apartment in Berlin when he went to Hollywood to make Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He fully intended to return, but on March 10, 1931, his car overturned on the Pacific Coast Highway. He died the next day at the age of forty-two.

“Murnau’s brother stashed his belongings in various city-center basements, which were susceptible to flooding, and worse, once the bombs began falling on Berlin during the Second World War,” writes Pamela Hutchinson in the Guardian. Somehow, the Bible survived, eventually passing through the hands of a restaurateur and then a curator before being acquired by the Cinémathèque française in 2017.

“I went to see it this summer,” writes Hutchinson, “and it is appropriately grand in scale, an unusually majestic scrapbook. Restored by the cinema’s director of heritage Laurent Mannoni and his team, the book looks good for an abandoned, hundred-year-old prop. The water damage has been smoothed out, leaving only a few scuffs, and the shadows where some enterprising thief has prized the metal crucifix and corner pieces from the leather.”

Surely the most spectacular new publication in this month’s roundup, The Faust Bible: The Making of F. W. Murnau's Masterpiece is a handsome facsimile and the second title in the MUBI Editions Projections series. MUBI has produced a nine-and-a-half-minute video introduction, and for Notebook, Adrian Curry has put together a gallery of posters for the film. On Sunday, Faust will screen in Munich with live musical accompaniment from Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski and then in Los Angeles on November 1 at the Academy Museum with a live score by Julianna Barwick.

Reading Oeuvres

Sticking Place Books has just published a revised and expanded third edition of Joseph McBride’s essential study Orson Welles. McBride, who appears as a young film critic in Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind (1970–2018), has written more than twenty books, including Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, which might be read as a corrective to Capra’s own autobiography, The Name Above the Title.

“Now we have a fresh take on the issue,” writes the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane. “Frank Capra: A Life, by Sam Wasson, is hefty and dense, like The Catastrophe of Success, but altogether less corrosive in its tone.” Lane does grant that, while watching the trailer for Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), “you get the feeling that, as far as he was concerned, his name belonged not just above the title but before, after, and practically instead of it. It is the puff of that self-belief, in part, that provokes the ire of Capra’s detractors. ‘One man, one film,’ he said, and in that preemptive claim to the status of an auteur he left himself open to censure. Yet Capra’s movies from his golden years do look and sound like his and nobody else’s, with their signature blend of blends: the loner and the bunch of pals, the cracker-barrel and the wisecrack, and the accelerating narrative that finds time to stop and stare.”

Jason A. Ney’s Richard Fleischer: Journeyman, a biography of the director of such disparate hits as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Boston Strangler (1968), Soylent Green (1973), and Mandingo (1975), “trudges through each Fleischer production as if through a minefield where aesthetics and morals are made to seem equally irrelevant, or at least incidental, to many uphill skirmishes,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Baffler. “If his oeuvre doesn’t add up to anything more than production anecdotes, pursuing a recurrent theme, style, or genre to give his work more identity becomes hard to resist, even when it seems far-fetched. Rosenbaum also notes that Fleischer “remains a particular favorite of the film critic I regard as the most serious and thoughtful one currently alive, Shiguehiko Hasumi.”

Parker Finn (Smile) is currently remaking Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) with Margaret Qualley and Callum Turner, and “a remake, unfortunately, makes sense,” writes Charlotte Landrum at Little White Lies, especially at a time when “external chaos seeps into the home, often without us even realizing, as we’re left wondering why a loved one in front of us is now a stranger, and how a life that should have been simple came to resemble a haunted house at a theme park.” There couldn’t be a better time, then, for Samm Deighan’s new feature-by-feature study Hysterical Excess and Inhuman Ecstasy: The Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski.

“When he was ten years old,” writes Richard Skinner for 3:AM, “Simon Roy was home alone in Quebec skipping through the TV channels when he alighted on a scene from a film where a man is showing a woman and her young son around a huge food storeroom in a hotel and, as he’s showing them around, he telepathically asks the young boy, ‘How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?’ Freaked out, Roy ran to a house on the other side of the street where his mother was playing cards with neighbors. The movie was The Shining and this first viewing started a lifelong obsession with the movie.” Roy’s Kubrick Red, first published in 2014, is “one of the most fascinating and original memoirs I’ve ever come across,” writes Skinner.

The latest additions to the growing body of critical work on the late David Lynch include Scott Meslow’s A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks and Philippa Snow’s forthcoming essay Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask David Lynch), a study of seven films in twenty-four pages. Also forthcoming is Alicia Haddick’s Archive: Shinya Tsukamoto, with a foreword by Gaspar Noé.

Critics and Collections

For Screen Slate, Mark Asch talks with J. Hoberman about his new book, Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, and about the challenges of becoming a freelancer after decades spent as the chief film critic at the Village Voice, Chantal Akerman in the 1970s, “a certain sense of immediacy” in some recent documentaries and in “vernacular video,” AI, and of course, the state of the art. “For me,” says Hoberman, “the key piece was written by Rudolf Arnheim in 1931 or ’32, when all these people were mourning the death of cinema because sound had come in, and he, in essence, says, you’re right. It’s something else now; accept it. I think that that’s the truth.”

Michael Atkinson is still writing for the Voice. He started out there in 1994, and just last week, he turned in a review of You Can See Everything—but don’t read it until you’ve seen Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s movie. And now Atkinson has a whopping new collection out. Five hundred pages and a deep-breath title, This Is How You Fight the Battle for Movies: Diatribes, Hosannas, and Wild Talk on the Semi-Lost Craft of Cinephilia, 2001–2026.

Erika Balsom and Genevieve Yue coedit Cutaways, a series of books for Fordham University Press. Each volume focuses on a single motif, theme, or device in a discussion of an idiosyncratic selection of films. Yue’s Trains is the fourth entry, and she and Metrograph programmer Edo Choi have put together a two-part film series. Trains: Local Routes is running through November 1.

In Metrograph’s Journal, Yue tells Erika Balsom that she “enjoyed being able to experiment in this book. The Cutaways series is meant to be an experimental space for scholars, critics, filmmakers, and programmers to come together and play in a space. But yes, it is still published by a university press and because of that it goes through a rigorous review process.”

Sabzian is running an excerpt from Balsom’s own new book, The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, a piece on Harun Farocki’s Parallel I–IV (2012–2014). The Institute of Contemporary Arts is celebrating the book’s publication with the London premiere of James Benning’s little boy (2025) on October 30 and a panel discussion on October 31.

“Rarely,” writes Tom de Lancy Green in his review for Cinema Year Zero, “has there been a more perspicacious acknowledgement in feminist film criticism that, ‘like it or not, voyeurism is the very ground of cinematic fascination and cannot be escaped that easily,’ an attitude that carries through to Balsom’s review of two all-timers in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) and Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbès, or Virtue (1980). Balsom’s affection for these free, pencil-sketchy films is analogous with the book’s approach to the margins of the form. She called it Edges of Cinema to emphasize her burrowing inquisitiveness as much as the strident heterodoxy of the films covered here.”

The ICA has marked the publication of Arrows of Desire: Selected Writings 1963–2002, a collection of work by Peter Wollen—e-flux has an excerpt—with a screening of Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), based on his own short story, which Equator has just republished, and featuring Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton. On October 28, the ICA will launch the second edition of Who Are You Dorothy Dean?, a collection edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo. The ICA will screen a forty-minute excerpt from Andy Warhol’s Prison (1965) that features Dean, and a Q&A with Ngbanzo will follow.

A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema, a collection of notes on some of the most unfortunate film industry developments making news between March 2024 and March 2025, has been updated with a fresh round from Hamrah and Will Tavlin at n+1, and it takes us to about a month ago. Hamrah will be discussing the book with Adina Glickstein in San Francisco on Friday, and in Los Angeles, he’ll present Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (2007) on Sunday and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) on Monday. On November 5, Hamrah will be talking about his other new book, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025, at Lost City Books in Washington DC, where he’ll present Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) at Suns Cinema the following evening.

“Become a better and more voracious reader, and becoming a better critic will follow,” writes Justine Smith at the top of an annotated list of eight recommendations. A few are for undeniable standards you might expect: Manny Farber, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph. Others are less commonly cited: Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film and Michel Chion’s Film, a Sound Art. And if you only have time for one, writes Smith, “make it this one”: Nicole Brenez’s On the Figure in General snd the Body in Particular: Figurative Invention in Cinema.

Two and a Half Stars

At the top of her interview with Michael Douglas for the Los Angeles Times, Maddie Connors notes that his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, “details his movie-making career as a prolific producer and actor, along with his affair with his Romancing the Stone costar Kathleen Turner, mudslides in Mexico, snorting cocaine with O. J. Simpson, encounters with Princess Diana and screaming matches with Paul Verhoeven that end in blood. In short: the life of a movie star.” Douglas has also been chatting with Elisabeth Egan in the New York Times and Tonya Mosley on Fresh Air, and Deadline is running an excerpt.

Sylvester Stallone’s memoir, The Steps, “asks us to accept the author as a real-world Rocky, the lowly everyman who hauled his way to the summit,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “That’s not a lie; it’s a life story to be proud of. But he is also Apollo Creed, the wily showboater and self-promoter, who knows that a David and Goliath story is good for business and that the best American heroes are self-directed, self-made, and still a little rough around the edges.”

Dave Abramson’s Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story arrives with enthusiastic blurbs from Quentin Tarantino and Patton Oswalt and a foreword by screenwriter Scott Alexander, who cowrote Ed Wood (1994) and Man on the Moon (1999) with Larry Karaszewski. Petrillo was briefly famous in the 1950s for one thing and one thing only, his uncanny ability to impersonate Jerry Lewis. His show business career rolled on into the early 1990s, but his fame did not. “Abramson, a onetime WFMU DJ and an encyclopedic pop culture enthusiast, doesn’t get too hifalutin about it,” writes Glenn Kenny, “but his book clearly understands Petrillo’s dilemma as existential.”

Forthcoming

Fireflies Press, best known for its outstanding Decadent Editions, has teamed up with Porto’s Batalha Cinema to publish From where do you start when drawing a flower?, a collection of writing and art by Matías Piñeiro. Coming out next month, the book features not only an introduction by Mariano Llinás but also a conversation between Piñeiro and New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim.

Piñeiro will deliver a masterclass and host screenings at Batalha Cinema on October 29 and 30 before he returns to New York to present his 2016 feature Hermia & Helena at Metrograph on November 8, offer a lecture and performance at Light Industry on November 17, and screen a 35 mm print of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) at the Museum of the Moving Image on December 6.

After the Kino-Eye: An e-flux Film Reader will be out in February, and Canongate has announced that it has acquired Tilda Swinton’s first book, Material Evidence. Due in the fall of 2028, the book will trace Swinton’s life, but: “Rather than moving chronologically from childhood to the present, the book proceeds object by object: a christening dress, a letter, a wooden leg, a sweatshirt, a length of embroidery silk, a photograph.”

Endnotes

The Light Industry Benefit Book Sale is happening in Brooklyn on Sunday: “Also on offer that afternoon, amplifying the pleasant vibes which are sure to prevail, will be a survey of film music’s central place within the once-popular genre of easy listening, assembled by Light Industry’s Ed Halter from his personal record collection.”

From November 10 through 28, the Austin Film Society will present a special screening series in conjunction with the release of Mark D. Cunningham’s new book, Once Upon a Time in South Central LA: John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy. Ten years ago, Ashley Clark, our curatorial director, reported for Filmmaker on a conversation between Singleton and novelist Walter Mosley. Clark has programmed The World of Black Film: Revolutions, a series running on Saturdays at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco from November 14 through January 16, and he’ll be taking his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, on the road.

Clark will introduce a screening of Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) at Film Forum in New York on October 29, and he’ll be on hand when the Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation presents Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979) on November 7. The following day, he’ll be talking about the book with Rachell Morillo in Philadelphia, and then on November 9, he’ll discuss Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) with Be Reel Black Cinema Club founder Stephanye Watts at Two Locals Brewing Company.

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Sergei Loznitsa in New York

David Hudson — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:17:00 +0000

Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium (2026)

“If ever there was a project for Sergei Loznitsa, this was it,” wrote Jay Weissberg in Variety when Imperium premiered in Venice last month. In the early 1970s, an Italian communist film crew armed with 16 mm cameras spent three years traversing the Soviet Union, shooting more than sixty hours of ethnically and culturally diverse day-to-day living from the Baltics to the Pacific and from the Arctic down to the “Stans.” “From urban commuters to village fêtes, Baku trawlers to Siberian reindeer herders,” wrote Weissberg, “the cameramen aimed to capture the Soviet polity at a time when Westerners had a gray, monolithic image of what lay behind the Iron Curtain.”

The Italians were working on a major television series, but in the end, only a few episodes aired. Loznitsa has now honed all that original footage down to a vivid travelogue running just short of three hours. On Sunday, Imperium won the Best Film Award at the seventieth BFI London Film Festival, and on Friday, the Museum of Modern Art will launch the first complete retrospective of Loznitsa’s work in North America.

Loznitsa will be there to introduce Imperium. “What astonishes is not so much that the Kremlin was able to hold it all together for so long but that ancient customs and peoples stubbornly resisted some seventy-five years of forced labor, dogma, and terror,” writes MoMA curator Josh Siegel, wryly adding that “Russia today is another story altogether.”

“An empire projecting a delusion of homogeneity is here revealed as something much more permeable and syncretic,” wrote Leonardo Goi in a Notebook dispatch from Venice. “Buddhist monks in orange robes and blue-tinted shades strolling around temples in Kalmykia; Christians flocking to centuries-old churches in Armenia; women boasting their traditional clothes somewhere in Turkmenistan; models strutting with their Italian-style coats in Riga. A miraculous alchemy binds the original directors to the man editorializing their material several decades later. The Italians didn’t just provide Loznitsa with a time machine, [they] also shared his keen eye for incongruous images, wherein the cultural uniformity flaunted by Moscow is routinely complicated by endemic symbols and traditions. The result is a riveting snapshot of a bygone world that never feels didactic.”

As a Ukrainian filmmaker who studied in Moscow, Loznitsa has spent nearly three decades probing the entangled histories of his own country and Russia. His earliest short films and features are studies of specific milieus in then-contemporary Russia—a construction site, a farming community, a train station, a rural psychiatric hospital, a factory. With Blockade (2005), Loznitsa began a series of features constructed exclusively from archival footage. All of Blockade’s fifty-two minutes were shot by Soviets during the Siege of Leningrad undertaken by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944. The estimated death toll is one and a half million, around half of the city’s prewar population.

“Loznitsa doesn’t adorn the eerie footage with talking heads and factoid title cards,” wrote Jim Ridley in the Village Voice. “What narrative there is, along with a sense of incrementally mounting horror, emerges unbidden from the images—teeming streets that gradually thin, bundled proles panning for filthy water in potholes, stick-thin pedestrians stepping matter-of-factly past wrapped corpses. The movie is a tone poem of attrition.”

The MoMA series isn’t arranged this way, but Loznitsa’s oeuvre could be viewed as a hundred-year journey through wars, their desolate aftermaths, and the very occasional and short-lived triumph. That journey would begin in Moscow in 1930, when eight men, professors and engineers, were accused of conspiring against the state. Another feature culled from archival footage, The Trial (2018) bears down on the emphasis Stalin’s regime put on turning the legal process into a show in which the masses were called on to play the crucial role of the hysterical chorus demanding retribution.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody points out that, years later, the prosecutor “was falsely accused of being a spy and executed. Terror continued to assign roles at random,” and indeed, “a palpable sense of randomness is Loznitsa’s singular accomplishment. As in the trial itself, there is no story in The Trial—only the spectacle of the transformation of people into totalitarian subjects.”

Set in 1937, Two Prosecutors (2025) is based on a novella written in 1969 by Georgy Demidov—a physicist who had spent fourteen years in the gulag—but not published until 2009. Kornyev, a young and idealistic lawyer played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, ventures into the dark labyrinth of Stalinist bureaucracy to argue on behalf of an aging prosecutor (Alexander Filippenko). He also aims to report on rampant corruption in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. “If Loznitsa has cited Gogol and Kafka as touchstones,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage, “there are scenes in Two Prosecutors that echo the bleak absurdism of Roy Andersson.”

In 1941, German soldiers and Ukrainian collaborators murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The New York Times’ A. O. Scott has called Babi Yar. Context (2021) “a wrenching and revelatory collage . . . What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated, and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of twelve Germans convicted of atrocities after the war. Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method is to allow the human reality to speak for itself.”

Based on a novel by Vasil Bykov and set in Nazi-occupied Belarus, In the Fog (2012) centers on Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski), a railway worker falsely accused of collaborating with the Germans. “Death, or so he believes, would bring him a kind of exoneration,” writes the NYT’s Manohla Dargis, adding that “for all the devastations visited on the characters, Loznitsa is searching for the human good amid a human catastrophe. The stunning opening scene—a probing sweep around a Bruegel-like tableau of people, dogs, and mud—puts that search into cinematic terms and also telegraphs the narrative’s circular form. We go on, circle back, go on.”

The Natural History of Destruction (2022)—whose title is taken from a 1999 collection of essays in which W. G. Sebald addressed the unwillingness in German culture to process the carpet bombing of the country’s cities in the waning days of the Second World War—is another archival collage. But Loznitsa brought this nightmare of firestorms and mass death to Cannes in the immediate wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dispatching from the festival, Notebook’s Daniel Kasman found “a dangerous flirtation in the film with equivocation and simplification, with all sides equally bad, war being evil. But more likely, the film, in its terrible vision of ruination, should be taken as a warning, first to Putin and then to the rest of the world. To Putin, the warning is: Along a certain path, you will only bring destruction to yourself, your people, and your country. To the rest of the world: You can fail too, by embracing the dark allure of supremacy through obliteration.”

Half a year after that Cannes premiere, Loznitsa was in Venice with The Kiev Trial (2022), which documents the 1946 hearings that have sometimes been referred to as the “Kyiv Nuremberg.” Fifteen Nazis and collaborators were found guilty of committing atrocities in Ukraine during the war. “Unlike Babi Yar: Context, which gave us documentary footage of the killings,” noted Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound, “The Kiev Trial follows the Claude Lanzmann principle of recounting rather than showing horrors—apart from the final sequence, which shows the actual hangings, in front of a Kyiv multitude, of the German officers.”

Here our journey might take a slight detour to the twenty-first century for two reflections on the scars left by the Second World War. “If poetry after Auschwitz constituted an act of barbarism,” wrote Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope, “then what can be made of curious tourists eating sandwiches, or snapping self-portraits, on the lawns of former concentration camps now repurposed as museums? The question isn’t so much posed as interrogatively embedded in Austerlitz’s [2018] conceptual framework, in which ‘dark tourism’ is subjected to a formally distanced yet skeptical gaze of its own, by way of a camera that is, to all appearances, indistinguishable from—and yet purely oppositional to—the ubiquitous memory tool of choice brandished by the idling hordes. Premised on the paradox of fleeting vigilance and historical sampling, Austerlitz extends from Sergei Loznitsa’s own visit to Buchenwald, where a source of unease arose from proximity to the living rather than the dead.”

Writing for Variety, Jessica Kiang found Victory Day (2018) to be “a perfect corollary” to Austerlitz. Each May 9, Russian-speaking residents of Berlin gather in Treptower Park to celebrate the 1945 triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. “At one end towers the massive statue of a strapping Soviet soldier, sword in his hand, child nestled in the crook of his arm, standing atop a trampled, broken swastika,” wrote Kiang. “All the way at the other end, past the sixteen decorative ‘sarcophagi’ on which Joseph Stalin quotes are literally carved in stone, and through a raised portal of red marble emblazoned with hammers and sickles, a gently downward-sloping avenue, lined with hushed weeping willows, leads to a much smaller statue: a seated woman, bowing her head in grief.”

“The site’s epic, pathos-heavy symbolism seduces even as it repels,” wrote Ela Bittencourt in the Village Voice. “In one mausoleum relief, thanks to Loznitsa’s forced perspective, a German plane appears small enough to be struck by a Soviet peasant’s outstretched, elegantly poised hand. The iconography evokes episodes of unremitting civilian suffering during an airstrike, yet Loznitsa captures it first in close-up, revealing an uncanny inner strength.”

“A mesmerizing, two-hour assemblage fashioned from archival material intended for The Great Farewell, a never-released feature documenting the March 1953 funeral of Soviet maximum leader Joseph Stalin, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral [2019] is both awesome and stupefying, conjuring the spectacle of a dead pharaoh laid to rest in a celluloid pyramid of his own design,” wrote J. Hoberman for Artforum. “Loznitsa saves the body count (twenty-seven million murdered, executed, tortured to death, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or deported; fifteen million starved to death) for the kicker.”

Revue (2008) is “surely the greatest compendium of Soviet kitsch since 1997’s East Side Story,” wrote Vadim Rizov in the Voice. “Loznitsa’s simple strategy is to narrow in on the gap between ‘cultural’ events and the dreary realities they celebrated in the ’50s and ’60s by cutting back and forth between self-consciously nationalist concerts/social-realist plays and their real-world inspirations. The gulf is rarely wide: The newsreel footage Loznitsa finds—factory workers woodenly announcing their patriotic quota increases—is hardly more convincing than the terrible plays made to glorify them.”

Mr. Landsbergis (2021) contextualizes an interview with Vytautas Landsbergis, who spearheaded the movement that led to Lithuania becoming in 1990 the first Soviet republic to declare its independence. “Formally, Mr. Landsbergis heralds a few key ruptures,” wrote Leonardo Goi for Notebook. “It marks the first time Loznitsa’s voice can be heard in his films, and the first time one of his archival docs features a talking head. Sitting in his summer house, Landsbergis recalls those tumultuous years, and his musings intersperse the mélange of black-and-white and color clips the director assembles from Soviet and Lithuanian sources.”

Eight cameramen set to work in Leningrad when Soviet hardliners in Moscow attempted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1991. “People poured onto the streets, the army refused to fire, the coup failed, and the Soviet Union was soon a thing of the past,” wrote Jay Weissberg in his Variety review of The Event (2015). “Loznitsa relies on an intelligent audience with historical memory, and among that demographic, few will be unmoved by the inevitable pondering: What happened to the optimism of 1991?” Robert Greene put The Event on Sight and Sound’s list of the best documentaries of that year and noted: “When Putin pops up, waves of present tragedy rush through the material.”

“Imagine the early, hellaciously bleak work of Cormac McCarthy transposed to the corrupt outlands of modern Russia and/or Ukraine and composed with a steely psychopath’s disregard for cohesion, and you have something like Sergei Loznitsa’s debut feature, a two-hour-plus decathlon of evil cross-purposes and runaway iniquity,” wrote Michael Atkinson in his review of My Joy (2010) for the Voice.

The plot of A Gentle Creature (2017), Loznitsa’s second fictional feature, is “almost comically simple,” wrote the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. “A woman tries to deliver a parcel: that’s it. There is no clear debt to the Dostoyevsky novella with which it shares its title,” but “the great Russian novelist’s shadow keeps looming up from murky corners, along with similar debts to the savage nineteenth-century satires of Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gogol.” Loznitsa’s “vision of this world, shot by the great Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, is immersive and unnerving.”

In the fall of 2013, thousands of demonstrators began gathering in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) to peacefully protest Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an agreement that would draw the nation closer to the European Union. The government cracked down, the people rose up, and Yanukovych eventually fled to Russia. Loznitsa was there with two other cinematographers, Serhiy Stefan Stetsenko and Mykhailo Yelchev. Maidan (2014) “harkens back to the heroic, journalistic roots of documentary-making,” wrote Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter, “and yet feels ineffably modern and formally daring. It’s a tiny marvel of a movie.”

Within four years, Putin had annexed Crimea and was infiltrating Ukraine from the east. Donbass (2018) is a “brutally matter-of-fact, cynically comic string of vignettes depicting social destabilization in the titular war-ravaged region,” wrote Robert Abele in his 2020 review for the Los Angeles Times. “And yet, as the world grows ever more calloused toward propaganda-fueled division, official criminality, and everyday armed conflict, we may need more films as bracing as Donbass to slap us straight about where this is leading us all.”

Loznitsa has spoken of The Invasion (2022) as a follow-up to Maidan, but at the Film Verdict, Clarence Tsui found it at least structurally closer to Donbass. Rather than depict actual military maneuvers, The Invasion, shot over a period of two years, is a series of “chapters dedicated to individual events. Weddings and water rationing, shooting practice and surgery, Christmas festivities and the chaotic aftermath of an airstrike: all are brought vividly to life by cinematographers Evgeny Adamenko and Piotr Pawlus. These visual snippets are sewn together masterfully by Loznitsa and Danielius Kokanauskis to produce a comprehensive picture of what Ukrainian society is like in the present day.”

When the European Film Academy issued a statement of solidarity with Ukraine just hours after Putin launched his invasion, Loznitsa found it to be pretty weak tea. He revoked his membership and condemned the Academy for failing “to call a war a war.” Days later, the EFA announced that it would exclude Russian filmmakers from its European Film Awards, a move that only further infuriated Loznitsa, who noted that “many friends and colleagues, Russian filmmakers, have taken stand against this insane war.”

Following Saturday’s screening of State Funeral, Loznitsa will take part in a conversation with Julia Loktev, the Russian-born American director of My Undesirable Friends, the two-part, eleven-and-a-half-hour chronicle of Putin’s crackdown on independent Russian journalists reporting on the war. MoMA’s retrospective will then carry on running through November 24.

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How Late Is It?

David Hudson — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:42:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Gustav Fröhlich in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

On January 10, 1927, Fritz Lang’s monumental sci-fi classic Metropolis premiered in Berlin. An exhibition, The Metropolis Century: Dystopia and Rebellion, will be on view from March 18 through September 26 at the Deutsche Kinemathek, which is partnering with the Berlinale to present the festival’s 2027 retrospective, Rage Against the Machine.

The full lineup for the timely program won’t be revealed until December, but organizers have already teased a few titles: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s The Last Days of Gomorrah (1974), Muscha’s Decoder (1984, and with a cast featuring William S. Burroughs, Genesis P-Orridge, and Bill Rice), Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), and Rintaro’s Metropolis (2001).

Starting this evening, the Harvard Film Archive will spend the weekend presenting a newly struck 35 mm print of what curator Haden Guest calls Masaki Kobayashi’s “towering magnum opus, the nine-and-a-half-hour WWII epic The Human Condition (1959–1961).” In the Chicago Reader, Micco Caporale talks with Circuit des Yeux (Haley Fohr) about her new original score for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which she will be performing live with Alan Sparhawk tomorrow evening at the Studebaker Theater.

If you’re in Los Angeles, you might catch E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1989) tonight at the Los Feliz Theatre—and if you miss it, it screens again on Sunday and Thursday—and then head to the launch of the UCLA Film & Television Archive series Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Early Works tomorrow, and then to the Culver Theater on Sunday, when Blake Williams will present A Woman Escapes (2022, codirected with Sofia Bohdanowicz and Burak Çevik) and four of his 3D shorts, followed on Monday at 2220 Arts + Archives by Williams’s selection of 3D shorts directed by others.

Wellesnet passes along the sad news that author and critic Bill Krohn has passed away at the age of eighty-three. For decades, Krohn was the Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma, and Adrian Martin has written that his 2020 collection Letters from Hollywood: 1977–2017 “offers one of the very best examples I have ever encountered of a fertile space intermixing popular-journalistic and intellectual-critical modes of writing about and analyzing cinema.” With critic Myron Meisel and filmmaker Richard Wilson, Krohn cowrote and codirected the acclaimed 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.

Writer Jim Knipfel, who passed away last week at the age of sixty-one, was probably best known for “Slackjaw,” a column that ran for years in the New York Press. In 1999, he used the title for the first of three memoirs, earning a blurb from Thomas Pynchon, who found the book “maniacally aglow with a born storyteller’s gifts of observation.”

Knipfel’s last piece for Truthdig was an appreciation of Roger Corman, but his last piece period may well have been his own obituary: “He never liked gardening, playing cards, or fishing, and his ‘bright smile’ was neither ‘contagious’ nor did it ever ‘light up the room.’ Despite those deliberating character flaws, looking back he summed it up this way: A thousand regrets, failures, mistakes, traumas, tragedies, bad decisions, and humiliations, but no complaints.”

This week’s highlights:

The Metrograph series Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire is on through the weekend, and in a discerning guide to the oeuvre for the New York Review of Books, Sophie Pinkham calls Dovzhenko “a complicated hero for a Ukraine at war with Russia. His films are mind-bogglingly beautiful paeans to Ukraine’s land and its people, animals, and plants, but he also played the Soviet game, his work vetted and reviewed by state organs and censors. He likely survived the 1930s only thanks to Stalin’s personal patronage and protection. Ukraine’s greatest director hid his youthful affiliation with Ukrainian nationalism, embraced Bolshevism, and created magnificent works exalting the October Revolution and the collectivization of agriculture, two of the most traumatic moments in Ukraine’s twentieth-century history. His films celebrate the Communist project, but at their best they depict human suffering and survival with a complexity that is alien to propaganda.”

Possible Love, tracking the complex dynamic between two couples, one working-class, the other well-to-do, is Lee Chang-dong’s “most narratively ambitious film in scope since Peppermint Candy (1999) and a testament to Lee’s prolonged ethical deliberation both as an artist and the son of a utopian socialist father,” writes Jawni Han at Reverse Shot. Profiling the director for the New Yorker, E. Tammy Kim writes that “Lee talks about his work in terms of exigencies: ‘Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a film?’ At first, I interpreted this line of questioning as an acknowledgment of how costly—in money, time, and manpower—a feature can be. Later, I saw it as a test of social necessity. He told me, ‘I like to think, both for me and the audience, What is an important issue that we’re struggling with right now?’”

Each year, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies offers an open-access Fifth Issue, and the latest features essays on Georges Méliès, Lino Brocka, and Bruce Lee as well as a six-article dossier on Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966). “It is hard to believe that a film so tapped into the spirit of youthful rebellion and so attuned to the desire to take a hammer—or perhaps a kitten heel—to the system is sixty years old,” write Tanya Goldman and Masha Shpolberg in their introduction, noting that they aim “to honor Daisies’ uniqueness—in Chytilová’s filmography, in the canon of the Czech New Wave, and within Eastern Bloc filmmaking more broadly—while also emphasizing the film’s perennial quality: its ability to animate audiences across space and time. With authoritarianism resurging and war an urgent reality, we turn to Daisies once again for inspiration on how to resist—joyfully, playfully, and courageously.”

In the weeks since Film Comment presented its series John Berger and Cinema, Tom Overton’s biography of the artist, writer, and critic has appeared, and it’s “deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so,” writes Megan O’Grady at Hyperallergic. “It is in the space of the cinema where Berger’s achievements—his vision of a world dynamized by those love-drenched, one-to-one human connections we dare to call ‘friendships’—coalesce,” writes Carlos Valladares in the Brooklyn Rail. “The greatest filmmakers, he believed, could ‘go beyond individuality’ and achieve ‘a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind.’ At first glance, such rhetoric may strike one as nastily bombastic, wildly overblown in its starry-eyed optimism. But a slow comb-through of Berger’s writings, and particularly the trilogy of films he made with the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner (La salamandre, 1971; Middle of the World, 1974; Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, 1976) shows that Berger walked his talk with stringent militancy. He never stopped striving for a better, differently organized world, one whose roots began at ‘home’—wherever that provisional realm may lie for any given lonely soul of Faustian modernity.”

“Who are these billionaires who claim to hold the power of life and death over humanity?” asks Arundhati Roy in a new essay up at Equator. “They give the impression that they have already disaffiliated themselves from the human race.” The Guardian’s global technology editor Dan Milmo notes that “film villains used to be hoodlums, ex-deep state operatives, people with posh British accents. Tech execs are the new Darth Vader.” And “films about them have in turn evolved from coming-of-age stories and stylish biopics into whistle-blower dramas and dark thrillers,” writes Brady Brickner-Wood in a New Yorker piece that touches on Alex Gibney’s Musk, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, and others, but focuses primarily on Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning. In the New Republic, Annie Berke pairs that one with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger because both films “unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.”

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William Greaves 100

David Hudson — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:46:00 +0000

William Greaves in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)

When Once Upon a Time in Harlem premiered at Sundance back in January, the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller called it “a staggering work of archival magic.” In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves, best known for his groundbreaking Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), invited artists, composers, writers, performers, and activists associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s to Duke Ellington’s townhouse for a cocktail-hour get-together that bubbled along into the early evening.

Greaves and his four cameramen—one of them was his son, David Greaves—mingled, capturing boisterous conversations and the occasional one-on-one interview. In Once Upon a Time in Harlem, “the trailblazers aren’t names on a page or plaques on a wall,” writes Oller, “but endlessly bickering, drunkenly funny, sweetly proud, profoundly eloquent members of a recognizable social circle. They are not participating in a stagey or stately oral history about the Harlem Renaissance; it just so happens that a greater history than any that’s yet been written emerges from their organic interactions.”

When Greaves passed away in 2014, David Greaves and his daughter, producer Liani Greaves, set out to restore the nearly thirty hours of footage and, as the Guardian’s Adrian Horton writes, “to seamlessly clip and contextualize the party into a hundred mesmerizing minutes.” The result is “both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy. That this sumptuous footage, allowed room to breathe, exists at all feels like a miracle; that it takes shape here as a coherent, inventive yet straightforwardly informative film is an intergenerational feat.”

“The edit employs jazzy ’70s split-screen to offer multiple perspectives of conversations and convey an impression of the story as up for grabs, of history as living,” writes Mark Asch for Little White Lies. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem was made during another profound moment in both New York City and in Black history and culture. The film’s opening and closing montages situate these lions of the past squarely in 1972, juxtaposing archival footage with the iconography, from the Apollo Theater to graffiti-scrabbled stoops.” William Greaves is “a conspicuous presence when he pops up on-screen, less because he’s the director than because he’s a midcareer artist evidently eager to ask questions and soak up knowledge. That he, like his subjects, is no longer with us, makes Once Upon a Time in Harlem doubly precious, as a capsule of two times.”

This eagerness that Asch senses in Greaves reflects the filmmaker’s lifelong connection to the people he was capturing. Born in Harlem in 1926, Greaves grew up in the cultural milieu created and shaped by those he’d invited to the party. This weekend’s launch of a theatrical run for Once Upon a Time in Harlem—David and Liani Greaves are in New York to take part in Q&As at Film Forum tonight and tomorrow and at Film at Lincoln Center on Saturday and Sunday—marks a centennial that will be celebrated with series running at the Barbican in London from Wednesday through November 28 and at Film Forum from October 23 through 29 as well as a Spotlight program at next month’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

Greaves started out as a dancer but soon gravitated toward the American Negro Theatre, and by 1948, he was studying at the Actors Studio. He landed substantial roles in theatrical productions and appeared in two films screening in the New York and London series, Jack Kemp’s musical melodrama Miracle in Harlem (1948) and Powell Lindsay’s Souls of Sin (1949), featuring Greaves as blues guitar player Isiah “Alabama” Lee.

In short, his career was rolling along just fine, but Greaves could see that, as a Black actor in the United States, he was facing limited options. In 1950, he left the country to study documentary filmmaking at the National Film Board of Canada. He would eventually make more than two hundred nonfiction films, and a standout from this period is Emergency Ward (1959), a thirty-minute immersion in the urgent goings-on at Montreal General Hospital.

As the civil rights movement began to catch fire, Greaves decided to return to the U.S. Emergency Ward had caught the attention of the United States Information Agency, and after making a few films for the USIA, he convinced them to let him travel to Senegal in 1966 to document an event for a film that became The First World Festival of Negro Arts (1968).

“The year 1968 was a particularly productive one for Greaves,” writes Matthew Barrington, a programmer for the Barbican, in an annotated list of ten standouts from the oeuvre. With Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968), “Greaves moves beyond the act of countering negative stereotypes, drawing a deeper, complex portrait of how success serves ‘the Black community,’ while simultaneously critiquing and pulling apart the notion of any such singular entity. The film also reflects Greaves’s interest in subverting the idea of the documentary, through the inclusion of an extended docufiction sequence focusing on a group of Black Republicans.”

Greaves also spent that year shooting Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, “a singular, metacinematic experiment in nonfiction that foregrounds the ‘performances’ within it and slyly calls into question notions of authority, sexuality, and other forms of social identity,” as Michael Koresky wrote in 2014. “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm documents the shooting of a strange film in Central Park, although Greaves never intended us to see this movie within the movie. As the director of this film about the filming of a film—the structure and content of which are a mystery even to the baffled crew—Greaves necessarily becomes the central on-screen figure. And although it is never spoken about in the film, the fact that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm was made by an African American man in the 1960s cannot be ignored: Greaves’s race is unavoidable and ever-present.”

“If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos,” wrote Amy Taubin in 2006, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score.”

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., National Educational Television (NET, soon to be known as PBS) launched the news magazine Black Journal with Greaves as a cohost. During the production of the third program, Black staff members demanded that executive producer Alvin Perlmutter, a white man, be replaced with Greaves, and Perlmutter readily agreed. The Barbican will present a free screening of an episode featuring segments on Black policemen, Ghanaian murals, and liberation movements in South Africa.

Further recommendations from Matthew Barrington include In the Company of Men (1969), in which “Greaves films a series of role-playing workshops where long-term-unemployed Black workers engage with white factory managers who fired some of the people in the room,” and The Deep North (1988): “Therapists invite people of various ethnicities to recount their experiences and encounters with other racial groups. They are then guided to respond by roleplaying the anecdotes being told by group members. The film shows Greaves as a deeply humanitarian filmmaker, working to expose the dark elements of American history while also finding formal ways to explore these ideas filmically. It underlines his optimism that hope can defeat hate.”

When Muhammad Ali died in 2016, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody explained why he preferred Greaves’s The Fight (1974) even to such “excellent films” as William Klein’s The Greatest (1969) and Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings (1996). Greaves was there when Ali faced off against Joe Frazier for the second time in Madison Square Garden, and his film is “about ‘the fight’ in the same way as a work of literary theory might be about ‘the novel,’” wrote Brody. “Greaves’s subject is far more than one particular bout—it’s about the sport, and the business, of boxing, and he realizes his comprehensive and general view by way of a resolutely, obstinately precise attention to the particular details of one particular fight, one which, owing to the supreme virtues of its athletes, is among the supreme events in the history of the sport.”

In 2021, Kino Lorber released a restoration of Nationtime (1972), a chronicle of the 1972 National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana. “Nationtime is an essential document,” wrote Maxwell Paparella at Screen Slate, “charged with portent and embellished by Greaves’s restless camera. Again and again, the frame is filled with indelible images of the occasion: [Jesse] Jackson biting his fingernail as he waits to speak; [Bobby] Seale’s comrades replacing the leather jacket around his shoulders; Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King sharing a private word on the dais, their eyes full of loss and life.”

At 4Columns, Melissa Anderson wrote that “although Nationtime hews closely to the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking—a fly-on-the-wall perspective dominates—the documentary showcases Greaves’s gifts for capturing the ways that energy shifts and ricochets among groups of people, a talent earlier demonstrated in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.”

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Julia Loktev’s Undesirable Friends

David Hudson — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 08:28:00 +0000

Ksenia Mironova and Valeria Ratnikova in Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II–Exile (2026)

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I–Last Air in Moscow (2024) ends with a cliffhanger. In the fall of 2021, Loktev—who was born in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was nine, and has directed the acclaimed fictional features Day Night Day Night (2006) and The Loneliest Planet (2011)—headed to the Russian capital where journalists for TV Rain, one of the few remaining independent media outlets in the country at the time, were being declared “foreign agents.”

On February 24, 2022, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and with it, a severe crackdown on dissent at home. Within days, TV Rain shut down, and its reporters, facing the likelihood of arrest or worse, began fleeing the country. My Undesirable Friends: Part II–Exile, screening in New York and London today and tomorrow before heading next month to Portland and Austin, picks up their stories just days later and follows them through the spring of 2026.

“Last Air in Moscow was the long whistle of a dropping bomb; Exile follows the trajectory of the shrapnel,” writes the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller. TV Rain editor in chief Anna Nemzer heads first to Georgia and then the U.S. Valeria Ratnikova, known to her friends as Lera, bounces from Turkey to Latvia—where TV Rain broadcast for half a year before being tossed out due to what seems to have been a misunderstanding about a news anchor’s reference to “our soldiers” in a report on the war in Ukraine—to the Netherlands, where TV Rain, now primarily a YouTube channel, is currently based.

Ksenia Mironova has resettled in New York, and talking to Slate’s Sam Adams last year, she “described the uncanny sensation of watching the U.S. follow her country down the road to fascism.” Elena Kostyuchenko has written a widely praised memoir, I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country. TV Rain journalist Peter Ruzavin and Ukrainian reporter Nataliya Gumenyuk became a couple, and he wound up joining the Ukrainian armed forces.

Over the course of Exile’s 355 minutes—thirty more than Last Air in Moscow—these and several other journalists “live lifetimes in just a few years, while feeling like, as one of these subjects describes it, both German and Jew on the brink of WWII,” writes Oller. “They flee for their lives while still feeling complicit in the atrocities. The rest of the world reinforces this: They were second-class Russians because they published the truth; they’re second-class emigrants because they’re Russian.”

“I remain absolutely besotted with this project because of how uniquely well it unifies its ambitions—emotional, political, formal, journalistic—across six hours, no less,” writes Nicolas Rapold for Screen Slate. “Loktev continues in her dual roles as confidante, eliciting the equivalent of on-the-fly exile memoirs and monologues, and one-woman crew, wielding her iPhone with the intimacy of a friendly chat and casually reinventing what we’ve come to accept about cinéma vérité. Leaning here into love—through the relationships between couples, both lovers and friends—Loktev's tough-and-tender chronicle pushes back against oppression and fear as the organizing narrative imposed upon the world by Putin and his ilk, but also does not spare the extent of Russia’s aggression, from incredibly intrusive spying up to and including murder attempts.”

“When a few of the reporters express a firm belief that the invasion of Ukraine will be over in a couple of months, it speaks to the limitations of on-the-ground analysis,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online. “But when others who are facing prison sentences actually consider returning to Russia to do their time, as [Russian opposition leader and activist Alexei] Navalny did, it can be difficult to refrain from shouting at the screen as if you were watching a horror film.”

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri emphasizes that “the dangers they face are very real. Over the course of Exile, one of Loktev’s subjects is poisoned; another receives a five-year prison sentence in absentia. They are constantly and credibly threatened, their locations and details given out in menacing anonymous messages. They are obviously being surveilled. At one point, they hang out with a noted human-rights activist, who later turns out to have been an informer for the Russian police . . . The whole movie seems to play out in whispers.”

“Many of the conversations in Exile revolve around a set of themes that, to audiences facing rising authoritarian and fascist movements in their own countries, play like giant revolving sirens,” writes Alissa Wilkinson in the New York Times. For Nick Schager at the Daily Beast, Exile is “as must-see as they get.”

Talking to Alex Lei at In Review Online, Loktev notes that many of her subjects “have been convicted in absentia, which means that they can’t step foot in about fifty percent of the world; in India and Vietnam, they could be arrested. At the same time, they all keep working. They all keep reporting on the war in Ukraine.” It’s a point she hammers home in her conversation with Marshall Shaffer at Slant: “There’s the next day, and the next day, and that’s so much what the film is about. How do you keep fighting the good fight, even when it’s hard, even when it feels lost? But you still do it. To me, that’s a really inspiring story.”

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Marcel Carné in Melbourne

David Hudson — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:31:00 +0000

Arletty in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945)

The centerpiece of Illicit Attachments: The Clandestine Cinema of Marcel Carné, a five-film series running on three consecutive Wednesdays at the Melbourne Cinémathèque, is naturally Children of Paradise (1945). “What’s left to be said about Marcel Carné’s towering intimate epic of early nineteenth-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time?” asked Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2012. “‘I want you to love me the way I love you’ is heard twice in Children of Paradise, a perfect summation of screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s rich detailing of romantic desperation and feelings not reciprocated—or realized too late.”

Four men vie for the affection of Garance, “the elegant, worldly courtesan” played by “the statuesquely tall, dark, and minxish Arletty,” as Gilbert Adair described her when she passed away in 1992. The actor, singer, and model worked with Carné on five features, and in 1945, she served two months of an eighteen-month sentence, having been found guilty of treason for conducting an affair with a German officer during the Second World War. “My heart is French, but my ass is international,” Arletty supposedly remarked, and it would not have been out of character. She bounced back and carried on working in French movies through the 1960s.

Prévert drew on historical figures to create three of Garance’s suitors. The renowned mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, known in the film as Baptiste, is played by Jean-Louis Barrault. Pierre Brasseur plays the celebrated actor Frédérick Lemaître, and Marcel Herrand plays the dandyish murderer and poet Pierre François Lacenaire, who served as the model for Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The fourth suitor, Count Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou), is a composite character standing in for the seductive power of wealth.

The French and Italian coproduction began shooting in Nice in the summer of 1943, but it had to be halted when the Allies invaded Sicily. The cast and crew hauled off to Paris to resume work in the spring of 1944. “Alexandre Trauner designed the awe-inspiring sets and Joseph Kosma penned the yearning-filled music,” wrote Girish Shambu for Senses of Cinema in 2001, “and yet both men, being Jews, had to perform their work in the strictest of secrecy. The actor Robert Le Vigan (who originally played the part of the informer-thief Jéricho) was sentenced to death for collaboration by the Resistance, and fled the country. His scenes were reshot, this time with Pierre Renoir (brother of the director Jean) playing the part. Just as real-life events threatened to disrupt the project, the film itself used as its central metaphor the tension-charged relationship between theater and life.”

“National pride buoyed the film’s premiere in March 1945, just two months after the Nazis had been driven from the country,” wrote Dudley Andrew in 2012. “Exhibited briefly as two separate films, then consolidated into a single 190-minute experience, it played continuously for decades in Paris.” Andrew also noted that “although he relentlessly skewered him in the years to come, Truffaut ultimately admitted to Carné that he would have traded his entire oeuvre to have made Children of Paradise.”

The film “may be described as one long aching ode to melancholy, but it never descends into mawkish sentimentality,” wrote Peter Cowie in 2002. “It runs the gamut of emotions, from the anguish of infidelity to the rivalry of unrequited lovers, from solitude and rancor to the backstage enthusiasm and commotion of the theater. Carné and Prévert know exactly when to leaven their narrative with witty interludes, and much of the verbal sparring inspired Bergman in films like Smiles of a Summer Night and The Magician.”

Children of Paradise was the seventh film Prévert wrote for Carné, and their collaboration was exemplary of the tendency in French cinema that came to be known as poetic realism. “The term can perhaps best be understood by reference to the popular music of the time,” suggested Lucy Sante in 2004, “specifically the style called chanson réaliste. As made famous by Edith Piaf, Damia, Fréhel, and Lucienne Delyle in particular, this genre evokes a world-weary romanticism with untrained and frequently raspy voices, minor-key melodies, and dark narratives set more often than not in semicriminal milieux. What made it realistic was its scorn for happy endings and bucolic settings; even if it amounted to another sort of fantasy, it was at least a fantasy that was congruent with working-class lives.” Prévert, “who had a way of maintaining an invisible balance between lyricism and snap-brim slang repartee, came closer to owning the poetic-realist franchise than any other figure.”

Jean Gabin stars in Le jour se lève (1939) as a working-class hero who kills for love. In a new Senses of Cinema program note, Shari Kizirian points out that Carné told his biographer, the art historian Edward Baron Turk, that during his military service in Germany, he would slip away from the barracks to watch films. He was especially enthralled by the early expressionist works of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau.

Watching Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), Carné “observed how shooting through glass and catching reflected light on opalescent surfaces, oilskin raincoats, and wet city streets could create an atmosphere of human dread,” wrote Turk. “Watch Le jour’s Gabin contemplate his fate through the bullet-riddled window,” writes Kizirian, “his face darkened in a kind of reverse mask as smoke billows up from a cigarette. Later, through drawn muslin, François’s shadow swells on the ceiling into a foreboding spectre as he paces. Then, his fate met, the shards of mirror scattered around him on the floor begin to catch the light of the rising sun.”

“After the carnage of World War II, the fatalism became cleaner, the worldview a little sharper,” note the Melbourne Cinémathèque programmers. The series opens tomorrow with Les portes de la nuit (1946), starring a young Yves Montand as a Resistance fighter, and Thérèse Raquin (1953), featuring Simone Signoret in a loose adaptation of Émile Zola’s 1867 novel.

Citing Roberto Rossellini’s “1948 exhortation that Carné ‘free himself a little from the straitjacket of the studio,’” Daniel Phuoc Wilson writes for Senses that Thérèse Raquin was “fashioned two years deeper inside that straitjacket, garlanded with the Silver Lion at Venice only months before the Cahiers critics would begin composing the obituary of the cinematic tradition whose afterlife it inhabited. The film occupies a historical disjunction between poetic realism’s waning critical legitimacy—preserving within the postwar cinematic present an ostensibly exhausted sensibility—and its persistent expressive vitality.”

On October 28, the series will wrap with Les tricheurs (1958), also known as The Cheaters and Young Sinners and probably most often remembered now for featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo, barely known at the time, in a minor role. Despite dismissive reviews—see, for example, Luc Moullet’s—Les tricheurs was a box-office hit in France and Switzerland. Reviewing this group portrait of disaffected Parisians in their twenties, Bea Solla finds that “Carné reinvents himself for the Beat generation and doesn’t do half badly.”

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Leave-Takings and Homecomings

David Hudson — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:03:00 +0000

Did You See This?

HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

On Tuesday, the editors of Narrow Margin will be at Light Industry in Brooklyn to present two films starring Joel McCrea, Alfred E. Green’s Four Faces West (1948) and André de Toth’s Ramrod (1947). The fourth issue of the quarterly, The Western: From B-Z, is “dedicated to westerns made at the margins, produced with little means, and made from the scraps of the studio system: cheap programmers of Poverty Row, seventy-minute features of cowboys with guns ablaze on the backlot. At once popular and peripheral, these westerns were the morass upon which American cinema was built, the crude oil that fueled an empire.”

Later this month, Light Industry will host two more events to plan ahead for. To mark the recent publication of Anne McLean’s new translation of Aside from My Heart, All Is Well—the novel by Héctor Abad inspired by the life of a fellow Colombian, the Claretian priest and film critic Luis Alberto Álvarez—the Theater of the Matters and Archipelago Books will present four films by Álvarez’s friend and student, poet and filmmaker Víctor Gaviria.

Álvarez advocated for “an authentic, regional cinema grounded in the place, people, and tongue of the country, particularly the poor of the Antioquia region and the street youth of his city.” The program Love Is Strong as Death: The Antioquian Cinema of Luis Alberto Álvarez and Víctor Gaviria begins at 5pm on Sunday, October 18. And then on the following Sunday, October 25, Light Industry will open its Benefit Book Sale, accompanied by a program with the congenial title Lush Themes from Motion Pictures: Film Music and Easy Listening, 1955–1975.

This week’s highlights:

Tonight, Media City Film Festival and Trinosophes Projects will present Starshine & Clay, a program of ten films by Kevin Jerome Everson, in East Lansing, Michigan, and then from Thursday through November 14, Everson’s new installation Gises will be on view at the Detroit Public Library. In conjunction with these free events, Three Fold Press presents Clocking Time, a dossier by Yasmina Price on Everson, whose films “travel across intergenerational family stories, the auto industry, sitcoms, migration, beauty pageants, unionized and unsanctioned labor, gossip, non-event activities, auditions and rehearsals, media artifacts, moonshining, and climbing telephone poles. Figures as varied as the painter Caravaggio, filmmaker Lav Diaz, comedian Richard Pryor, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, photographer Garry Winogrand, and musical collective Parliament-Funkadelic are all amongst his influences.”

Once they settled into their hour together on stage at the New York Film Festival, James Gray and Jim Jarmusch seemed to be having a pretty good time. Gray is “the least heralded major American filmmaker now working,” writes Charles Taylor in Liberties. “The voluptuousness in his movies, a melancholy one, lies in the depth of the emotions.” Gray’s films “can be seen as a series of leave-takings and homecomings, the former never guaranteeing anything like freedom, the latter often as much trap as sanctuary.” To watch Gray’s first feature, Little Odessa (1994), and his latest, Paper Tiger, “back to back is to see two movies engaged in a fascinating conversation with each other,” writes Jim Hemphill at the top of his interview with the director for IndieWire. “Really,” says Gray, “it’s an act of insanity when somebody allows a first-timer to direct, because those people don’t know anything. Even Orson Welles didn’t know what he was doing on Citizen Kane—which is part of why it’s great.”

Lucky Star is running Jhon Hernandez’s new translation of a piece by critic and filmmaker Axelle Ropert (The Wolberg Family, Petite Solange) that ran in a 1998 issue of La Lettre du Cinéma, “the short-lived Paris film journal that forged its own path and specialized in resurrecting ’70s French auteurs,” as Nicholas Elliott has described it. Ropert plays “The 7 Families Game,” writing about actors she divides into seven clusters such as “The Blind” (Henry Fonda, Christopher Walken), “The Revenants” (Robert Taylor, Sterling Hayden, Robert Forster), or “The Tomcats,” who deploy “an impressive aristocratic disdain in which a terrible oratorical power is revealed: from the definitive and vengeful sermon of George Sanders as Addison DeWitt to Anne Baxter in the shabby décor of a hotel room (All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz), to the splendid amorous ultimatum delivered to Jeanne Crain on a hotel terrace one evening (The Fan, Otto Preminger), by way of Victor Mature’s supremely inspired declamation of Shakespeare (My Darling Clementine, John Ford)—the Tomcats take the floor.”

There’s a slender bridge between two pieces published in Bright Lights Film Journal this past week. Stanley Kubrick told those close to him that he considered Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to be his best film, and Jonathan Kirschner observes that “the nominal narrative belies the depths of this movie’s prodigious ambition and profundity, as the stakes appear to fall well short of epic, especially in comparison with Kubrick’s landmark reflections about World War I (Paths of Glory, 1957), the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove, 1964), and the possibilities of human evolution (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).”

And Ben Schwartz points out that Roger Ebert’s 1997 piece on Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979) “contains an insight of stunning prescience”: “Being There is a film about a man whose mind works like a rudimentary AI program.” Chance (Peter Sellers) is a gardener and a vessel for nothing but what he’s seen on television. All around him glean from whatever he says only what they yearn to hear. Biographer Roger Lewis “said Sellers ‘put all the nothingness he had’ into the part,” writes Schwartz. “Chance’s affectless speaking voice resembles nothing so much as cinema’s most famous AI, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; intentionally or not, Ashby nods to this through his inclusion of Eumir Deodato’s jazz-funk arrangement of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ when Chance first steps out into the larger world.”

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The Artfully Balanced Life of Eva Marie Saint

David Hudson — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:28:00 +0000

Eva Marie Saint in a publicity photo for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954)

Eva Marie Saint, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 102, was twenty-nine when Elia Kazan cast her as Edie, a young, blond Catholic woman, in On the Waterfront (1954). More than any other character in this crowded story of union corruption and violence on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, Edie would be sharing the screen with Terry, a former boxer working as a longshoreman. And Terry was to be played by Marlon Brando.

Three years earlier, Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire set off a tectonic shift in American acting on film. In 1953, Brando scored his third Oscar nomination for his turn as Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar—and all but single-handedly created an immortal fashion template with his leather-clad biker Johnny Strabler in László Benedek’s The Wild One: “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” “Whaddaya got?”

Terry, an inadvertent accomplice to murder who eventually takes a life-threatening stand against a mob-connected union boss, may rank among Brando’s most challenging roles—and greatest performances—but no one, least of all Kazan, doubted that he was up to it. Edie, though, would be Saint’s feature-film debut.

“Saint holds her own with Brando, matching him moment for moment,” wrote filmmaker Michael Almereyda in 2013. “In their scenes together—Kazan’s favorite scenes in the film, he said—we see impossible distances closing between two people separated by barriers of temperament, breeding, guilt, grief, and fear. In the central, heartbreaking bar scene, the movie settles into a volley of ‘simple’ over-the-shoulder shots and close-ups, during which Brando and Saint register attraction and resistance, yearning and bitterness . . . The scene is simply one of the absolute glories of American filmmaking.”

Saint hadn’t come out of nowhere. Growing up near Albany as the younger of two daughters of a Quaker and a schoolteacher, she followed her sister to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where, practically on a whim, she tried out for a play and was cast in the lead role. More lead roles followed, and her popularity soared. She was voted Sweater Queen, May Queen, and so on.

In her early twenties, she landed a job at NBC as a page and was soon appearing in live commercials, and then live television and radio broadcasts of theatrical productions, all while studying at the Actors Studio. “To a torrent of critical acclaim,” as Aljean Harmetz puts it in the New York Times, Saint starred with Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s 1953 television play The Trip to Bountiful, and it was when the production moved to Broadway that Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg saw her and decided to audition her for the role of Edie.

On the Waterfront was nominated for twelve Oscars and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. By March 30, 1955, the night that the twenty-seventh Academy Awards were presented, Saint was nine months pregnant, and accepting her award, she famously exclaimed, “I may have the baby right here!” She’d married her husband, director and producer Jeffrey Hayden, in 1951, and they stayed together for sixty-five years until he passed away in 2016.

While Saint carried on working in television, she costarred with Bob Hope and George Sanders in That Certain Feeling (1956), directed by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. “Saint is not known for comedy,” writes David Parkinson for the BFI, “but she anticipates Doris Day’s working chic, as small-towner Ethel Jankowski reinvents herself as city slicker Dunreath Henry in this sprightly farce.” Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain, featuring Saint as the wife of a morphine addict (Don Murray), and Edward Dmytryk’s Civil War drama Raintree County, costarring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, both followed in 1957.

When Alfred Hitchcock went looking for a femme fatale to play Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive mistaken for a government agent in North by Northwest (1959), he surprised more than a few by selecting “a star whose three names each hinted in their ways at purity and piety, [giving] this stylish, assured performer a hint of something respectable, even prim that the passion could work against,” as Peter Bradshaw writes in the Guardian.

“It was a combination that Hitchcock found irresistible,” Bradshaw continues, “and Saint found immortality in her most famous role—as the demurest and coolest of cool customers, an arctically radiant blonde goddess of mystery who outrageously comes on to Cary Grant with some of the airily sexy entitlement that Grace Kelly had in To Catch a Thief, a little of the secret sadness of Kim Novak from Vertigo, or the damage of Tippi Hedren in Marnie. Hitchcock’s instructions to Saint were to lower her voice, not use her hands, and look into Grant’s eyes at all times. The resulting stylization made Eve an intensely realized persona, almost a hypnotic trance subject, but very charismatic.”

By this point in her career, Saint was telling her agents that she had no desire to become a superstar. Her children and her own private life were to take priority. The pace slowed to the occasional television appearance and around one feature per year. In 1960, she went with Exodus.

“An unfeasibly fresh-faced Saint plays a naive American nurse who, in 1946, becomes embroiled in Paul Newman’s fight to establish the state of Israel,” writes Anne Billson in the Guardian. “Fact-based fiction or Zionist propaganda? Either way, Otto Preminger’s epic, adapted by the formerly blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo from Leon Uris’s bestseller, is simplistic, exposition-heavy, and lumbers on forever. As the comedian Mort Sahl once said, ‘Otto, let my people go!’”

“In the first (and lesser) of the two films she made with John Frankenheimer, Saint plays Echo, one of many casualties to Warren Beatty’s charisma,” writes Scott Tobias in the New York Times. All Fall Down (1962) is “an overheated Southern melodrama in the Tennessee Williams mold, but it has a tragic bent that gets the most out of actors like Saint and Beatty.” The second Frankenheimer movie Saint appeared in was Grand Prix (1966), which for Tobias, “may be the best gearhead movie ever made.”

In Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965), Saint joined a coterie of actors playing women who lose their men to Elizabeth Taylor. In this case, she might have seen it coming, as the man, a headmaster at an Episcopalian boarding school, is played by Richard Burton. Saint was a pleasantly supportive player in Norman Jewison’s chaotic comedy The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966), and she played the exhausted wife of a philandering artist (George Segal) in Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970).

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Saint spent most of her working life appearing in television movies, though she did play Tom Hanks’s emotionally fragile mother in Garry Marshall’s Nothing in Common (1986). In 1990, she won an Emmy for playing a regal matriarch in People Like Us, a miniseries adapted from Dominik Dunne’s novel. In Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking, Saint plays the mother of an aging actor (cowriter Sam Shepard), “and a year later,” notes Andrew Pulver in the Guardian, “she was cast in Superman Returns—where she was ‘reunited’ with On the Waterfront star Brando, whose estate gave permission for 1978 footage to be used in the film after his death in 2004.”

In 2010, Tyler Hayden landed an extensive interview with his famous grandmother that ran in the Santa Barbara Independent. Saint recalled irritating her husband by having them arrive at airports hours before their flights. “I loved to watch people,” she said. “I could sit there and watch people forever. I would remember the walks. I would remember listening to them, their facial expressions. It’s constant learning. [Actors Studio director Lee] Strasberg once said, ‘The time between jobs is as important as the jobs themselves.’ That’s the time when you’re living.”

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Beatrice Gibson’s At Night

David Hudson — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:36:00 +0000

Beatrice Gibson’s At Night (2026)

Beatrice Gibson may have won a Best Emerging Director Award when her first feature, At Night, premiered in Locarno this summer, but for nearly twenty years, her short films have been drawing accolades at festivals such as the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, the Viennale, and the Courtisane Film Festival. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and at Centre Pompidou in Paris. And she’s won the Tiger Award for Short Film in Rotterdam twice—for Agatha (2012) and The Tiger’s Mind (2013).

“Gibson’s short films have partaken of a promising new trend in experimental cinema, one which I think has everything to do with the nonsectarian ways that people come to cinema these days,” writes Michael Sicinski. “The avant-garde was long considered another country, even a ghetto, that had little in common with narrative filmmaking. But today we very much live in a One Cinema universe, where artists see nothing unnatural or transgressive about drawing equally from experimental and ‘commercial’ filmmaking. Folks like Ross Meckfessel, Zachary Epcar, and Basma Alsharif pull from the ambiance and performance elements of art cinema (Lynch, Cronenberg, Godard, Fassbinder) while also foregrounding the medium’s formal potentials and material elements. Gibson’s work is situated in this zone, something best exemplified by her 2018 film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, which concludes with a joyous reimagining of the final scene of Claire Denis’s Beau travail.”

Screening in New York on Sunday, in London on Sunday and Tuesday, and at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 25, At Night is “a pensive picture set on a hypnotic Parisian night whose dreaminess belies the urgency of the film’s curiosity,” writes Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com. Corey Atad finds that the film’s “directness and its lyricism recalls everything from Akerman’s News from Home, to the films of Pedro Costa, to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. A sequence at a concert by an accordion-playing queer artist is one of the best things I’ve seen this year.” At Night’s run time is just eighty-seven minutes, “but I could have watched it for hours.”

Gibson herself appears as B, a British filmmaker who has arrived in Paris to scout locations for a film that hasn’t yet taken shape. “It is easy to make good images,” says B as she records something of a cross between a voicemail and a note to herself. “And the film, wonderfully shot by Ben Rivers, is beautiful,” writes Sam Bodrojan for IndieWire. “The nocturnal photography spills out from dive bars into back-alleys, transforms nondescript storefronts into a magic garden of forgotten infrastructure.”

At Night wanders along Metro tracks, bus lines, and walkways, alighting here and there on the women it finds. Six of them gather in a bar after a reading, and Gibson says that the ten-minute sequence was “inspired by a scene in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) featuring her friends—artists and sex workers—in a bar talking. The bar scene in my own film is so fascinating to me, so prismatic, it manages to hold many different points of view with relative tenderness, at the same time as maintaining a kind of tension.”

Artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, poet Sophie Robinson, producer Denna Cartamkhoob, psychotherapist Katia Belo Cardoso, and filmmakers Amy Gwatkin and Laida Lertxundi are more or less playing themselves, and so, too, is Diocouda Diaoune, whose Didi has not only previously collaborated with B on other films but also worked for B as her son’s nanny. B and Didi aren’t exactly estranged, but they’re getting there, and in the back of a convenience store, they try to talk it out. A definitive resolution, though, turns out to be elusive.

“It’s Gibson’s refusal to pin her film down that makes At Night so refreshing, and one of the few films from this decade that tackles ideas around privilege, class, and identity with the complexity they deserve,” writes C. J. Prince. “I didn’t realize the extent to which race and class would play out,” Gibson tells Sophia Satchell-Baeza in an interview for the BFI. “I come from a place of privilege and several other characters don’t. There was a critical tension in that, so I wrote my character in as a way to explore it.” Liyo Gong is “an amazing editor. I can honestly say that she coauthored this film . . . My lonely, wandering, sad self was constructed in the edit.”

Structurally, At Night draws on what Gibson tells Jordan Cronk in Filmmaker are “two key sources: the poet Alice Notley’s cult epic poem The Descent of Alette, in which a woman ventures down toward the core of the earth via an oneiric series of subways and caves, and Kathy Acker’s novel Don Quixote, whose gender-flipped protagonist is a knight who rides around on an epic quest following an abortion.”

Talking with George MacBeth at e-flux, Gibson says that “the central question of the film is quite simple to my mind: What is the best way to be, to exist, inside the particular historical moment that we find ourselves? How should we be in relation to it? How should I be in relation to it and in relation to others? . . . I think we live in fucking complex times, and I wanted to make a complex film.”

“The opening quote from Alice Notley (‘I am a tone of voice, warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, turning and including’) is as much a manifesto for the late poet’s craft as it is for the director’s,” writes Leonardo Goi for Filmmaker. “Like Notley, who viewed poetry as a permeable realm into which different voices could coalesce, Gibson treats cinema as a polyphonic world, a medium that brings together not just disparate art forms, but disparate people: all her films are odes to the sanctity of communal work and friendship.”

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Fests and Events

David Hudson — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:14:00 +0000

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

This week is packed. The New York Film Festival is on through Monday, Yorgos Lanthimos is presenting a selection of favorites at the Athens International Film Festival through Sunday, and the Busan International Film Festival has just opened with the world premiere of Kim Jong-kwan’s The Table: Day and Night. It’s an anthology film tracking the stories of four couples who cross paths at a café in Seoul as summer turns to fall.

Busan’s thirty-first edition marks its first year as an “A-list festival,” a classification granted by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) to just sixteen other top-tier festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Sundance. Zhang Yimou is presiding over the competition jury, Michelle Yeoh will receive the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award, and other special guests this year will include Isabelle Huppert, Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lav Diaz, and Tsai Ming-liang.

“If you are anything like me,” writes Pamela Hutchinson, “then you may well consider the two-hour flight to Italy for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival at least partially justified by the chance to see four minutes of a lost F. W. Murnau film. Right or wrong, it’s how we’re made. And yes, today I did get to see two separate fragments of Murnau’s Satanas (1920). Well, they say the devil has all the best films.”

Pordenone’s forty-fifth edition is on through Saturday, and in her daily dispatches to Silent London, Hutchinson likes to include an “Intertitle of the Day.” For example: “Wretched woman! Don’t you know your corpse is lying in one of the rooms in this house?” That one’s from Augusto Genina’s dramedy La maschera e il volte (1919).

Wednesday

Tomorrow sees the opening of seventieth BFI London Film Festival with Simon Stone’s Elsinore, and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and contributors to Sight and Sound offer guides to the highlights. The fifty-third edition of Film Fest Gent will open with Lukas Dhont’s Coward. In her Little White Lies review, Hannah Strong notes that Coward “continues the Belgian filmmaker’s exploration of queer belonging as first expressed in Girl and Close, but establishes a sense of growing ambition and skill, here channeled into a layered wartime drama.”

Of the more than a hundred features screening in Ghent, Sabzian has selected ten to spotlight as well as one exhibition, Sentiments, Signes, Passions, conceived by Fabrice Aragno and focusing on Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book (2018). Film Fest Gent has invited Mariano Llinás and Agustín Mendilaharzu to take part in a symposium on El Pampero Cine, the collective they cofounded more than twenty years ago with Laura Citarella and Alejo Moguillansky. And within the Classics program, attendees will find an Eric Rohmer retrospective.

Robert Beavers will be in Toronto tomorrow evening to present three of his films, The Sparrow Dream (2022), The Hedge Theater (1986–1990/2002), and The Ground (1993–2001). “Beavers has created one of the most distinctive oeuvres in contemporary cinema, celebrated for its meticulous 16 mm and 35 mm formal lyricism,” writes TIFF Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard. In The Sparrow Dream, Beavers revisits places he’s lived, and throughout, notes Picard, “pages of an illustrated copy of The Odyssey are turned, and a meditation on memory is awakened to a resplendent state of being in time.”

In Berlin, Arsenal will launch a twenty-film series, Just Revolutionary: The Films of the Ninjin Club, celebrating the production company founded in 1954 by Ineko Arima, Keiko Kishi, and Yoshiko Kuga and featuring work by Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Masaki Kobayashi. “Within the rigid, strictly hierarchical, patriarchal Japanese studio system of the 1950s and 1960s, which expected actresses to embody a traditional image of the women and largely denied them positions behind the camera,” writes Milena Gregor, Ninjin Club was “entirely unprecedented both politically and socially.”

The Cinémathèque française’s Jean-Paul Belmondo retrospective will run parallel to the exhibition Belmondo, le Magnifique, on view from tomorrow through January 31. The Cinémathèque is also celebrating its ninetieth anniversary, offering Parisians 180 films screening through November 29. General Director Frédéric Bonnaud explains that the entire staff was consulted to come up with a list restricted to two films per year of the Cinémathèque’s existence—and only one film per director would be allowed. “Ultimately,” writes Bonnaud, “what began as a simple diversion has become—modestly yet confidently—an ideal introduction to a history of cinema.”

Thursday

The Independent Film Festival Boston’s Fall Focus program is on from Thursday through Tuesday, and after a break, it will return on October 29 to run through November 4. Suggesting that “you won't find a better preview of the coming wave of end-of-year specialties and critical favorites,” Ty Burr recommends seven features he’s seen and flags five more he’s looking forward to catching. And that’s out of a total of twenty-seven.

“The sad reality is that a lot of these movies will not get a proper local release,” IFFBoston executive director Brian Tamm tells Sean Burns at WBUR. “You know, the last Mike Leigh film only played at the AMC Boston Common. There’s a real chance that for some of these films, the only way you’re going to see them in an art-house theater projected by people who care if they look and sound good is at this festival. So I feel like we’ve got an obligation to fit in as many movies as we can.”

The Chicago Film Society will screen a 35 mm print of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) at the Music Box Theatre. Megan Abbott notes that while the film was met with “aggressive, outraged” reviews when it was released, it is now “considered a masterpiece, a virtuoso achievement of craft and cunning that has profoundly influenced generations of directors (from Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma to Michael Haneke and Kathryn Bigelow) and helped inspire an entire subgenre of ‘slasher’ movies centered on a psychopathic killer and a cast of beautiful women who fall under his knife, axe, machete.”

Editor Claire Atherton is best known for her thirty-year collaboration with Chantal Akerman, and recently, she’s been working with Éric Baudelaire, Wang Bing, Bani Khoshnoudi, and others. Atherton will be in New York to introduce and discuss her work for the first several days of the series that the Museum of Modern Art will present through October 23. “When I’m asked about my approach to editing, I always insist on the fact that you need to discover while doing,” Atherton said a few years ago. “It’s important to know where you’re starting from, but you have to take the risk of not knowing where you’re going.”

Friday

Alex Cox will be spending the weekend in Los Angeles as the American Cinematheque screens six of his features, including his first, Repo Man (1984), whose “outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful,” writes Sam McPheeters. “Sid & Nancy (1986) continued the punk trajectory in a (mostly) dramatic direction. Straight to Hell (1987) inverted this format by using punks, including members of the Circle Jerks and the Clash, as actors, drawing out the gloopy spaghetti-western violence of Repo Man’s main firefight. Walker, shot in the summer of 1987, is Cox’s most overtly political work, a pointed satire that, along with such other films of its time as Missing, Romero, and Salvador, dared to depict the Grand Guignol of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.”

Facets will present The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films of Bruce LaBruce from Friday through Sunday, and in the Chicago Reader, Annette LePique talks with senior programmer Raphael José Martinez and a few of the filmmakers and artists who will be conducting Q&As with LaBruce, including Joe Swanberg, Henry Hanson, Susanne Sachsse, and Frédéric Moffet. “Once again, there is plenty to fight for and against, and woke queers are starting to actually wake up!” LaBruce tells LePique. Those nowhere near Chicago may want to tune into our new Criterion Channel program Bruce LaBruce: Reluctant Pornographer.

The Weekend

The eighteenth Lumière Festival, founded in Lyon and overseen by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, opens Saturday to run through October 18. This year’s Lumière Award will be presented to Joel and Ethan Coen, and other special guests will include Todd Haynes, Abel Ferrara, Tsui Hark, Robert Eggers, Zhang Ziyi, Agnès Jaoui, Nadine Labaki, and Bérénice Béjo. Retrospectives will focus on Ettore Scola, Norman Jewison, Gustav Machete, women filmmakers, and Greek cinema.

Also on Saturday, New York’s Metrograph and Razom for Ukraine will launch Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire in the run-up to this year’s Ukrainian Cultural Festival (October 18 through November 6). Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Dovzhenko “a pagan mystic whose masterful films look as wildly experimental, as dreamlike, as hysterically funny, as fiercely tragic, and as beautiful today as they did a century ago.” The series features such classics as Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930) screening from 35 mm prints and live accompaniment to the silent films.

“Dovzhenko had the strange fate to extend his vocation beyond the grave, employed in this clandestine mission by his surviving collaborator, codirector, and wife Yuliya Solntseva,” writes Alena Lodkina for Metrograph’s Journal. “Solntseva directed five features based on the scripts, diaries, memoirs, and notes that Dovzhenko left behind, two of which—Poem of the Sea (1958) and The Enchanted Desna (1964)—will show as part of Dovzhenko’s retrospective.”

On Sunday, Mezzanine will present a rare 35 mm screening of the theatrical version of Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1976) at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles. Writing for Not Coming to a Theater Near You in 2005, Leo Goldsmith called Edvard Munch “a rich and intensely personal film, representing a widening breadth of subjects, concerns, languages, and milieux in [Watkins’s] filmmaking.”

Let’s wrap with two events in London. Fireflies Press cofounder Giovanni Marchini Camia will be at the Close-Up Film Centre on Saturday to introduce a screening of Morvern Callar (2002) and to launch Anwen Crawford’s new book on Lynne Ramsay’s second feature. And on Sunday, Sonic Cinema, the series programmed by Oliver Dickens, will present a rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) preceded by a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.

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Elsinore and The Man I Love

David Hudson — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:04:00 +0000

Andrew Scott in Simon Stone’s Elsinore (2026)

Opening his appreciative review of Simon Stone’s Elsinore in the Guardian, Benjamin Lee reminds us that for a not-so-brief period of time around thirty years ago, the fates of gay characters in movies were determined almost exclusively by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) “showed a wider audience a mostly clean and palatable version of the crisis, and won Oscars for doing so,” writes Lee, “and for a time, when gay men weren’t acting as sassy friends to women in need, they were coughing up blood in lonely hospital beds.”

Lee notes that “the inevitable and understandable pushback, allowing for a wider breadth of stories, brought us more ‘queer joy’ and ‘chosen family,’ but it also allowed some to forget just what a time of unimaginable annihilation it was . . . It’s right for us to focus on the increasingly restrictive terrors of the now and hope for a brighter, gayer world in the future, but it’s also vital to remember the nightmares of the past and to honor those who fought their way through it.”

In part, this is what Elsinore sets out to do, and the same might be said of Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love. Both films are set in the late 1980s and in lively and historically vital capitals of the theater world—Elsinore in London, The Man I Love in New York—and both end as they must. Elsinore premiered to raves at Telluride and will open the seventieth BFI London Film Festival on Wednesday, and while The Man I Love was greeted with mixed reviews in Cannes, Sachs’s film seems to be finding and connecting with its audience as it screens this week at the New York Film Festival.

Working for the first time as a producer, Andrew Scott stars in Elsinore as Ian Charleson, the real-life costar of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982), back-to-back winners of Oscars for Best Picture. Charleson’s movie career didn’t take off as expected, though, and when Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly walked off the stage during a National Theatre production of Hamlet in 1989, Charleson asked director Richard Eyre (played in Elsinore by Johnny Flynn) to allow him to take over.

Eyre, an old friend who was aware of Charleson’s diagnosis, was reluctant at first, but then relented, and Charleson delivered a Hamlet for the ages. When Ian McKellen won the 1989 Evening Standard Award for Best Actor, he handed his statuette to Charleson, saying he’d just seen “the perfect Hamlet” the night before. Charleson died less than two months later.

“Hamlet is a poem of death,” Eyre has written. “It charts one of the great human rites of passage—from immaturity to accommodation with death. Hamlet grows up, in effect, to grow dead.” Scott himself took on the role in 2017, delivering a widely praised performance running nearly four hours about 150 times. “You’ve got 1,500 lines,” Scott tells IndieWire’s Anne Thompson. “He’s got the most actual lines to learn in any Shakespeare character, I think, apart from Iago, and then you’re the Prince, and you’re the grieving son, and you’re the lover. And then in the third act, you have to do a sword fight. I mean, that’s fucking mental. It’s crazy.”

Andrew Haigh, who directed Scott in All of Us Strangers (2023), tells the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard that Scott’s turn as Charleson is “simply astonishing. I struggle to think of a better performance. Andrew embodies the character so completely, it feels as if we are watching lived experience. But make no mistake, this is a performance of incredible skill. Andrew is completely fearless in the role.”

Stone, probably best known among moviegoers for The Dig (2021), started out as an actor himself before becoming a prominent stage director in Australia and London. He tells David Canfield in the Hollywood Reporter that sports movies such as Rocky and The Karate Kid are among the unlikely inspirations for the narrative flow of Elsinore, which was written by Stephen Beresford (Pride). “I studied a lot of ’70s, ’80s, ’90s Hollywood dramas,” says Stone. “Seeing how they were structured, you get that sense of cathartic joy at the end of a struggle.”

So far, C. J. Prince, writing for the Film Stage, is one of the few critics to pan Elsinore. “While it’s clear he gives it his all,” writes Prince, “the shoddy construction of Elsinore as a series of poorly edited Andrew Scott sizzle reels makes it impossible to tell how good a performance he gives. This is prime overwrought awards bait, a star vehicle with Stone drunk at the wheel, crashing over and over again to wring out some precious tears from viewers.”

But for the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, Scott’s “searing dual performance” as Ian Charleson and as Charleson’s Hamlet “makes Simon Stone’s film an emotional powerhouse even if it doesn’t avoid inspirational cliché.” Further, “one of the most fascinating insights into queer history comes with the appearances of iconoclastic director Derek Jarman (David Dawson), a friend for whom Charleson had played a punk angel in 1978’s Jubilee,” notes Rooney. “For anyone who recalls Jarman’s seismic influence on queer cinema with uncompromising films like Sebastiane, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, and Edward II, hearing the director say, ‘Ian, remember me,’ with the knowledge that any encounter could be their last cuts deep.”

“For my part,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore, “the most wrenching scene in the movie is one in which Ian sits up in bed at the clinic after having been hospitalized, preparing to tell his parents, played by Peter Mullan and Georgie Glen, that he is gay and dying of AIDS. Scott’s face, in this shot, is a whole novel, disintegrating into tears before being shored up again, eventually rearranged into something resembling a welcoming smile that teeters on the edge of collapse. Ian is terrified of the conversation that’s about to happen, of having to admit to lying, of telling his mother and father that they’re due to outlive him. But he’s also an actor, and he works to put together the expression he wants to greet his parents with like he’s creating a masterpiece out of shattered glass.”

The Man I Love, too, “is about a man who refuses to let the fact that he’s dying stop him from making art and about a thriving late-’80s queer scene that similarly refuses to be cowed by the AIDS epidemic decimating its population,” writes Willmore. “More than either, it’s about being with someone who barely has room in their life for you, a theme that Sachs has returned to in different iterations over the years, from the chaotic love triangle in Passages to Keep the Lights On’s chronicle of a yearslong relationship with a man with addiction issues.”

Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, an actor whose experimental theater company, the Mechanicals, is preparing to stage a word-for-word recreation of André Brassard’s Once Upon a Time in the East (1974), a French-Canadian ensemble piece that plays, as Sachs has put it, “as if Altman’s Nashville had been made by Fassbinder.” While Jimmy’s longtime partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge), renders tender loving care, a new downstairs tenant, Vincent (Luther Ford), has fallen for Jimmy, who proves eager to welcome the attention from his young admirer.

In the New Yorker, Justin Chang has his reservations about The Man I Love, but Richard Brody is all in. “With subtle brilliance,” writes Chang, “Sachs evokes the tones and textures of his milieu and makes inventive use of music: the George Gershwin song of the title, a recurring French ditty from the Brassard film. What’s missing, though, is a center worthy of the frame. Malek is an actor of lithe physicality—his body language in the dance scenes has a witty expressiveness—but he never conjures a sense of Jimmy’s inner life. Seldom has his emotional range felt more glaringly inadequate.”

“Sachs thrills to the mutual inspiration of theater people at leisure,” writes Brody, and “the domestic riffing of performers, bouncing songs and jokes to one another as if tossing beach balls, offers moments of immortal joy.” The Man I Love is “turbulent and tender, emotionally bruising and vulnerable throughout, its quasi-operatic fervor contrasting poignantly with its physical confines and its clinically inevitable decrescendo.”

“While the movie belongs to Malek—who makes Jimmy both languorous and revitalized by creativity, weakened by declining health but hurling himself with ferocious tenacity into whatever life he has left—Sturridge is the stealth MVP,” writes David Rooney. “With an impressive economy of means, the actor gets at something fundamental to the relationship between artists and their partners, comfortably occupying the tight spaces left available by a magnetic man who sucks up most of the oxygen in a room without even trying. Dennis is a character not given to big emotional displays, but I found Sturridge’s performance ineffably moving.” And Ford plays Vincent “with the dreamy invulnerability of youth and a refusal to consider consequences.”

“In a scene where the camera slowly pans across a room as people simply chat around a dinner table,” writes Kyle Turner for Slant, “or another in which it lands on a dancer in a shimmery red jacket, Sachs makes you believe that this was the sort of creativity that gave the city its lifeblood at a time when so many people were losing their lives. These snapshots of artists hanging around, rehearsing, and partying are a more convincing tribute to that time than the fairly generic love triangle that anchors the film.”

Sachs’s films are “satisfyingly dramatic while understanding that, especially when telling some form of love story, an element of unknowability must be maintained,” writes producer and former Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay. “Downtown artists John Jesurun and John Kelly were theater advisers here, and as someone who worked in this world in the 1980s, the film’s textures and relationships feel uncannily true to that scene while revealing emotional dynamics within it I had never seen represented on screen.”

“It’s admirable and even exhilaratingly rebellious how much Sachs, from film to film, seems disinterested in expanding his audience,” writes IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “He is one of the only American filmmakers of a certain profile who is putting gay stories on-screen with a frank emotional honesty and richly literate curiosity about film history, which he pours into every frame.”

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Under Watchful Eyes

David Hudson — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:11:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018)

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose debut feature, A Generation (1955), rerouted the course of his country’s cinema. As Michał Oleszczyk has written, Wajda excelled at the game of “making one’s art under the watchful eye of the Communist authorities—and then turning it against them.” Wajda carried on working at a furious pace right up until he passed away in 2016. From today through October 22, New York’s Film Forum is presenting Andrzej Wajda 100, and further commemorative series are being hosted by the Yale Film Archive (through December 17) and the Jacob Burns Film Center (October 9 through 15).

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival presents a preopening screening tonight before its forty-fifth edition officially launches tomorrow to run through October 11. Harold Lloyd stars in Sam Taylor’s comedic hit For Heaven’s Sake (1926), and for live accompaniment, Oscar Marchioni, who has composed a new score, will conduct the Zerorchestra.

This week’s highlights:

In this week’s New Yorker, Anthony Lane profiles Paweł Pawlikowski, whose Fatherland completes a trilogy begun with Ida (2014) and Cold War (2018). The three films explore “the mystery of borders, geographical and spiritual, like a doctor tenderly probing an unhealed wound,” writes Lane. “For the many moviegoers who became conscious of Pawlikowski only at the time of Ida, the range of films that preceded it may come as a surprise. Not that it’s easy to get hold of the damn things, even with the aid of Vimeo and YouTube. A few remain elusive, including Václav Havel: A Czech Drama (1989), which is not a drama but a documentary, made in what was then Czechoslovakia before the Communist regime caved in. In short, we could use a full retrospective to plug the gaps.” And Lane gives us a tantalizing preview of what such a program might offer.

“Perhaps no other filmmaker has portrayed the human difficulties of coupling and uncoupling with such sustained sensitivity and insight,” writes David Polansky in an essay on Eric Rohmer for Liberties. “Much like Jane Austen’s, Rohmer’s plots appear simple and bourgeois on the surface, yet they contain dizzyingly high stakes cloaked in the quotidian. He is among cinema’s great observers of the bourgeoisie. There’s a very funny scene in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, in which a character laments the jaundiced view of the bourgeoisie that prevails among the intelligentsia. Well, Rohmer would be the antidote.” In the meantime, the latest reviews of Élisabeth, Rohmer’s only novel, come from Geoff Andrew and, for the New Left Review, Emily Bickerton.

As the new restoration of My Brother’s Wedding (1983) tours North American theaters, M. Sellers Johnson talks with director Charles Burnett for Film International about his follow-up to his landmark debut feature, Killer of Sheep (1978). In My Brother’s Wedding, Pierce (Everett Silas), a young Black man in South Central LA, must decide whether to attend the titular ceremony or the funeral of a troubled friend scheduled for the same day. Burnett says the dilemma is rooted in an incident in his own life, a period when he felt “being a brother’s keeper” was the most urgent calling. “I was a great fan of Ermanno Olmi, who did The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978),” Burnett tells Sellers. “His films are like Bresson’s films, to a certain extent. Very dry, in a way. Using real people and not actors. I was a great fan of his.”

Directed by Bob Fosse and starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce, the stand-up comedian with “a naughty boy’s playful, infectious energy that helped him get away with the comedy equivalent of murder,” Lenny (1974) is “a textbook case of two territorial alphas destined to drive each other crazy,” writes Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee. Fosse was particularly “interested in Bruce’s toxic relationship with his stripper wife, ‘Hot’ Honey Harlow [Valerie Perrine], a destructive duet that made them the Sid and Nancy of the burlesque set . . . As a filmmaker, Fosse was fascinated by fears of inadequacy and secret shames. We get searing, quicksilver glimpses of how the hang-ups and double standards that Lenny ridicules onstage are rooted in his own experiences. It takes one to know one.”

Let’s wrap with a poem. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), featuring an immortal performance from Conrad Veidt as a haunted and haunting sleepwalker, is the quintessential work of German Expressionism and, as Clayton Dillard wrote in Slant in 2014, it “remains cinema’s preeminent embodiment of dream-screen anguish.” The latest issue of the New York Review of Books offers “Paging Dr. Caligari” by Elaine Equi, whose work has appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry and who has written extensively about the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Ed Ruscha. Here are two lines from three stanzas: “Can a person already in a trance be hypnotized again? / I need to decide something—anything will do.”

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Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard

David Hudson — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:08:00 +0000

Rooney and Kate Mara in Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard (2026)

In the early 1980s, the case of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters from Yorkshire, kicked up a flurry of media attention in the British press. The Chaplins had been obsessing over a local truck driver and were briefly locked up for harassing the man. The story lit a spark in Werner Herzog’s imagination, one that smoldered for decades until he hit upon the brilliant idea of casting Rooney and Kate Mara as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters in contemporary Ireland—not twins, they insist—who go on trial for taking sneaky revenge on the beau (Orlando Bloom) who has spurned them for another woman.

“In its tale of two sisters bonded so closely that they do everything in eerie, exact unison, and the rejection they subsequently face in the world, we can see a variation on the twisted innocents and holy fools that populate so much of the director’s work,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Bucking Fastard is dedicated to David Lynch, but perhaps Herzog should have dedicated it to his younger self, to the Werner Herzog who made The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Even Dwarves Started Small, and Woyzeck—sigh, the things that guy could have done with this deliciously weird tale. Bucking Fastard is nuts, yes, but it could have been, should have been nuttier—transcendentally, galactically nuttier.”

Leonardo Goi, writing for the Film Stage, has his reservations as well, but “if I cannot bring myself to dismiss Bucking Fastard entirely, it is not out of auteurist reverence, but because the wide-eyed romanticism that permeates it feels genuine, heartfelt, and occasionally infectious.” For one thing, “there’s an irreducible tension between the two women—and the actresses who embody them—that makes their union a highly volatile, staticky relationship, and Herzog mines their joint activities (vacuuming, making tea, or opening a can of sardines before a friendly counselor played with saint-like patience by Domhnall Gleeson) for some surreal choreographies.”

“Where many twin narratives concern the desire to be seen as individuals,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies, “this film explores the concept of two sisters who yearn to be a single entity and the complications such a desire creates in a world obsessed with individualism.”

The Maras’ sister act—“think the eerie supernatural twins in The Shining (1980) but much more cheeky fun, and dressed by Wes Anderson’s production team,” suggests Stephen Dalton at the Film Verdict—is “an impressive feat of disciplined acting that exerts its own peculiar fascination,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “At least for a while. Part of it is the identical outfits, a look that mixes Olsen twins with sister wives and a dash of Franciscan monk. Love the brocade granny handbags. But radical anti-fashion aside, this bizarro fable about unfulfilled love, oversized knitwear, and abandoned story threads frays beyond repair, well before it reaches an abrupt and perplexing halt.”

To escape the media frenzy, Jean and Joan Holbrooke move into an apartment in Dublin before taking up an aunt’s invitation to live with her out in the countryside, where the sisters discover a cave and decide to burrow their way through a mountain to some mystical land where they will find true love. “From there, Bucking Fastard becomes a set of wriggly vignettes more than a linear story,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, and “the meandering storyline is pure, sweet, gaga Herzog.”

In Sight and Sound, Nicolas Rapold finds that “Herzog’s latest eccentric yarn is probably his best fiction feature since he had his second coming in the 2000s as a kind of superhero Teutonic auteur,” and at the Daily Beast, Nick Schager suggests that Herzog has crafted “perhaps the most beguiling—and downright bizarre—film of his career.” It “may play at times like a greatest-hits compilation,” writes Mark Hanson at Slant, “but the sincerity with which Herzog regards the sisters’ stubborn hopefulness in the face of a selfish and uncaring world gives the film a lasting emotional power.”

Bucking Fastard screens on October 8, 10, and 12 at the New York Film Festival; on October 14 through 18 at Film Fest Gent; and on October 21 and 23 at AFI Fest in Los Angeles.

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Arthur Harari’s The Unknown

David Hudson — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:35:00 +0000

Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider in Arthur Harari’s The Unknown (2026)

Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, screening on Friday, October 2, and Monday, October 12, at the New York Film Festival, was met with both glowing and damning reviews when it premiered in competition at Cannes. On the Film Comment Podcast, Jordan Cronk, Adam Piron, and Ruun Nuur tried to explain to host Devika Girish what it was about the film that they just couldn’t shake. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023)—which, like The Unknown, stars Léa Seydoux—came up, making what appears to be one of the year’s great stumpers all the more intriguing.

Niels Schneider, perhaps best known for his work with Xavier Dolan, costars as David, a photographer who has been documenting the changing cityscape of Paris. Eva (Seydoux) has caught his attention before she shows up at a club with a hungry yet passionless stare at David. After a furious hookup, David wakes up to discover that he’s inhabiting Eva’s body. Freaked out, David heads out to track down his previous body, and when he finds it, he realizes that there is a teenage girl in there, Malia (Lilith Grasmug).

David—appearing to the viewer, remember, as the spitting image of Léa Seydoux—and Malia (Schneider) go looking to unravel the mystery, and their path leads them at one point to Malia’s father, played by Radu Jude. “Not to make too much of what is a relatively small (though not insignificant) role,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety, “but Jude’s anomalous casting as Malia’s Marcus Aurelius–quoting, crane operator dad does carry with it a current of eccentric vivacity that the rest of the film sorely lacks.”

For Kiang, it’s “an interesting instinct, to drain the body-swap premise of its comic, Steve-Martin-channelling-Lily-Tomlin potential so that it hews closer in feel to something like Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’—a clear inspiration here, albeit shorn of the novella’s absurdist gallows humor. But along with the comedy, a lot of the life has drained out of the concept too.” And for Hannah Strong at Little White Lies, The Unknown’s “intriguing premise is completely underserved by its oblique script.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney suggests that “calling this sui generis freakout horror or sci-fi or even fantasy seems simplistic. There’s a surface kinship here with films like It Follows and especially Under the Skin, in which post-coital afterglow sours fast. But the director declines to get too specific about his allegorical intent, which could be sexual trauma or gender identity or just a mysterious body-snatcher nightmare. Either way, this is a spellbinding psychological puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux.”

“One of the best aspects of The Unknown is its lack of causes,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, adding that “the crisis is inexplicable, traceable to nothing like environmental catastrophe, biological mutation, or supernatural curse. Something has happened to these characters, it may have afflicted a few others, and they all must simply deal with it . . . The transformations are achieved with a rare virtuosity—the actors’ precision fuses with the meticulous screenwriting (by Harari, his brother Lucas, and Vincent Poymiro, based on a graphic novel by the brothers)—and the direction anchors the characters in their respective milieux in ways that, through the disturbance of normalcy, turns familiar places and habits strange and uncanny.”

Harari—best known for his 2021 feature Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle and for cowriting Anatomy of a Fall (2023) with his partner, director Justine Triet—“reaches new heights, adopting a late-modernist approach that I’d have no problem filing alongside works from the likes of Kieślowski, Antonioni, and Lynch,” writes Blake Williams for Notebook. “Harari flirts with the ridiculous while maintaining a firm grasp on sincerity, and The Unknown is as mesmerizing as it is because it allows the viewer to effectively (and affectively) embody an intersubjective perspective on the world, whereby the increasing disassociation we feel towards our own bodies is treated as a serious and defining development of modern life.”

Williams adds that The Unknown is “an allegory for cinema-going, too, yes, and it takes that task seriously as well. But the allure of this film’s confidence to keep expanding, to unremittingly fall deeper into itself with each new scene, nearly every shot, is one that easily transcends its function as cinema. It goes so far as to encompass the sense that only ever being able to exist as ourselves, bound into a single body and consciousness for life, feels further from an absolute than ever.”

At Reverse Shot, Julien Allen argues that “nothing, however challenging or opaque, is gratuitous in The Unknown—especially given that identity and visual familiarity are active components of the narrative. Body-swap, previously the cinematic preserve of comedy (Freaky Friday, All of Me) or genre (Face-Off, Possessor), here provides the starting point for an absorbing existential drama, which at times thrillingly exploits its marriage of narrative thriller techniques and Freudian fantasy.”

Further, Allen suggests that The Unknown “operates as an electroshock-fueled invitation to outflank our standard operating procedures when identifying with screen characters visually, and to begin to dig into, comprehend, and relate to ‘others’ (in all senses of that word) on a much deeper level. The souls (Eva, David, Malia) to whom we have been introduced are still intact and worthy of investment, but their afflictions mean that they no longer fit the world around them. That is a challenge for them, but more valuably, it is a challenge for us.”

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September Books

David Hudson — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:50:00 +0000

Shirley Clarke

The latest—and, as always, essential—roundup on new and noteworthy books is out from Sabzian, and Tillo Huygelen opens with word that Cinematek, the Royal Belgian Film Archive, is dedicating its library to film theorists and historians David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. “The inauguration of the Bibliothèque Bordwell-Thompson is accompanied by a carte blanche curated by Thompson, giving a personal take on the collections and of the research that connected the two scholars so closely to the archive,” writes Huygelen.

That series opens tomorrow with a screening of Alberto Capellani’s Germinal, “one of the great films that made 1913 the annus mirabilis of early cinema,” as Thompson points out in her program notes. Bordwell / Thompson: Carte Blanche runs through November 22, and December will see the publication of Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, an impressive collection edited by Charlie Keil and Murray Smith.

On Thursday, J. Hoberman will be at L’Alliance New York to introduce a screening of Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1958), the subject of one of the chapters in his new collection, Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021. Another chapter is “No Success Like Failure: A Natural History of the Film Maudit,” and on October 11, Hoberman will introduce Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) at the Museum of the Moving Image.

A. S. Hamrah will be at the n+1 office in Brooklyn on Thursday to discuss Last Week in End Times Cinema, his “study of bad news in the movie industry over the course of 365 days,” with n+1 contributor Will Tavlin and coeditor Lisa Borst. And on October 22, Hamrah will introduce the Vital Signs Film Series screening in Oakland of Zach Clark’s The Becomers (2024).

Starting Saturday, New York’s Metrograph will present Trains: Local Routes, the first half of a two-part series Genevieve Yue has curated in conjunction with the publication of her latest book, Trains. This is the latest title in Cutaways, a series of small-format books, “each entry a journey through the history of cinema guided by a single motif or formal device.”

Cutaways is coedited by Yue and Erika Balsom, whose collection The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture has just hit shelves. On October 5, Light Industry in Brooklyn will celebrate the publication of The Machine That Kills Bad People, a collection of essays commissioned by the screening series that ran from 2018 to June of this year at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Programmed by Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers, The Machine that Kills Bad People was known for its double bills, and on the program for Monday evening are Bette Gordon’s Anybody’s Woman (1981) and Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell (1932).

Then on October 6, Balsom will return to Light Industry to deliver an illustrated lecture on A.A.A. Offresi (1981), in which hidden cameras capture the interactions between a French sex worker and her clients in Rome. A.A.A. Offresi was scheduled to be broadcast on Italian television, but instead, a Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) presenter announced that the broadcast had been cancelled “at the formal request of the president of the parliamentary oversight commission.”

Critical Context

Siegfried Kracauer, the critic and theorist remembered first and foremost for his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, was “among the first to treat films as social symptoms, but today we do it all the time,” writes Jimmy So in the New Republic. When the Nazis came to power, Kracauer fled Berlin for Paris before emigrating to the U.S., and “he carried not just trauma but a conviction that culture could offer early warnings of political disaster. In exile in the United States, he set out to trace a line from Weimar expressionism to the psychic conditions that enabled the Third Reich. If it had happened in Germany, who was to say it couldn’t happen in the United States?”

“For Anwen Crawford, author of the recent Decadent Edition from Fireflies Press,” Lynn Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002) is “as substantially immersive as it is impossible to grasp,” writes Katherine Connell for Screen Slate. “There are many ideological and historical frameworks that Crawford uses to contextualize the film’s temporal setting, including globalization, Cool Britannia, New Labour, ’90s rave culture in deindustrialized Scotland, as well as its pre–social media and post-9/11 theatrical release. This academic rigor is helpful in working through the sociopolitical implications of the film, but what Crawford’s text most profoundly reveals is that the truest way in to Morvern Callar begins and ends with a personal, haptic relationship to its contents.”

“To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement,” wrote Phillip Lopate in the first chapter of his 1998 collection of essays and criticism, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. Out now from Sticking Place Books, Essaying Movies gathers Lopate’s conversations with Carrie Rickey (A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda). Sticking Place has also just published Cheshire on Film, a collection of interviews and essays by critic and filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire.

More Conversations

Over the weekend, Ioncinema’s Eric Lavallée reported that Kristen Stewart is set to star in Olivier Assayas’s Spiritual World as Ada, “a haunted young woman with clairvoyant powers who is visited by mysterious premonitions.” Stewart and Assayas have previously worked together on Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016), and the remarkable cast lined up for Spiritual World also features Vicky Krieps, Niels Schneider, Riley Keough, Wagner Moura, and Barbara Sukowa. Assayas on Assayas presents a wide-ranging series of conversations between the director and critic Jean-Michel Frodon.

Meridian gathers Claudia Nedelcu Duca’s interviews with Andrei Ujica, the writer and director who collaborated with Harun Farocki on Videograms of a Revolution (1992) and is best known for The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010). “Ujica’s extraordinarily powerful montage of newsreel footage is not a record of the Romanian dictator’s appalling misdeeds,” wrote Jay Weissberg for Variety, “but rather a sly use of Ceausescu’s own propaganda to drive home a devastating critique of both Romanian society and international realpolitik: We all let this happen.”

Fierce and Feisty

In Laurence Kardish’s Shirley Clarke: The Passionate Life and Radical Works of an Exceptional Filmmaker, “a unified field of constant artistic creation appears, of which the feature films were merely the most conspicuous public traces,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Paradoxically and strikingly, these newly revealed continuities of Clarke’s life and work not only put her movies in perspective but also reflect essential concepts of the cinema—and of cinema’s place in her time.”

One of Clarke’s many early supporters was Louis Sher, who by the early 1960s, was running the largest independent cinema chain in the U.S. Clarke’s first feature, The Connection (1961), premiered to considerable acclaim in Cannes but was banned by local censors when it arrived in New York. Sher propelled Clarke’s case forward in the courts by screening The Connection in Los Angeles and declaring in ads: “Now you can see the film that New York tried to ban!” The story is told—along with countless others—in lively detail by filmmaker and programmer Mike Plante in Sensation Cinema: The Audacious, Defiant History of Louis Sher and the Art Theatre Guild.

Making Movies

“As Joseph McBride’s recent book George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director demonstrates in much detail, enjoying a Cukor movie invariably means enjoying what particular actors do and how they do it,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum at the top of his notes on ten films, including his own favorite Cukor, Sylvia Scarlett (1935). At IndieWire, Jim Hemphill recommends Illeana Douglas’s Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women, “one of the most entertaining and enlightening books ever written on a single film. Douglas’s approach is informed equally by her background as an actor (Cape Fear, Grace of My Heart) and her work as a film historian for Turner Classic Movies; her filmmaking experience gives her the ability to clearly convey all the complex machinations at work on a film set, but what makes the book special is the way she combines this intimate firsthand knowledge with a historian’s broader perspective.”

With Shooting Eve, Sam Staggs delves into the making of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s beloved All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and a young Marilyn Monroe. And Daniel Titley traces the history of a lost landmark of the silent era directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney in The Hypnotist: The Lost Story of London After Midnight.

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale talks with Mark Edlitz about Maverick in the Machine: Orson Welles and the Battle Over Journey Into Fear, and at Wellesnet, Ray Kelly notes that the book sheds “new light on one of the most turbulent chapters in Orson Welles’s Hollywood career.”

Fabulous Fictions

Speaking of Welles, anyone who has “a vague connection” to the novelist Booth Tarkington will likely attribute it to Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the troubled adaptation of the 1918 novel. “Welles may have been one of the last writers to speak of him in unqualified, glowing terms,” writes filmmaker Patrick Wang (A. Rimbaud). “I find Tarkington an eminently capable writer, an even better dramatist, and the rarest interpreter of human psychology and action. His stories are as structured as Brecht, as emotional as Arthur Miller, and as tragically revealing as an Act V monarch in an Elizabethan drama.”

“Deprivatizing my body grants me the capital I crave.” With Bree: An Autobiography, Hannah Bonner takes on the voice of Bree Daniels, the call girl vividly portrayed by Jane Fonda in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

In his New York Times review of Hollywood, Ending, the latest novel by John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), David Canfield notes that the main characters—rising young actors cast in a hot biopic called Andy Warhol Never Gets Old—navigate “an imposing landscape of film-industry veterans including exacting directors, weary publicists, cunning agents, and prying journalists. The Tinseltown setting proves dramatically canny: The spotlight always seems to find the young, but it is not for the weak.”

Hollywood Men

“What do you get when screen heroes share their stories?” asks Tim Teeman in the New York Times. “A lot of sex, bravado, determination, illness, depression and insecurity, love-life mazes, addiction, recovery, and—one thing they all share—battles to vanquish various demons.” Tim Teeman has notes on “six potential page-turners”: Ke Huy Quan’s Never Say Die, Dolph Lundgren’s Fights Worth Fighting: Finding Strength in Struggle, Sylvester Stallone’s The Steps, Michael Douglas’s One Helluva Ride, Joe Manganiello’s Bloodlines, and Kyle MacLachlan’s Fictional Selves. Melena Ryzik notes that Fictional Selves “charts MacLachlan’s kinship with [David] Lynch, who died last year; his roles, both earned and lost (he passed on sex, lies and videotape); and his romantic relationships, including with Laura Dern, his Blue Velvet costar, and the actress he cheated on her with.”

Ari Emanuel, “who inspired the manic Ari Gold character on the TV show Entourage, is almost a caricature of a Hollywood personality; cunning, quick-thinking, charming, and heroically profane,” writes Connie Bruck in the New Yorker. “There are three Emanuel brothers: Zeke, the doctor and intellectual; Rahm, the former congressman, White House chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago; and Ari, the businessman. All are consummate schmoozers, though Ari and Rahm balance their ingratiating manners with ferocious tempers.”

Ari’s memoir, Roll the Calls, “breathlessly charges through its 400-plus pages, dropping names, settling scores, and swearing up a storm,” writes the NYT’s Nicole Sperling. The Hollywood Reporter has an excerpt, and Emanuel has been talking with—and at—Lane Brown (Vulture), Matt Donnelly (Variety), Dominic Patten (Deadline), and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Easy on the Eyes

For AnOther Magazine, Baneet Sarai leafs through Almodóvar Art: The Art in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar. “Exploring the design of his films from pugnacious early gems like Dark Habits to mature masterworks like Volver and All About My Mother,” writes Sarai, “the book has been lovingly compiled by his creative director, Juan Gatti, whose partnership with Almodóvar is one of the most prolific director-designer relationships. Together, they have created a saturated, madcap world that values expression over naturalism, mood over narrative. ‘Pedro conceives of his films as a complete aesthetic experience,’ says Gatti.”

Hat & Beard Press, in the meantime, is previewing another handsome volume, SV105401: The Blade Runner Contact Sheets by Stephen Vaughan, and the sample pages here are tantalizing. Along with shots snapped on the set of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic, the book will include essays by Paul Sammon (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner) and critic and novelist Joanne McNeil.

Forthcoming

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko will turn twenty-five next month, and over the past ten years, the writer and director has been working on a sequel of sorts—a novel, whittled down to around six hundred pages from Kelly’s 800-plus-page first draft. The Philosophy of Time Travel, due in December, will reconstruct events following the death of young Donnie Darko on October 4, 1988, and Kelly is currently planning to expand the project with animated and live-action films.

Chances are, you’ve seen the trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher, and starring Brad Pitt, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rick Dalton’s stunt double in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). The new film hits theaters during the Thanksgiving holidays, and then Tarantino’s novelization, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, will be out on December 8. His novelization of Once Upon a Time appeared three years after the movie, whereas the new one will be released before The Further Mis-Adventures lands on Netflix on December 23.

November will bring Scott Ryan’s oral history The Road to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart as well as The Future of Reality, a collection edited by Kevin B. Lee, Flavia Mazzarino, and Marine de Dardel that “asks filmmakers and scholars to respond to a contemporary reality framed and filtered by algorithms and synthetic media.” And looking way ahead to 2028, we’re already anticipating Glenn Kenny’s monograph on Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).

Endnotes

Matthew Sorrento, the editor of Film International Online and Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, has launched a new scholarly film and television imprint, Channel Academic. Recent and forthcoming titles include Woody Haut’s Kiss Me Deadly: In Search of Noir’s Great Whatsit and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s The Blair Witch Project: Josh’s Blair Witch Mix—An Absent Soundtrack Found.

For more recommendations, turn to the Film Stage, where Christopher Schobert has notes on David Thomson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies—the latest reviews come from Scott Bradfield in the New Republic and Tim Riley in the Los Angeles Review of Books—as well as Scout Tafoya’s The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans and Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews, edited by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Cronin.

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What If This Was Real?

David Hudson — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:21:00 +0000

Did You See This?

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)

The San Francisco Film Preserve launched a new festival yesterday, and it’s running through the weekend at the Roxie Theater. The inaugural edition of Re:Vision offers thirty-four films in fourteen programs, and Screen Slate has been spotlighting highlights throughout the week.

Patrick Dahl writes about short films by Len Lye, whose work is “as playful and joyous as any mainstream animated spectacle, but is far more invigorating in its instability.” Arlin Golden revisits Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959), “an impressionistic portrait of sustained toil” on Venezuela’s Arayan peninsula. And Corina Copp writes about Karen Sperling’s The Waiting Room (1973), a “psychological Lehrstück, if I may, that uses straight female friendships and relationships as a surface at a time when it was *just* beginning to feel outrageous that feminists continued to dwell primarily on the problems of the bourgeois domestic sphere.”

Now on view at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles through December 23, David Lynch: LA is an exhibition of photographs made between 1979 and 2008. “True to the Lynchian sensibility, there’s obviously a sense of liminality to his photographs,” writes Ava Lachini for Flaunt. “Though his visual language is ostensibly universal at this point, Lynch’s singular perspective still feels new.”

Another opening in Los Angeles made a lot more noise this week. “Both surgically somber and proudly over the top,” writes New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong and funded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is “a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark.” Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder is in there as well as work by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, and several comic artists, including Winsor McCay, Frank Frazetta, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, and Robert Crumb.

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, the most complete survey of the artist’s work yet, has just opened at the New Museum in New York. On view through January 3, the exhibition features new work and two of Jafa’s landmark moving-image pieces, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion–winning The White Album (2019). “Together the films project alternately outraged and euphoric versions of United States racial history,” writes Holland Carter in the New York Times.

On Thursday, Marina Vlady, who won a Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance in Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed (1963), passed away at the age of eighty-eight. Though she played Lady Kate Percy in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), Vlady was best-known internationally for her turn as Juliette Janson, a housewife who earns a little extra cash as a part-time prostitute in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967). “With the whispered complexities of a semiotic secret agent, Godard’s voiceover introduces her first as an actress and then as a character,” wrote Nathan Lee in the Village Voice in 2006. “Acting is montage.”

This week’s highlights:

We mentioned yesterday that the new Film Comment is up, and there are new issues out from Cineaste and Film Quarterly as well. In a Cineaste “Web Exclusive,” Ehsan Zamani writes about five Iranian films “that, through their social narratives, have each entered the sensitive territory of religious politics in a unique way.” Freely accessible features from FQ include a dossier on David Lynch and Mulholland Dr. (2001), a conversation with Christian Petzold about Miroirs No. 3 (2025), and—relatedly—a poem by Erin O’Luanaigh inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

Speaking (again) of Lynch, he was so impressed with Godfrey Cheshire’s review of Blue Velvet (1986) that he cold-called the writer and they wound up hanging out at The Cave in Chapel Hill. Let’s flag a few more recent newsletters: Patrick Wang (A. Rimbaud) introduces a series of six hourlong videos on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation, and last year’s Netflix miniseries; Farran Smith Nehme writes about Joan Crawford, Clarence Brown’s restored and revived Letty Lynton (1932), and Gilbert Adrian’s costumes; then there’s Corey Atad on Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), and style; Filipe Furtado on curtain calls from Hitchcock and John Wayne; and Fred Barrett on Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (1928), Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (1959), and Ishmael Bernal’s A Speck in the Water (1976).

With the Metrograph series Winona Ryder, Analogue Youth returning next month, Christine Smallwood surveys the career in a Journal piece, suggesting that “a strong contender” for Ryder’s best role was Charlotte Flax, the devout Catholic daughter of a wayward mother (Cher) in Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990). When a young man sparks something in Charlotte, she “discards her cardigan, wiggles into Cher’s hot pink dress, and heads out into the night,” writes Smallwood. “This combustive mix of female sexuality and Christian iconography recurred in Ryder’s career, next in the fever dream psychosis that is Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the melodramatic delirium of The Crucible. If Ryder is not entirely convincing as a seventeenth-century Puritan, she is more than persuasive as a mean girl who, through force of will and sexual fury, summons the girls around her into a vengeful and possessed army.”

One admirer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is Neil Jordan, who has overseen the restoration of his own Interview with the Vampire (1994). “If you look at F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, they’re expressionist, poetic nightmares,” Jordan tells Dan Mecca at Letterboxd. “But then the entirety of Bela Lugosi and Hammer Horror turned the whole vampire into a joke, really. It was great to restore it to something like its origins, in a way. And that’s what Francis did. He was brave enough to add all this huge opulence to the Carpathian Mountains and the characters. I had this different, beautiful book, which was even richer than Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, and it was more challenging and more interesting in many ways. In a strange way, it was more like: What if this was real?”

Let’s wrap with an engaging, hourlong listen. In 1980, the New York Review of Books ran “The Perils of Pauline,” an eight—thousand-word takedown in which Renata Adler argued that fellow New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s collection When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Jarrett Earnest, host of the NYRB podcast Private Life, talks with Lucy Sante about what she perceives as the lawyerly construction of Adler’s argument—that the demands of Kael’s weekly gig amplified her “quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses”—and about the impact of the piece on the literary milieu of New York at time. The conversation then segues into Sante’s own writing for the NYRB.

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