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Streams of Narrative

David Hudson — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 06:09:00 +0000

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait (2006)

One of the finest appreciations of television director James Burrows is a piece on his recurring role—as a television director—on the HBO comedy series The Comeback. When he wrote it in April, Slate’s Sam Adams couldn’t have known that we would lose Burrows just two months later. He was eighty-five.

Before delving into the poignancy of Burrows’s performance in the sitcom starring and cocreated by Lisa Kudrow, Adams lays the groundwork: “A sitcom veteran whose credits stretch all the way back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he was, with one exception, nominated for an Emmy every year between 1980 and 2005—a period during which he directed 237 episodes of Cheers and shot the pilots for Friends, Frasier, and Will & Grace. His 2022 memoir, Directed by James Burrows, overflows with casually dispensed bits of wisdom—it’s the multicamera equivalent of Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies—and reveals him to be not just one of the most successful but one of the most thoughtful craftsmen the television medium has ever known.”

As Il Cinema Ritrovato heads into the final weekend of its fortieth edition, Karlovy Vary (July 3 through 11) is preparing to celebrate its sixtieth edition and eighty-year run. This past week, KVIFF has announced awards and special screenings honoring Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate), Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy, Three Colors: Blue, In-I in Motion), Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat), and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Jana Hojdová’s Robert Richardson: The White Devil). Other special guests include Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets) and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who will present Family Movie, a horror-comedy they’ve codirected that stars their kids, Travis and Sosie Bacon.

Another guest KVIFF was hoping to invite is Jafar Panahi, who has coproduced and edited Nader Saeivar’s main-competition entry, Hijamat. But when an Iranian court upheld a verdict finding Panahi guilty of “propaganda against the regime” earlier this month, those plans fell through. Facing a sentence of one year in prison and a two-year travel ban, Panahi can appeal but not yet leave the country. “Obviously, we’re very sad,” KVIFF artistic director Karel Och tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai. “We just can’t stop admiring this man, not just for his artistry, but also for his human approach and his courage, which is just jaw-dropping.”

The New York Asian Film Festival (July 10 through 26) will host the North American premiere of Na Hong-jin’s Hope and present its Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema to Na on July 20. In Locarno (August 5 through 15), Virginie Efira will receive the Leopard Club Award, and the extraordinary make-up artist Rick Baker will be honored with the Vision Award. And Venice (September 2 through 12) has named the jurors who will join president Maggie Gyllenhaal.

This week’s highlights:

Sabzian is running transcripts of Pedro Costa’s introductions to three films he’s selected recently for programs in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Flame of My Love (1949) reminds him that Jean-Marie Straub “always hinted that he considered Mizoguchi the greatest of all filmmakers. Even greater than Renoir or Ford.” While discussing Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950), Costa tells the story of how, in the mid-1990s, he decided that he needed to stay and work in Fontainhas for a while. And in The Fearmakers (1958), Tourneur was working with “a broken man, with what was left of Dana Andrews . . . one feels that Jacques and Dana were really scared of what was coming. Maybe what they were afraid of is finally here; it’s among us now.”

Throughout this year’s World Cup, the Guggenheim is presenting Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait (2006), a two-channel video projection tracking Zinédine Zidane, the outstanding midfielder, as Real Madrid faced off against Villarreal in a 2005 La Liga match. Seventeen cameras remained trained on Zidane exclusively throughout the game while “the droning score by Scottish prog band Mogwai swells or, eerily, drops out entirely,” as Mark Asch writes for Screen Slate. “Zidane has setbacks (Juan Román Riquelme gives Villarreal a first-half lead after the referee awards a dubious penalty), comebacks (Zidane is involved in the buildup for Real’s two second-half goals), and a shocking final twist; it’s also full of stars, as befitting the peak of Real’s galactico era.” For Samuel Brodsky at Film Comment, the film’s “transcendental power . . . lies in the moments when we see Zidane simply observing, waiting.” For further World Cup–related viewing, see the lists put together by Carlos Aguilar for the New York Times and Alexandre Koberidze for Metrograph’s Journal.

Playwright and poet Dan O’Brien has a beautiful piece in the new Film Quarterly on Carson Lund’s Eephus (2024), “a perfect little film: ‘perfect’ because I enjoyed watching it without reservation, and ‘perfect’ because it seems to be wholly the film it wants to be; ‘little’ because nothing much happens, and what does happen is happening at a community baseball field in small-town Massachusetts. (Gilles Deleuze praises ‘minor literature,’ and Eephus surely qualifies as ‘minor cinema,’ in the most positive sense.) Two teams composed of mostly middle-aged white men, the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint, convene to play one last game before the field will be demolished to make way for the construction of a new school. That’s about it, in terms of plot . . . How can a film that disregards so many so-called principles of dramatic writing still manage to be so compelling? Since I happen to write plays, and this film reminds me of one, I thought I might try to answer this question for myself.”

“If there’s anything that could be said to characterize ‘A film by Louise Weard,’ it’s everything,” writes Frank Falisi at the top of his interview with the director of the ongoing series Castration Movie for In Review Online. “We’re now over 120 years into cinema’s life as an art form,” says Weard, “which kind of coincides with the modernist novel, right? And so yes, I do view these movies as trying to do something literary with the film format. I’m definitely approaching what a modernist cinema can look like. Every shooting choice, all of the editing decisions, the structural choices of the storytelling, the dialogue . . . It’s all meant to push cinema in this way. I think you could find some comparisons to stream-of-consciousness writing, like Mrs. Dalloway, in how we handle some of our dialogue and party scenes in Castration Movie.”

For the New York Times, Milana Mazaeva and Neil MacFarquhar profile Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark), who won the Golden Lion in Venice for Faust (2011). Sokurov has been openly critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but for some exiled Russian artists, not critical enough. They managed to pressure the Venice Biennale to drop Sokurov from its list of guest speakers. “In many ways his fate is the fate of a talented loner,” Anton Dolin, a prominent Russian film critic living in exile, tells Mazaeva and MacFarquhar. “That explains both the cult around him and the hostility toward him. On the one hand, his films are banned in Russia. On the other hand, he remains highly respected and continues to participate in state councils and institutions.” And Sokurov, who turned seventy-five earlier this month, has no plans to leave the country: “I am sitting in this boat, and if it starts to sink, I will go down with it.”

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Three by Elaine May

David Hudson — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:09:00 +0000

Elaine May and John Cassavetes during the making of Mikey and Nicky (1976)

Elaine May hadn’t seen her third feature, Mikey and Nicky (1976), in twenty years when she introduced a screening at the Harvard Film Archive in 2010. “I hope I enjoy it,” she told the audience, and naturally, her delivery drew appreciative laughter. “The milieu, the people in this movie, are actually my milieu. I’m a Chicago, sort of gangster girl. And the events aren’t exactly true, but they have happened. So it’s sort of a kind of a true story, but nobody knows this about me except you guys, and I’m afraid you all have to die.”

Peter Falk and John Cassavetes star as small-time mobsters and lifelong friends. When Cassavetes’s Nicky hears that a hit has been put out on him, he reaches out to Falk’s Mikey for protection. The two spend a long night roaming city streets and bickering as only the closest of friends can. Mikey tries to convince Nicky that he’s not a target, but over time, it becomes clear that his reassurances are merely a delay tactic.

“Seemingly improvised by two Method actors, Mikey and Nicky was totally scripted,” noted J. Hoberman in the New York Times 2019. “To watch Cassavetes and Falk inhabit their roles is to watch two great jazz musicians riffing on a score.” Cassavetes “begins the film in a place of weary, scared, wired, vibrating intensity that he maintains to the bitter end,” wrote Nathan Rabin that same year. “He’s burning with desperation even in his most hushed moments.” In Mikey, Falk “has the less showy but arguably more challenging role, as a nurturer who cannot show his true face to his old friend without exposing the simultaneously deadly and banal betrayal at the film’s core.”

As the film turns fifty, Muscle Distribution is sending the 2019 restoration out to theaters across North America, and on Friday, May and producer Julian Schlossberg will take part in a Q&A after an evening screening at Film at Lincoln Center in New York. Todd Berliner, the author of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece, will introduce Tuesday’s screening, and during the weeklong run, FLC will also present May’s first feature, A New Leaf (1971), and her fourth and last, Ishtar (1987).

A New Leaf is “one of the best romantic comedies ever made,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody a few years ago. Walter Matthau stars as Henry, “a Manhattan trust-fund princeling” who has frittered away his wealth and aims to marry back into it. His mark is Henrietta, a clumsy but brilliant botanist played by May herself. Once he’s cashed in, Henry plans to kill his new wife.

“The keen depravity of May’s comedy of murder is all the sharper for the outrageous precision of its humor,” wrote Brody. “Matthau adds Henry to his unique gallery of the pompous and the orotund,” and “May brings enormous pathos to Henrietta—the true-hearted innocent who finally finds love, but with the wrong man—and centers on the character (and on her own performance) some of the most inventive humor of modern cinema.”

“With A New Leaf,” wrote 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson in 2019, “May established a theme that runs through the quartet of films she’s directed: the derangements of coupledom, whether sexual or platonic, with a breezy but still biting focus on the pitiful vanities and obtuseness of men.”

Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman star in Ishtar as Rogers and Clarke, a ludicrously untalented team of songwriting performers who get caught up in a bit of Cold War intrigue in Morocco. May spent more time and money making Ishtar than the press at the time deemed acceptable for a female director, and the film suffered both commercially and critically from the verdict handed down long before the movie was released.

“I didn’t catch up with this film maudit until 2013,” Anderson recalled. “That screening remains one of the most memorable of my life, an event that provided the rare opportunity to discover a wildly unpredictable movie more than a quarter century removed from its initial ignominy. Ishtar’s genius operates on many levels: the painfully inept, unfailingly hilarious lyrics Rogers and Clarke concoct, several written by May (‘Water! / My lips are on fire / with my desire / for you’); the bumbling twosome’s deluded but touching belief in their talent and each other (the pair of putatively straight guys are easily the most loving couple in May’s oeuvre); the scathing satire of Reagan-era foreign policy.”

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Guy Maddin’s Careful Returns

David Hudson — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:43:00 +0000

Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992)

In Tolzbad, the fictional Alpine village that serves as the setting of Guy Maddin’s third feature, Careful (1992), citizens speak in a near-whisper and swallow any potential outburst of emotion for fear of setting off an avalanche. This is a “community of apple-cheeked villagers whose scrubbed faces belie a Freudian wasp’s nest of incestuous desire and sibling rivalry,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times when Careful screened at the New York Film Festival. “From its portentous between-scenes titles to the way the director bathes whole scenes in garish oranges and blues, Careful is one long and amusing pun on German Expressionistic film imagery, Freudian psychology, and quasi-Wagnerian storytelling, all carried to absurdist lengths.”

Starting Friday, New York’s Film Forum will present a weeklong run of a new restoration, and Maddin will be there on Friday and Saturday to talk about it. After Saturday’s Q&A, he’ll introduce Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), his Maddinized documentation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s interpretive performance of Bram Stoker’s immortal novel. Careful will also screen in Chicago before heading to Los Angeles and more cities throughout the summer.

“Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history,” wrote Dennis Lim in 2008. “His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed.” Careful “takes his penchant for artifice to an extreme.” Maddin “says he started out intending to make a ‘pro-incest’ movie and ended up with a ‘pro-repression’ one—it’s precisely this ambivalence about forbidden and frustrated desires, the recognition that repression is deranging and also its own kind of turn-on, that undergirds the erotic logic of Maddin’s films.”

“The restoration of Careful is wonderfully done, bringing out the at-once hyper-artificial and softly organic textures of his mise-en-scène, from plastic roses to moose antlers to mysterious aqua potions in glistening beakers,” writes Payton McCarty-Simas in the Brooklyn Rail. Dracula “takes artistic license to follow in the footsteps of silent feminist polemics like Häxan—down to the brood of horn-tailed demons twerking on Victorian bedposts. Most of the runtime is devoted to the vampiric seduction of Lucy Westenra (an effervescent and ferocious Tara Birtwhistle), whose libidinal repression drives her eagerly into the arms of the Prince of the Night. In the face of all this corseting, Maddin’s conclusion is a resounding, ‘No wonder!’”

Film Forum will also screen Maddin’s first two features, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990). In Tales, the friendship between two patients during a smallpox epidemic turns to rivalry as they compete for their nurses’ attention. Their enmity only intensifies when they learn that their paths have previously crossed in gruesome ways. Maddin “self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch,” wrote Noel Murray at the A.V. Club in 2002.

Archangel is also the name of a Russian town where a Canadian soldier who has lost a leg in the First World War arrives to mistake a woman for his deceased lover. She’s married to a Belgian who can’t remember he’s married to anyone at all. Archangel “offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema,” wrote Jake Cole for Slant a couple of years ago. “There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Reviewing Archangel for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful.”

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Vital Signs in Oakland

David Hudson — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:55:00 +0000

Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest (2025)

Back in May, critic and filmmaker Jonathan Kiefer (Woodshedders, Around the Sun) launched the Vital Signs Film Series at Shapeshifters Cinema, an artist-run space in Oakland, California, with a forty-seat theater and a café serving house-made beer. Programs at Shapeshifters lean toward the experimental, but Kiefer is bringing a monthly event featuring what he describes to KQED’s Sarah Hotchkiss as “adventurous stuff that is kind of indie, art-house, slightly strange, noncommercial, very boutique offerings. Maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll wind up on the streaming platforms. But then with this type of film especially, it’s not as good just to watch it at home as it is to be in even a small room with just a few people.”

Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You (2025) opened the series, and June’s selection was Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love (2025). July 5 brings Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest (2025). It’s a vision of a postapocalyptic world in which the only survivors are children and a road movie following nine-year-old Moon (Moon Guo Barker, the daughter of novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo) over the course of eight chapters.

In one of those chapters, a cluster of children deliver a faithful rendering of The Word for Snow, a one-act play by Don DeLillo—a fan of Rivers’s work, as the filmmaker was surprised to discover a few years ago. As Rivers tells Steve Rose in the Guardian, DeLillo wrote a note of appreciation after seeing The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), and the writer and director have kept up an occasional correspondence ever since.

DeLillo had no idea how Rivers would handle The Word for Snow, but he gladly gave the go-ahead. The children deliver their lines “with such straight faces, all you’re paying attention to is the words,” says Rivers. “They’re nine years old. I didn’t expect them to understand everything. But then again, I don’t understand everything either. I read it many times over and it still remains kind of abstract and sometimes absurd.” DeLillo “said he was impressed with what I did with it—that was a huge relief.”

Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud screens on August 2. Starring Blake Draper as the restless French poet, the film “inspires the attentive viewer to find different ways to tell the history of a people, a movement, poetry, memory, and the intersection between colonialism and the emergence of the individual,” writes Carlos Valladares at the top of his interview with Wang for BOMB.

Auditioning the relatively unknown Draper, Wang found that “he had focused on what I think is maybe the most narratively interesting part of my script: not ‘Why did Rimbaud stop writing poetry?’ but ‘Did he ever stop being a poet?’ He saw that. He saw it in the ending. I think that’s why the ending means a lot to him as an actor, and why it shows in the final portrayal.”

Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s Removal of the Eye (2024), screening on September 6, stars the directors as Kallia and Ram, a couple coping with a new baby and Kallia’s Greek mother, who has set out to protect the family from the evil eye. “Building on the absurdist tone and improvisatory style of New Strains [2023],” writes Caroline Golum for Screen Slate, “Shaw and Kamalakanthan pull no punches skewering the millennia-old business of care and feeding, plus our own twenty-first-century obsession with ‘Building a Better Baby’ (to borrow from the film’s creepy fake publication). This ripe satire of the nanny state offers a bit of nap-time solace to the screaming, teething toddler in all of us.”

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Catching Up with The Currents

David Hudson — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:11:00 +0000

Ernestina Gatti and Isabel Aimé González Sola in Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents (2025)

Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents was one of the quiet highlights of last fall’s festival season, and it has since opened theatrically in New York and will be touring theaters across North America through the end of July. The film’s next stop will be in Knoxville this Wednesday, and the artistic director of Film Fest Knox, Darren Hughes, has offered the audience some words of introduction: “Mumenthaler’s style might be compared to ‘magical realism,’ in that she works within straight-ahead narrative conventions but does so in a world of unexplainable flights of fancy. I find it all totally mesmerizing.”

“The Currents exhibits a rare kind of formal invention, such that each new shot hits your consciousness as a kind of cognitive surprise,” writes Michael Sicinski. “At the same time, the film hangs together perfectly as an aesthetic object. That’s because Mumenthaler has entirely aligned our point of view with Catalina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), whose identity is in such disarray that she perceives the world as if it were some strange text she cannot decipher . . . This slip into whatever Catalina is undergoing—psychosis? a fugue state? PTSD?—would be illegible to the viewer were it not for Mumenthaler’s absolute formal control.”

Mumenthaler’s first feature, Back to Stay (2011)—the winner of both the Golden Leopard and the FIPRESCI Prize in Locarno—focuses on three sisters raising themselves after the death of their grandmother. In The Idea of a Lake (2016), a photographer comes to grips with the absence of her father, who disappeared in 1976 after the Argentine coup d’état. Born in Argentina, Mumenthaler was raised in Geneva, which is where we find Catalina in the opening sequence of Mumenthaler’s third feature.

Lina, as her friends call her, is a fashion designer of considerable renown, and she’s in Switzerland to be honored with an award. Having accepted, she steps into the restroom, dumps the glass trophy in the trash, and wanders the city alone before leaping into the icy waters of the Rhône. Rescued, she returns to Buenos Aires, where her husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and five-year-old daughter (Emma Fayo Duarte) will have to come to terms with Lina’s new phobia: water. She can’t even bring herself to open a tap, never mind bathe.

For 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson, The Currents is “fitfully compelling,” but Anderson finds “little in Mumenthaler’s film that rivets and deranges like those by two of her compatriots, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008) and Laura Citarella’s Dog Lady (2015), both of which also feature female protagonists who have broken with reality.”

The Currents is “both fascinating and intractable,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “an entry in cinema’s rich tradition of deconstructed feminine portraiture that skids ambitiously along a tonal and stylistic spectrum between Hitchcock’s Marnie and Todd Haynes’s Safe. Not all of Mumenthaler’s sideways turns yield satisfying discoveries, and The Currents gets less interesting when it seeks out tidier interior motivations toward its third act. But this is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction.”

“Mumenthaler beautifully portrays Lina’s life adrift and especially her relationships with women who offer assorted versions of being in the world, from her young assistant to her mother-in-law to a shop seamstress,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “The filmmaker’s absorbing audiovisual approach culminates in a virtuosic scored montage involving the famous searchlight atop the Palacio Barolo.”

Writing for Reverse Shot, Lawrence Garcia notes that The Currents “eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition.”

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Enduring Portraits

David Hudson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:29:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016)

Gene Shalit, who delivered punny movie reviews on NBC’s Today Show from 1973 through 2010, passed away last week. He’d turned one hundred in March. “With his handlebar mustache, bushy hair, black horn-rimmed glasses, and extravagant bow ties, he was one of the nation’s most recognizable characters, a composite caricature of Groucho Marx, William Howard Taft, and a Jim Henson puppet,” writes Robert D. McFadden in the New York Times.

A few years into his gig at Today, Shalit hired his first full-time writer, Kurt Anderson, who would go on to write novels and nonfiction and cofounded Spy magazine. Shalit’s “smart no-brow approach to culture was a new thing on TV,” writes Anderson for Vulture. “He was a cultural omnivore, enjoying and celebrating high and low but distinguishing, often bluntly, between smart and stupid, good and bad. His reviews and their jokey wordplay were packed with all sorts of literary, musical, cinematic, and historical references . . . He was a TV performer with a signature shtick and look who was also entirely authentic, with a genuine eccentricity that viewers found endearing and fun. He was an unusually kind jester, radiating joie de vivre, infectiously happy to be here now.”

In festival news, Il Cinema Ritrovato, which opens on Saturday and runs through June 28, is introducing a new initiative. It’s called Extended, and it will offer those in Bologna a chance to sample this year’s fortieth edition from June 29 through July 5. Munich (June 26 through July 5) and Karlovy Vary (July 3 through 11) have unveiled their lineups, and in August, Asia Argento will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Locarno.

This week’s highlights:

Last December, Documentary Magazine polled contributors and members of the International Documentary Association to come up with a ranked and annotated list of the twenty-five greatest nonfiction films of the twenty-first century as well as a string of “singular picks,” films with just one vote. The pairing of the two lists “offers an ongoing dialectic between center and margin,” suggests Winnie Wang in one of two new pieces reflecting on the results. “The documentarian as skillful portraitist, one who doesn’t merely capture, but embellishes in order to get at a deeper truth, who understands performance not as anathema to authenticity but as integral to it, is precisely the type found throughout the [first] list,” writes Manuel Betancourt. A portrait captures “a connection between the sitter and the one capturing their likeness. Look no further than Cameraperson to find a documentary that turns that friction into its very thesis. Made up of sequences shot for a number of projects she worked on as a cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson’s fragmented self-portrait is a film about the dignity of the documentary gaze—of her gaze, in fact.”

In a recent newsletter, Jamelle Bouie points us to Lovia Gyarkye’s excellent profile of Raoul Peck for Hammer & Hope. Peck has been making films for decades, and he’s probably best known for I Am Not Your Negro (2016), a historical essay film drawn from James Baldwin’s writing, and Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025), which compels viewers to “confront the parallels between our fascist reality and the English writer’s dystopian visions,” as Gyarkye puts it. “But calling Peck just a political director minimizes his achievement, allowing people to ignore the artistic merits and intellectual rigor of the work. Peck is more like a modern griot, a filmmaker who has made an art of his archival excavations. He reconstitutes the past in order to combat historical erasure, and in his films—like the work of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman—the archives are a contested site, an arena in which power can be reclaimed.”

It’s Black Writers Week at RogerEbert.com, and Robert Daniels, who is overseeing this year’s sixth edition, talks with Maya Cade, who founded the Black Film Archive in the summer of 2021 and will soon be both the owner and president of Milestone Films. For Cade, “one of the joys has been being an archivist for Black directors. I help them with their own archives by gathering their material. So, the Black Film Archive is not just the digital archive that you see. A lot of the work is tangible, like ensuring that another generation can learn from the papers and materials, the physicality of what these directors have to offer.”

Earlier this month, the Tehran Revolutionary Court upheld an in-absentia verdict against Jafar Panahi, sentencing him to one year in prison. Charged with propagandizing against the Islamic Republic, Panahi can now appeal to another court. In Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025), a group of former political prisoners kidnap and confront a man they believe was their torturer. “Panahi draws on the two dominant realist tendencies in contemporary Iranian cinema, associated with Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, while forging a distinctive style of his own,” writes Mehrdad Babadi in the Point. “From Kiarostami he adopts two familiar motifs: the car and the road trip.” And “he draws on Farhadi’s model of interpersonal and social drama to create a mystery thriller in which conversation does not clarify the situation but complicates it . . . More than any other Iranian director, [Panahi] registers the condition of Iranians under an authoritarian regime with unusual precision.”

It’s Screwball Summer at the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden, and in the new London Review of Books, Ruby Hamilton notes that the seventeen-film program running through August 18 includes “nearly all the classics of the genre, among them the first, the fastest, and the truest: It Happened One Night (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), The Awful Truth (1937). Not all of the choices fit in—Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) is a black comedy, but is it a screwball?—but then you end up quibbling about the Broadway farce vs. the populist comedy vs. the Lubitsch picture, and it’s not long before you begin to sound like Gary Cooper’s po-faced grammarian in Ball of Fire (1941), a grade-A hair-splitter.”

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June Books

David Hudson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:43:00 +0000

David Bowie

From June 26 through July 12, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will present Culture Wars!, a series of American films targeted by the religious right in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The series is pegged to next week’s publication of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, the new book from Isaac Butler, who wowed us a few years ago with The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.

Butler will be at MoMI on June 27 to talk about The Perfect Moment with New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson following a screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel depicting Jesus’s struggles with his dual nature, both human and divine. “The screenplay, which [writer Paul] Schrader described as ‘a plexiglass layer cake,’ built out of Kazantzakis’s Greek Orthodoxy, Schrader’s Calvinism, and Scorsese’s Catholicism, shifts beguilingly among the mystical, the mundane, and the surprisingly funny,” writes Butler in an excerpt from The Perfect Moment running in the New Yorker.

When word got out that Scorsese was making this movie, conservative Christians pounced. Butler outlines the tense meetings, tentative agreements, and broken promises that led to an all-out brawl in the media between complex networks of studio representatives and Moral Majority–backed political players. For a while, it looked as if the evangelicals had the upper hand. But then some of the most outlandish of the widespread protests “made Last Temptation—still unfinished, seen by at most a few dozen people, and months away from its theatrical release—into a national news story, one in which the noble free-speech warriors of Hollywood were beset by a horde of antisemites and Bible-thumping lunatics.”

Universal, which bankrolled and distributed Last Temptation, “spent far more than usual to guarantee the security of screenings, assuming responsibility for damages, hiring guards to escort every print of the film, and sweeping movie theaters for bombs,” writes Butler. The studio was rewarded by a pretty solid opening weekend, but interest in the film and the controversy it had sparked tapered off quickly. “Although the brethren would claim credit for the film flopping,” writes Butler, “it actually broke even.”

Art and Design

Karl Ove Knausgård—who wrote the essay for our recent release of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and of course, more famously, My Struggle, the widely acclaimed series of six autobiographical novels—curated an exhibition of paintings by Edvard Munch for the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2017. Trier and his brother Emil made a film about it, The Other Munch (2018).

Now the Paris Review is running Ingvild Burkey’s translation of Knausgård’s contribution to Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art, the catalogue for an exhibition curated by von Trier and on view at Willumsen’s Museum in Denmark through September 20 before it heads to Stockholm. Von Trier’s selection includes works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, August Strindberg, Paul Gauguin, and naturally, Munch.

Knausgård opens with reflections on Munch’s The Sick Child, a painting first exhibited in 1886 and “an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist.” He eventually winds his way to “the effect [von] Trier’s films had when they came out, on myself and on the milieu I was part of—they were important, they were controversial, they were discussed, they left a mark.”

Von Trier’s films are “wildly manipulative,” writes Knausgård, “and the manipulation is obvious and yet impossible to guard oneself against—at least for me. Feelings trump intellect. And isn’t that what happens at every level in his films, actually? And which makes them so provocative for many viewers? Not only are you given an exposition of a moral philosophical question about the nature of the good in Breaking the Waves, you are forced to experience it, and the conflict which the good stirs up everywhere it appears is suddenly brought near to you, to your own emotions, your own morality. This is especially the case with The Idiots, to my mind [von] Trier’s masterpiece.”

At Talkhouse, filmmaker Mark Rappaport (From the Journals of Jean Seberg) introduces his new Book of Dreams, a collection of more than eighty collages in which we find, for example, Marlene Dietrich’s Catherine the Great from Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) attempting to seduce Ivan the Terrible (Nikolai Cherkasov) as he appeared in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 film. Are these images “an intentionally subtle commentary on social mores?” asks Rappaport. “I doubt it. Are they a Rorschach test? I seriously doubt that, too. Why do you make them? I have no idea except that they are all film-related, taking elements from here, taking elements from there, and smacking them together so that they become something else. And what are the viewers supposed to make of them? Whatever they like.”

Artist and designer John Coulthart walks us through a history of cover designs for Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, and as you might expect, they took a turn after David Bowie starred in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 adaptation.

Lives and Works

After making the entirety of his 2022 book Intimate Impressions: The Cinema of James Gray freely available online, Collin Brinkmann began writing about the late-career work of Howard Hawks. He toyed with the idea of turning those thoughts into a book, but eventually dropped it. Then Paul Cronin of Sticking Place Books picked it back up again, offering to publish Late Style in Film. This “year-plus, nights-and-weekends kind of labor of love” offers Brinkmann’s insights into the evolving dialogue between auteurism and debates on the very idea of “late style” as well as three in-depth chapters on Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Back in the summer of 2024, we put together an overview of the first enthusiastic reviews of Carrie Rickey’s biography A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda. Writing for the London Review of Books, Lili Owen Rowlands finds that the Varda “who emerges is obstinate and evasive.” Rowlands reruns the life story with a particular emphasis on its darker passages.

Before he left for MGM, where he would make Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), John Sturges worked his way up at Columbia. In “An Extended Apprenticeship,” an essay that first appeared in The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959, Farran Smith Nehme tells that story, pausing now and then to dwell on a few outstanding titles such as The Walking Hills (1949), “a modern western, with a set of deceitful and back-biting characters that could easily have fit in a heist-driven noir.”

R. Emmet Sweeney talks with Henry Nicolella about his latest book, You Have to Run Fast: The Feature Films of Edward L. Cahn. Sweeney describes Cahn as “a promising director of fatalistic noirs at Universal (Afraid to Talk, Laughter in Hell) before spinning his wheels for MGM short subjects in the late ’30s. He reemerged as a pathologically prolific director of B-Westerns, sci-fi, and gangster films in the 1940s and ’50s.” Nicolella recommends a few favorites from each decade.

Before winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, Daniel Kraus wrote Whalefall (2023), a survival thriller that he and director Brian Duffield have adapted for a film to be released in October. In 2020, Kraus completed the novel that George A. Romero was working on when he died, The Living Dead. And March saw the release of Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World, a deeply researched history and a close personal reading of Romero’s 1968 classic. Talking to Dan Mecca at Letterboxd about Romero and more, Kraus says that “I have this document of what I’d like to put into a second edition, and it grows by the day. I keep learning new things about it. I’ll never be finished with it.”

On the latest episode of Writers on Film, John Bleasdale talks with Laura Horak, the founding director of the Transgender Media Portal, about her new book, Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds. And today in Milan, the Museo del Novecento will host a presentation of Italian Female Filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies: Lives, Histories, and Identities, a Fondazione In Between Art Film project edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, and Maria Alicata.

Critical Collections

Last Friday, we noted that J. Hoberman’s new collection, Across the Movie-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, a survey of his work since he and the Village Voice parted ways, will be out in August. Stuart Klawans, the film critic for the Nation from 1988 through 2020, has a collection out now, My Strange Love: Selected Film Reviews and Essays, 2001–2021. And Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, with a foreword by Kristin Thompson and a preface by Damien Chazelle, will be out in December.

Bright Lights Film Journal is running an excerpt from Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism in which editor Joseph McBride writes about Footlight Parade (1933), a pre-Code musical starring James Cagney, directed by Lloyd Bacon, and featuring musical numbers overseen by Busby Berkeley. “By a Waterfall” is an “incredible number, one of the most ambitious in the history of the musical,” writes McBride, who quotes Berkeley recalling, “The day I had the idea, I let Jack Warner know about it and he told me I would ruin even the Bank of America.”

Historical Perspectives

Liz Helfgott, our editorial director, introduces her conversation with Peter Cowie, who has written a new memoir, Flashbacks: A Passion for Film. “As a pioneering film critic, historian, publisher, festivalgoer, and commentator,” she writes, “Cowie helped introduce legendary film artists—including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Louise Brooks, Satyajit Ray, and Alain Resnais—to audiences all over the world, creating the foundations for a widespread cinephilia that is exploding again in the twenty-first century.”

Reviewing the third edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film for the New York Times in 2002, Sarah Kerr wrote that critic and author David Thomson “proves anew that he is irreplaceable.” Thomson’s publisher is calling his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, “a career capstone of sorts.” On July 12, Thomson will be in Berkeley to launch the book and present Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).

Thomas Doherty has written books on pre-Code Hollywood, World War II–era cinema, and the Blacklist, and he tells Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network about his latest, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America.

In The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920–1980, author Amy Murphy “doesn’t just throw a heaping helping of film titles at us, substituting lists and anecdote for real analysis,” writes John Talbird for Film International. “Instead, each chapter takes a deep dive into one specific movie, contextualizing the film with the real-world effects of white flight, government abandonment of urban locales, urban renewal destruction, and the vanishing career options for young people and families—mostly of color—in the new environment.”

Three Novels

Priya Parmar’s The Original “draws on the many existing biographies of [Katharine] Hepburn to explore, in a lightly fictionalized way, the actress’s tempestuous first decade as a newly fledged Hollywood star,” writes the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. In the New York Times, Alida Becker suggests that “anyone interested in Hepburn’s early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona.” Parmar’s “depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s is particularly adroit: ‘In this town, the air is curdled with sex. Here, anything can happen, and anything happens every night.’”

Benjamin Myers’s tenth novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, toggles between the night in 1971 when Klaus Kinski set out to perform a text he’d written, Jesus Christus Erlöser, prompting a mutiny in the audience at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, and what Jon Day, writing for the London Review of Books, calls “a meandering autofictional essay.” In the view of the nameless narrator, “Kinski’s performance was ‘every bit as potent as any mythologized rock’n’roll performance or art happening,’ whereas today art has lost its shock value.”

James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has a new novel out, called Red Sheet, a crime thriller set in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Introducing his interview with the author, Seth Abramovitch warns Hollywood Reporter readers that Ellroy truly “believes a genuine Moscow-controlled espionage network was operating in Hollywood back in the 1950s, that the Soviet threat was grave, and that history has gotten the era’s heroes and villains exactly backwards.”

“I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L.A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw,” writes William T. Vollmann in the New York Times. “In place of the twentieth-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.”

Your Show of Shows

“Television was an immersive media which divided the world into a before and after in a manner that no technology had since Guttenberg’s printing press,” writes Ed Simon in the Baffler. “Though the history of broadcasting is a global one—any fair appraisal is going to consider Programme One in the USSR or the BBC as much as CBS, ABC, and NBC—the television is not just an invention, but indeed is only matched in the United States by the automobile as a perspective, ideology, and lifestyle. In that way, it was unavoidable that my new book, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States, would have to fumble for the remote.”

Over the course of four seasons appearing intermittently since 2015, Documentary Now! has presented itself as a straight-faced PBS-style news magazine with episodes—narrated by Helen Mirren!—parodying classics of the genre directed by the likes of Albert and David Maysles, Werner Herzog, and Robert Flaherty. Documentary Now!: Fourth Edition (Revised and Expanded) is “a gorgeous coffee table book that parrots the show’s deadpan conceit of pretending it’s a real, long-running, widely revered television institution,” writes Scott Tobias at the Reveal. “Even the foreword, by critic Matt Zoller Seitz, is a parody of what Matt Zoller Seitz might have to say about its place in the cultural firmament.”

For his interview with showrunners Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono, Tobias decided to “focus on a single episode to demonstrate the amount of detail that figures into the direction of the show. To that end, we chose Mr. Runner Up: My Life as an Oscar Bridesmaid, the two-part finale of Season Two, which parodies Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.”

Endnotes

June 30 will see a Zine Launch Party in Toronto for the second volume of The Journal of Stoogeological Studies. “One of my motivations for launching this semi-regular Three Stooges journal in 2023 was that I thought it would be funny,” writes editor Will Sloan. “The idea of soliciting a bunch of millennials (with some representatives of Gens X and Z on either end) to write about a lowbrow comedy team that was famous during the Depression and whose core members were all dead by the Carter administration . . . I thought that was a good bit. But during the full-body immersion of assembling the submissions and revisiting so much of the Stooges’ work, I realized I had a deeper motivation. I love these guys.”

On the New Books Network, Pete Kunze asks Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence about editing The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, and our curatorial director, Ashley Clark, is a recent guest on Guide for the Film Fanatic, chatting with hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull about Perry Henzell’s reggae gangster classic, The Harder They Come (1972), and his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films.

We’ll wrap with Christopher Schobert’s latest books roundup for the Film Stage, where he recommends David F. Walker’s Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies as well as new titles on Hitchcock, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, and Audrey Hepburn.

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Masahiro Shinoda: From Pop to Kabuki

David Hudson — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:32:00 +0000

Kayoko Honoo in Masahiro Shinoda’s The Burning Sunset (1961)

Back in March, we took a look at Sixties Shinoda, a Harvard Film Archive series of films that the late Masahiro Shinoda, a key figure in the Japanese New Wave, directed during the first decade of his long and prolific career. The program included Dry Lake (1960), Pale Flower (1964), Assassination (1964), Samurai Spy (1965), and Double Suicide (1969), and starting Friday, all five films—plus seven more—will screen in New York as part of a Brooklyn Academy of Music retrospective copresented with the Japan Foundation.

BAM programmer Jesse Trussell has selected two films from the 1960s that the HFA passed over, The Burning Sunset (a.k.a. Killers on Parade, 1961) and A Flame at the Pier (a.k.a. Tears on the Lion’s Mane, 1962). Writing for Film Comment in 2017, Marc Walkow called The Burning Sunset “a madcap, candy-colored, pop-art nonsense comedy following a group of assassins, members of the ‘Killer’s Association,’ who devolve to infighting when a nonaccredited hit man turns out to be a better marksman than any of them. It’s Frank Tashlin meets Mr. Freedom, filtered through the eye of Seijun Suzuki, and it’s one of the most brilliant satires Japan ever produced. A Flame at the Pier takes a more serious tone as it riffs on On the Waterfront in its monochrome tale of a rebellious rock-and-roller put to work as muscle for the yakuza strikebreakers who control the Yokohama docks in cahoots with corrupt corporate bosses.”

Silence (1971) is the first of three adaptations of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel about two Portuguese Jesuit priests sent to seventeenth-century Japan, where Christianity is forbidden and its practitioners are persecuted. The second version, Os Olhos da Ásia (1996), was directed by Portuguese filmmaker and writer João Mário Grilo, and the third, of course, was Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). “While Scorsese’s version is more internal and less preoccupied with violence, it speaks to much of the visual language that was established [in 1971], even going so far as to share a number of virtually identical shots,” wrote IndieWire’s David Ehrlich in 2016. Shinoda’s version is “a lurid, tortured examination of faith as a physical crisis,” and as such, it’s “an invaluable religious epic.”

On Sunday, BAM will present a 35 mm print of Himiko (1974) imported from Japan. Shima Iwashita, Shinoda’s wife and frequent collaborator who also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Masaki Kobayashi, stars as the shaman queen and prophet of the Sun God in ancient Japan. Made in collaboration with the avant-garde production company Art Theater Guild, Himiko is “the kind of experimental cinema that no studio would have financed, complete with a discordant [Toru] Takemitsu score, extreme violence, and butoh dancers gamboling in wild costumes and various states of undress,” wrote Walkow. “Himiko is, surprisingly, a perfect flip-side to Silence, with both equally about political power and religious faith, and a pair of cultures colliding violently over the two.”

Kimberly Lindbergs has called Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975) “a strange amalgam of traditional Japanese theater, folktales, ghost stories, social commentary, antiwar sentiment, dark humor, and existential philosophy.” Based on Ango Sakaguchi’s story about a grisly affair between a bandit (Tomisaburo Wakayama of the Lone Wolf and Cub series) and the wife of the man he’s killed, “Shinoda’s film avoids typical horror movie tropes in favor of psychological dread and startling imagery that unnerves and arouses the senses.”

Drawing from a play by Izumi Kyoka and featuring Tamasaburo Bando, renowned for his portrayal of women, Demon Pond (1979) is “still a shock to any Western viewer’s system—a jolt of delicious weirdness that may have seemed as throwback-wacky when it was released in its home country as it has felt outrageous everywhere else,” writes Michael Atkinson. “Maybe more than any other film, Shinoda’s mythopoeic bugout builds a bridge between what the West perceives as ‘realism’ and hellzapoppin’ Kabuki dream-time, the way a rainbow might connect a mundane nursery life to a neverland oasis.”

A new restoration of Gonza the Spearman (1986), based on the 1717 play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, opens the series and screens through next Thursday. It’s a film “filled with historical imagination, social comment, and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty,” wrote Walter Goodman in the New York Times when Gonza arrived in the States in 1988. “Kazuo Miyagawa’s camera finds the beauty in stone walls, sliding panels, simple gardens, rich gowns, women’s faces. When the action resumes, the strangely powerful music of Toru Takemitsu keeps us on edge.”

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Chabrol & Huppert: Doing Wrong

David Hudson — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:25:00 +0000

Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie (1995)

Throughout the twenty-two minutes of Isabelle Huppert and Claude Chabrol: Crossed Portraits, a program Jean-Pierre Devillers directed for French television in 1998 (and now available on the Criterion Channel), the actor and director are playfully testy with each other as they reflect on the characters they have cocreated, beginning with Violette Nozière (1978). Plain and demure at home, eighteen-year-old Violette vamps it up when she heads out to turn tricks. She tries poisoning her parents (Jean Carmet and Stéphane Audran) more than once and eventually succeeds in killing her father.

After his death, the real-life Violette Nozière partied for a week in Montmartre before she was arrested, and the trial dominated headlines in French papers for weeks in the early 1930s. Huppert was twenty-four when she played Violette, but she pulled off a feat twice as astonishing in the flashbacks.

When asked in the 1998 program if there was a particular moment that stood out in what was by then a twenty-year collaboration, Chabrol recalls one that tops a list of many: discovering that Huppert could play a twelve-year-old girl. “And mine is when he asked me to do it,” says Huppert with a proud smile. Chabrol: “At the beginning we thought, ‘This can’t be her, that’s a little girl.’ And no, it was her. This feeling of joy happened several times.”

Writing about Chabrol’s “darkest film” in a dispatch from Cannes, Roger Ebert spotted Huppert as an early frontrunner for the Best Actress award, and his prediction turned out to be at least half right. Huppert tied with Jill Clayburgh, who was also recognized that year for her performance in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.

Tomorrow at L’Alliance New York, Violette Nozière will open Chabrol & Huppert: Doing Wrong, a six-film series running on Tuesdays through July 28. Next week brings Story of Women (1988), another disturbing tale drawn from actual events. In 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud was guillotined for having performed more than two dozen abortions while her husband was being held in a German POW camp. “Huppert is the perfect Chabrol actress,” wrote Darragh O’Donoghue in Senses of Cinema in 2017, “capable at once of immersion and irony, emotional warmth and watchful intelligence, high comedy and harrowing tragedy, fearless physicality and spiritual torment.”

A couple of years ago, B. Panther surveyed Chabrol and Huppert’s collaborations for Paste, and when it came to Madame Bovary (1991), Panther naturally noted that there are “many, many film versions of the canonical Flaubert novel. What makes this one exciting to watch is how Chabrol’s observational style mirrors Emma’s vantage as an outsider . . . Few people have run down a hill with more drama and inflamed passion than Huppert in Madame Bovary. When she drops her shawl, she leaves behind the last of any actorly pretense. As she comes careening to her epic conclusion, her sudden poisoning feels impulsive, almost improvised in a way that breathes new vitality into a classic text.”

“To watch a Chabrol film is to feel your mind bend slowly, slowly, then all at once,” writes Sarah Weinman. “Nowhere is this quality more apparent than in La cérémonie.” Huppert costars with Sandrine Bonnaire in the 1995 adaptation of Judgement in Stone, Ruth Rendell’s 1977 novel about two working-class friends whose simmering resentment of an upper bourgeois family eventually boils over. Rendell, “who herself called La cérémonie the best adaptation of her work,” as Weinman notes, “proved the best literary match with Chabrol’s style and thought.”

The Swindle (1997) stars Huppert and Michel Serrault as Betty and Victor, a team of low-level scammers who steal from businessmen—but without cleaning them out entirely. All’s well until Betty sets her sights on a fatter loot. The nature of the relationship between Betty and Victor remains intentionally unclear throughout Chabrol’s fiftieth feature.

“Husband and wife?” wondered Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You in 2007. “Lovers, former or otherwise? Partners in crime, and nothing more? Or even father and daughter?” Johnston noted that “Huppert’s own theory is that The Swindle reflects the relationship between a director and his female star, in the way desire and eroticism form part of that relationship even without it becoming a sexual one. There are also within the director-actress relationship issues of control and the will to escape from that control . . . But in a film that plays in some ways as Chabrol’s To Catch a Thief (though one should always be careful not to overplay the Hitchcock connection in a director for whom Fritz Lang is equally if not more important), it’s Chabrol the wry comic who predominates in The Swindle.”

In Merci pour le chocolat (2000), Huppert plays Mika Muller, a Swiss chocolate factory heiress married to a renowned concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc), whom Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) believes may be her biological father. “Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film,” wrote J. Hoberman in the Village Voice in 2002. “Chabrol has always enjoyed puncturing the balloon of bourgeois complacency, and as his creatures jump to ever quicker conclusions, the movie’s edge of campy self-reflection grows increasingly pronounced. The more one suspects, the funnier Merci becomes. Mika brings her injured stepson a pair of videos—Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door and Jean Renoir’s La nuit du carrefour—which would alert any habitué of the Paris Cinémathèque to where Chabrol is going.”

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Mad Summers

David Hudson — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:04:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Lili Taylor in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

Daniel Blake Schwartz’s debut feature, Cotton Fever, which Tribeca describes as “a portrait of several characters living on the edge in their desperate, daily quest to survive the throes of addiction,” has won the festival’s U.S. Narrative Competition. Topping the International Narrative Competition is Rodrigue Jean’s murder mystery Labrador—Autopsy of Silence, and Dione Roach and Steve Happi’s Jail Time Records, which the jury calls “the jaw-dropping story of a music recording studio built within the confines of an overcrowded prison in Cameroon,” has won the Documentary Competition.

Tribeca wraps on Sunday, and a busy summer follows. If you’re in Rome any time between now and July 12, you may want to swing by one of three outdoor venues where the ongoing series of free screenings Il Cinema in Piazza includes retrospectives of work by Elio Petri, Alice Rohrwacher, and Takashi Miike. In just over a week, the fortieth edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 20 through 28) will present more than five hundred films in Bologna. The program is set, the catalogue is out, and Barbara Stanwyck is on the poster.

Karlovy Vary (July 3 through 11) has lined up its Special Screenings: Classics and Out of the Past: KVIFF 60/80 programs, featuring documentaries on cinematographer Igor Luther (The Tin Drum) and producer Stuart Cornfield (The Elephant Man) and revival screenings of Kaneto Shindo’s Children of Hiroshima (1954), Glauber Rocha’s The Turning Wind (1962), and Mrinal Sen’s The Outsiders (1977). KVIFF’s President’s Awards will be presented to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is preparing to adapt Rachel Kushner’s 2024 novel Creation Lake, and Jesse Eisenberg, whose third feature, The Debut, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, will be out in the fall.

Locarno (August 5 through 15) has launched a six-episode podcast, Red & Black: Hollywood’s Blacklist, in the run-up to the retrospective curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht. In the U.S., Summer with Monica Vitti is on in Berkeley through August 13, and De Palma: Summer of Suspense opens today in New York to run through August 29.

In Los Angeles, Acropolis Cinema will present a sneak preview of Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to All, a new work in progress, as a live documentary on Thursday. This is both a prequel and a sequel to An Injury to One (2001), and on June 20, Acropolis and Wilkerson will present a 4K reconstruction of what Ed Halter, writing in the Village Voice, has called “a deft, ambitious exercise in old-school socialist agitprop.”

For those sticking close to home screens during the World Cup, Le Cinéma Club has lined up a free series of films to take in between games. It launches today with Francis Alÿs’s eight-minute Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes We Dream as We Live & Sometimes We Live as We Dream (2013) and carries on next week with Luiz Carlos Barreto’s 1974 feature This Is Pelé, followed by Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2014 short The World Cup in Recife.

This week’s highlights:

For the New York Times, Steven Spielberg explains how he’s juiced up a sequence from Duel (1971) to create a scene that gets mentioned in nearly every review of Disclosure Day. That’s neat, but what’s downright amazing is the oral history of Spielberg’s career that Bilge Ebiri has put together for Vulture. Irresistibly engaging from anecdote to anecdote, this long read also offers insightful observations from a wide range of illustrious collaborators, including George Lucas, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and on and on. “I get angry when I run into people who are condescending about him,” says playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story). “‘He’s great, but he’s a sentimentalist.’ I’ve said many times, the artist that I think he most resembles is Charles Dickens. It’s very easy to condescend to Dickens, but Dickens is a second only to Shakespeare.”

On Wednesday, the Academy announced that this year’s Governors Awards will go to Glenn Close, Ridley Scott, animator Floyd Norman, and producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, whose Killer Films has held out a vital hand to the productions of dozens of landmarks of American independent cinema. I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), the debut feature from Mary Harron (American Psycho), is one, and after knocking around for too many years between bankrupt distributors, it’s back in a new restoration opening today in New York and Los Angeles. The stellar cast features Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas—the author of the radical feminist SCUM Manifesto who did indeed shoot Warhol in the summer of 1968—Jared Harris as Warhol, Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling, and Michael Imperioli as Ondine. Harron has been talking with Monica Castillo (A.V. Club), Jim Hemphill (IndieWire), and Emma Madden (Guardian), and she spoke about Solanas last year with Jadie Stillwell (Screen Slate) and told Anisse Gross in a 2014 issue of the Believer: “What will remain interesting about her is that her work is both blindingly insightful and mad at the same time, which makes it radioactive. It will never lose its power, because the craziness is what allowed her to go there and get those insights.”

Another film turning thirty this year, Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, premiered in Cannes and won the Palme d’Or and a Best Actress award for Brenda Blethyn. Writing for Notebook, Matthew Eng focuses on Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s portrayal of Hortense, an optometrist who decides to track down her birth mother, Cynthia (Blethyn). “Hortense fosters an unmistakable connection to the viewer yet eludes psychological transparency and refrains from complete knowability,” writes Eng. “It is Jean-Baptiste who, through subtle performance style and primary authorship of the character, carefully sets the terms by which Hortense will and will not be legible to those who surround her and those in the audience who are nonetheless magnetized to the actress’s every delicate move.”

“I recently wrote to a colleague in Paris that I thought Radu Jude—the prolific author of farcical tragicomedies about our contemporary lives under surveillance, diminished by rapacious capital, plagued by nationalist stupidity, and subject to conspiratorial thinking and multiple pandemics, virtual as well as actual—might be the most important filmmaker in Europe today.” J. Hoberman introduces his exchange with Jude, which is now up at Film Comment. The conversation steers into the tricky issue of AI, the slippery nature of vulgarity, and what goes into the making of a good “bad” movie. Hoberman’s next book, Across the Movie-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, will be out in August, and Jude is very likely shooting Love Diptych, a film “in dialogue” with Robert Rossellini’s L’amore (1948), right about now in a village outside of Bucharest.

Film Comment Live: Hold Everything Dear—John Berger and Cinema, a series celebrating the critic’s centennial and presented in five New York venues, will open on July 29 with La rabbia di Pasolini, Giuseppe Bertolucci’s 2008 reconstruction of an essay film Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in the early 1960s and then disavowed when his producer mangled it. For the European Review of Books, Fernanda Eberstadt writes about Petrolio, the novel that Pasolini was working on when he was murdered in 1975, and a recent theatrical production of the story staged in Paris by Sylvain Creuzevault. Eberstadt notes that Pasolini considered Petrolio to be “the ‘summa of all my experiences, all my memories’—a novel that is part Salò, part newspaper-essay run mad.” Writing for the the Ideas Letter, Xiaowei Wang realizes that, having watched Salò (1976), “I have participated in a ritual that uncovers not only the driving engine of fascism but the affective substrate of totalitarian culture. This is what Pasolini termed ‘false permissiveness.’ In the age of generative AI, false permissiveness has new and unsettling relevance.”

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Suddenly, Virginia Woolf

David Hudson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:57:00 +0000

Sophie Okonedo in Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa (2026)

Last month, the Guardian posted a ranked list of the hundred best English-language novels of all time, the result of a poll of more than 170 novelists, critics, and academics, including Stephen King, Maggie O’Farrell, Siri Hustvedt, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. At the top we find George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf famously called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Woolf fares pretty well herself, landing five spots on the list, more than any other writer—including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, who each have a mere four books in the top one hundred.

Woolf’s highest scorer is To the Lighthouse (#4), followed by Mrs. Dalloway at #14. That 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel following Clarissa Dalloway as she toodles around London preparing to host a party in the evening has been adapted for the stage by Jen Heyes and Kit Green as “a playful reexamination of the novel, wrapped up as a multimedia-driven solo show,” as Holly O’Mahony describes it in the Guardian. The production can be seen in London from Tuesday through June 10 and in Manchester in September.

Vanessa Redgrave starred in a 1997 film adaptation directed by Marleen Gorris, and in 2003, Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her performance as Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel written by David Hare. Both the book and the movie depict Woolf struggling with depression while writing Mrs. Dalloway with cutaways to 1949 Los Angeles and 1999 New York, where two women—played by Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep in the film—prepare for their respective social gatherings.

By some odd coincidence, two new reimaginings of Mrs. Dalloway have appeared this year within weeks of each other. Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa became one of the most critically acclaimed films at Cannes when it premiered last month in the Directors’ Fortnight, and The Last Day, the debut feature from artist Rachel Rose, has just seen its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival.

“By transposing the story to Nigeria, the Esiris have foregrounded the colonialist history that surfaces in the book with its repeated mentions of India and, by extension, the British Empire,” wrote the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis when she interviewed the twin brothers in Cannes. “It’s a brilliant interpretive move, one that’s all the more powerful because of how the Esiris use Woolf’s narrative fragmentation to suggest this crushingly divided world. The young Clarissa grows up into a comfortably cosseted woman who lives in a large, waterfront house filled with servants. Unlike her father, Clarissa tends to smile at the people who do her bidding. Yet while she wears her privilege lightly, the weight of history presses down nevertheless. There’s pathos to how unknowingly Clarissa seems to drift along, but not an iota of sentimentality.”

Film Comment’s Devika Girish also spoke with the Esiris as well as with their editor, Blair McClendon. “The posh elite of Lagos are (perhaps too) much like their colonial counterparts, while the city’s working class grapples with the lingering effects of the coups, political crises, and Nigeria’s ongoing battle against Boko Haram,” wrote Girish in her introduction. “But it’s in the details—for which the Esiris have a keen, patient eye—that the nuances of this postcolonial adaptation emerge: in Clarissa and her friends’ holiday musings on the legacy of colonialism; in the variations of accent, language, and pidgin spoken by the characters; in the sounds of construction and calls of the muezzin that layer the film’s ambiance; and in the yearning glances and lived-in gestures of a tremendous ensemble of actors.”

Clarissa “places a superb Sophie Okonedo, radiant with melancholy, at the heart of its remarkably well-cast ensemble,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety. “Expanding in ambition and feeling from their promising debut,” Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020), “the Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all—and totally alone.”

The Last Day is set in New York on the Fourth of July, and Variety’s Guy Lodge finds that “a chill runs through Rachel Rose’s elegantly restrained, internalized character study. It crisps the edges of the film’s immaculately lit frames and causes its two principal characters, tautly played by Alicia Vikander and Victoria Pedretti, to stiffen slightly, unable to give themselves over to the day’s balmy mood. Both are mothers, and holiday or not, there’s much to be done: caterers to organize, groceries to buy, pediatrician appointments to keep, meds to take. But Rose’s film isn’t a standard portrait of domestic discontent, grasping instead at something harder and less tangible to articulate: the sense that you’ve slid out of step with your own life.”

Wagner Moura appears as a novelist and the former boyfriend of Vikander’s Julia, and in the Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han finds that Rose, “known for her video installations, relies more on striking imagery and sound than propulsive storytelling to cast her spell, yielding an experience whose impact is more easily felt than explained.” The Last Day is imbued with “the curiosity to observe its characters’ disillusionment and the empathy to share in their complicated emotions.”

A third new film needs mentioning here. Last week, SXSW London launched Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, an adaptation of Woolf’s second and longest novel directed by Tina Gharavi (I Am Nasrine). Set in 1910 and published in 1919, Night and Day is in conversation “with the male writers of the Edwardian age, like Henry James, John Galsworthy, and her friend E. M. Forster,” noted Lauren Groff in a 2019 piece for the Paris Review. “This is a book that gazes backward in time with skepticism and a virago’s impulse to shred into tatters all that it sees.”

Gharavi and screenwriter Justine Waddell narrow the focus to Katherine Hilbery (Haley Bennett), a headstrong woman determined to study astronomy at Cambridge. Her parents (Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders) insist that she marry instead. Screen’s Nikki Baughan finds that the film “relies heavily on its cast, particularly effervescent lead Haley Bennett, to breathe life into its staid, weighty narrative.” For the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, this is “such a sweet story and guilelessly eccentric—a butterfly fluttering just beyond the wheel of realism.”

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Steven Spielberg and Disclosure Day

David Hudson — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:28:00 +0000

Emily Blunt in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026)

For a film that suggests incontestable proof that we are not alone in the universe could move all of humanity to set aside our differences and come together as one, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day has sparked a remarkably wide range of first reviews. However critical consensus takes shape in the years to come, Time’s Stephanie Zacharek finds that Spielberg’s thirty-fifth feature is “the greatest film he could have possibly made in this moment, at a time when humans worldwide are feeling bewildered and blindsided by a new order in which compassion, creativity, and respect for the natural world have become traits to be crushed, not nurtured. Disclosure Day is majestic, unnerving, and more than little wacky, though its pure unhinged quality is probably its secret sauce.”

Working from a detailed treatment Spielberg tapped out in his Notes app, screenwriter David Koepp toggles between two storylines destined to converge. Cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has bolted from Wardex, a corporation that has been working with the U.S. government to keep a lid on the experiments conducted on aliens over the past several decades. Daniel’s got the evidence and—chased by Wardex reps overseen by company head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and accompanied by his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), a former nun—he races to what he hopes will be a safe place where he and Hugo (Colman Domingo) intend to air these long-kept secrets via a global broadcast.

Meanwhile, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), an ambitious weatherperson on a local TV station in Kansas City, is visited by a cardinal that lands on her kitchen table, looks into her eyes, and gives her the ability to speak any language on the planet and to peer into the souls of anyone she comes across. She, too, must be whisked to safety under Hugo’s long-distance guidance. And all the while, simmering in the background, overheard snippets from news reports suggest that nuclear tensions are mounting between the friends and enemies of North Korea.

“There’s a lot going on in this movie,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR, “a ton of running and jumping and driving cars through living rooms and into trains and invisible fire trucks that crash into other cars. There’s also plenty of earnest talk about secrets and healing and childhood and faith, all staged with some of the most offhandedly elegant camera blocking you’ve ever seen. Yet either despite all this running around or because of it, Disclosure Day never feels like it really gets anywhere.”

“On paper,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear, Disclosure Day “reads like a 1970s paranoid potboiler. On-screen, it looks like a 1990s summer movie, all big-swing sheen. In reality, this woozy attempt to ride a wave of distrust and lack of faith in our authority figures couldn’t feel more of its moment.”

It’s all “very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous,” finds the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines, and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt.”

Disclosure Day is “immaculately mounted on a moment-to-moment basis, so its inability to cohere at any juncture is frustrating,” finds the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager. “Hansel and Gretel references combine with lousy CG animals and copious religious talk and symbolism to middling effect, and the notion that a civilization on the brink of World War III might not be able to cope with a bombshell about outer-space life (because it would destroy belief in God?) is handled sketchily.” At Little White Lies, Hannah Strong agrees that “Koepp’s screenplay simply isn’t up to the task.” And at the Film Verdict, Alonso Duralde suggests that “even the GOATs can whiff it sometimes.”

“I’ve been on Twitter too long to be swayed by the movie’s conviction that proof of alien life would do more to end wars than inflame them,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “and Koepp’s script never puts in the work required to earn its optimism on the subject, but the childlike joy and wonder in seeing Janusz Kamiński’s camera trace impossible circles around a wooden fence, or pivot from one side mirror of Margaret’s car to the other, is contagious enough that even the film’s most credulous ideas feel too sincere to reject outright.”

“It’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg directed a film as quintessentially Spielbergian,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who has plenty of time for this cast as well. “O’Connor is one of our most soulful and sensate actors, seemingly incapable of a false note; he brings conviction and a depth of feeling to Daniel that intensifies with each new piece of information concerning who he is and where his abilities originate . . . The standout, however, is Blunt, simply breathtaking and never more magnetic, injecting a whirlwind of emotions into Margaret as she’s hurtled forward by terrifying instincts that she’s powerless to control, and making steady gains in purposeful determination as her situation—past and present—is illuminated.”

Disclosure Day eventually heads toward “an extended, and impeccably put-together final set piece, scored to John Williams’s music, that for all its outward corniness manages to be shockingly moving, often in the simplest of ways,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Some will call it manipulative, but Spielberg’s secret has always been that he understands something fundamental about the audience’s cinematic imagination. He knows how to move us because he knows what we secretly long for. He taps into our desire to believe in something greater, in all the things that hover at the edge of the possible, whether in our minds, in our skies, or on our screens.”

The ending “plays into every complaint that’s ever been lodged about [Spielberg’s] raging sentimentality,” writes the Atlantic’s David Sims. “I loved every second.”

Spielberg in the Summer of 2026

This week’s release of Disclosure Day follows weeks of marveling at a box-office phenomenon that feels very 2026. Two modestly budgeted scary movies directed by YouTubers in their twenties—Kane Parsons’s Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession—have become smash hits, elbowing aside a Stars Wars movie. If it were just one, it’d be an outlier. But two, appearing practically simultaneously, will suggest—to many studio execs, undoubtedly—that the phenomenon is repeatable. Universal Pictures, in the meantime, is giving Disclosure Day a moment in the sun that should last just over a month before Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey storms into theaters worldwide to very likely recoup several times over a budget twice the size of Disclosure Day’s.

Spielberg will turn eighty in December, so when he releases a feature every few years, we tend to step back and take measure of a career that has shaped the industry and left its mark on our culture more indelibly than any other filmmaker’s. The New York Times Magazine has put him on the cover and sent its two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, Wesley Morris, to hang with him for a couple of months and then write the profile.

From Firelight (1964), a now mostly lost feature about an alien invasion that Spielberg made when he was seventeen, through The Fabelmans (2022), in which he finally tackled head-on his parents’ divorce—a traumatic episode seeping into the bones of so many of his films, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Hook (1991), and Catch Me If You Can (2002)—“the movies are the arena in which he has worked on some of the mysteries he couldn’t solve on his own,” writes Morris. “What we experience as sorcery is, for him, a process of exorcism. ‘I can’t express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again,’ he said deliberatively, almost as if he was feeling this out. ‘I work so much out through this process. So much out. I get to bleed off some of the darkness instead of letting it fester inside me. You get to let it fester inside you.’”

With Jack Hamilton’s excellent piece on Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, both released in 1993—“the most pivotal year of Spielberg’s career, and the beginnings of a change in the way both critics and audiences thought about his body of work”—Slate has launched Spielberg Week. Two more standouts so far are Nadira Goffe’s appreciation of The Color Purple (1985) and Sam Adams’s assessment of War of the Worlds (2005), “Spielberg’s most unrelentingly downbeat movie, and the one that comes closest to fulfilling his lifelong promise to direct an honest-to-goodness horror movie.”

The Jacob Burns Film Center series Steven Spielberg’s Sci-Fi is on through June 21, and in London, the BFI season Close Encounters with Spielberg runs through June 28. As for what’s next, when he was at SXSW in March, Spielberg told Sean Fennessey, cohost of The Big Picture podcast, that he’s developing a Western. “And it kicks ass,” he said. “I never want to quit.”

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John Sayles in Toronto

David Hudson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:49:00 +0000

John Sayles’s Matewan (1987)

John Sayles is heading to Toronto to take an active part in all ten screenings of the TIFF Cinematheque series Declarations of Independence: The Cinema of John Sayles, which opens on Thursday and runs through June 18. Whether introducing a film or taking questions, he’ll occasionally be joined by his partner, Maggie Renzi, and always by critic, author, and guest curator Adam Nayman.

“Sayles is very much a critical American filmmaker,” writes Nayman in his program notes, “a vital and influential avatar of the DIY ethos whose movies registered as acts of conscientious objection during Hollywood’s early ’80s imperial phase. Not only did Sayles help set the terms for filmmakers operating outside the system, but he’s continued to work on them, alongside his wife and producer Maggie Renzi, for more than forty years. ‘There is such a thing as the right money and the wrong money,’ Sayles wrote in his 1987 how-to book Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan. The political and artistic principles he’s refused to compromise behind the scenes over the course of his extraordinary career are the same ones on the screen.”

Sayles was a novelist before he became a director. Having earned a degree in psychology, he was knocking around between odd jobs and writing short stories when he decided to turn one of them into his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, which was published in 1975 and later deemed “by turns hilarious and poignant” by Randall Kenan in the Nation. His follow-up, Union Dues (1977), was nominated for a National Book Award. And he’s still at it. Crucible was published earlier this year, and at the top of his interview with the author for the Chicago Review of Books, Steve Nathans-Kelly notes that Sayles’s eighth novel “chronicles fifteen tumultuous years in mostly Depression-era Detroit in a multi-threaded, character-rich narrative.”

The segue into filmmaking began in the late 1970s when Frances Doel, the head of the script department at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, hired Sayles to rewrite a screenplay that had been aimed at cashing in on the phenomenal success Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Joe Dante directed Piranha in 1978, and Sayles stuck around to splash in the genre pool a little longer. “Sayles clearly enjoyed his apprenticeship, pumping fresh blood into these narratives of werewolves, mutant reptiles, and tommy-gun shootouts with his trademark literate dialogue, bemused humor, and attention to social bearings,” wrote Robert Keser in Bright Lights Film Journal in 2003.

TIFF will screen two films from this period. Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) rides the coattails of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) just as shamelessly as Piranha did Jaws’. But Battle “has a charm that belies its low budget and opportunistic origins,” wrote Noel Murray at the A.V. Club in 2002. “Sayles ‘borrowed’ the plot of The Seven Samurai, set it in space, and—with the help of special-effects wunderkind James Cameron, baby-faced composer James Horner, and where-is-he-now director Jimmy Murakami—made it a visually inventive and intermittently involving intergalactic shoot-em-up.”

When Gabe Klinger interviewed Joe Dante for Metrograph’s Journal, he noted that The Howling (1981) “appears as the work of an upstart whose ambitions hadn’t yet met a ceiling (or studio writer’s room, as it were), working through genre film problems with the savvy of a true film connoisseur, and elevating a would-be grindhouse item by virtue of curating worthy collaborators—among these, John Sayles, who rewrote the film’s mediocre script.” Sayles was “always topical in his scripts,” notes Dante. “He used everything that was in the zeitgeist.”

Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979), Sayles’s directorial debut, was the “most modest and beguiling film to come out of the independent feature movement,” wrote Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader. A decade after their heyday as campus radicals in the 1960s, seven friends come together to hang out in a house in the country. “Such coziness and affection may not be the stuff of high art, but it feels good,” wrote Kehr. “Made on a tiny budget of $60,000, the film is full of technical flaws, but the casting, which is where most low-budget films fall down, is extraordinarily strong.”

Sayles signed on to direct a movie for a major studio just once. Paramount was looking for a teen sex comedy, and what Sayles delivered with Baby, It’s You (1983) was not that. Rosanna Arquette stars as a nice girl sailing through high school in suburban New Jersey in the mid-1960s when she falls for the new kid, a roustabout played by Vincent Spano. “Sayles knows this is well-trod ground,” writes Jason Bailey, “but he finds the complexity in these characters and situations; he captures the urgency and eroticism of first love, as well as the importance of getting that love out of your system.”

The Brother from Another Planet (1984), the biggest box-office success of Sayles’s career, stars Joe Morton as an alien who—except for his three-toed feet, his mute innocence, and his unobtrusive yet occasionally useful extraterrestrial powers—could pass for a male Black human. “Arriving first at Ellis Island and overwhelmed by his new surroundings, the whippet-lean and dreadlocked Morton is very much a symbol of the immigrant experience, right down to his (literal) voicelessness and vulnerability to his well-armed pursuers,” wrote Adam Nayman for Downtime a few years ago.

“But if the script’s organizing metaphor is broad and obvious,” Nayman went on, “the dramaturgy is subtle and sharp, privileging granular, street-level encounters that allow Sayles to show off his novelist’s gift for characterization and dialogue over any grand statements about the nation’s psyche . . . With apologies to the flawless neo-noir Lone Star (1996), Brother is Sayles’s masterpiece: American Babylon as a kind of Twilight Zone, a picaresque portrait drenched in neon and nightshade.”

Starring Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham, and David Strathairn, Matewan (1987) dramatizes the violent 1920 confrontation between miners and union busters hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company in West Virginia. “The opportunity to inflict unlimited pain and damage on workers and on the land, it goes without saying, requires the absence of unions,” writes A. S. Hamrah. “Matewan is one of the few movies produced in the U.S. to make the need for them its subject. The gun-toting, nonminer hillbillies who stealthily materialize out of the woods in the film know that the coal companies stole their land. We, however, have to be shown.”

Sunday sees a thirty-fifth-anniversary screening of a new restoration of City of Hope. Set in a fictional city in New Jersey, the film tracks connections between three dozen or so characters “and follows them through their days and nights, as they run into one another, make deals, tell lies, seek happiness, and find mostly compromise and disappointment,” as Roger Ebert wrote in 1991. “City of Hope is a powerful film, and an angry one . . . It asks a hard question: Is it possible for a good person to prevail in a corrupt system, just simply because right is on his side? The answer, in the short run, is that power is stronger than right. The notion of a long run, of course, is all that keeps hope alive.”

Lone Star shifts between two timelines in the same town—the 1950s and the then-present ’90s in Frontera, Texas—to unravel the mystery of the death of a violently racist sheriff chillingly played by Kris Kristofferson. Domino Renee Perez has been “thinking, teaching, and writing about Lone Star for almost two decades,” and in 2024, she looked back on the first time she saw it: “Awestruck not only by the movie’s powerful cultural critique but also by its mixing of genres—western, noir, murder mystery, and romance—I left the theater believing it was one of the most beautifully scripted, acted, shot, paced, edited, and scored films I had ever seen. I still believe it.”

In Men with Guns (1997), an aging doctor (Federico Luppi) in an unnamed Latin American city ventures into the jungle to reconnect with his former students. After he’s told that one of them has been murdered, he begins to suspect that all of them have met the same fate. “From Matewan to City of Hope to the brilliant Lone Star, Sayles has proven himself time and again a master of story, structure, character, and conflict,” wrote Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle. Men with Guns stands out for “its use of magical realism, repeated flashbacks, and the fact that it’s almost entirely in Spanish, but it’s still very much a John Sayles film, from its frequent use of deeply layered symbolism to its lush photography and deep, abiding emotional core.”

“As a candidate named Dickie Pilager, Chris Cooper is both George W. Bush and not George W. Bush in John Sayles's exciting political muckraking film Silver City,” wrote Caryn James in the New York Times in 2004. And “the film goes beyond election-year satire to reach broader themes of corporate power, campaign double talk, and journalistic responsibility.” Wrapping his program notes, Adam Nayman points out that “Cooper’s Dubya impersonation is superb, and Sayles fills out the ensemble with a murderer’s row of veteran character actors, including choice parts for Danny Huston, Daryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, and a killer Kris Kristofferson.”

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Stanley Kwan: Ladies Man

David Hudson — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:55:00 +0000

Anita Mui in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987)

Cora Miao and Chow Yun-Fat star in Stanley Kwan’s first feature, Women (1985), as a married couple who separate after she discovers that he’s been having an affair with a younger woman. “Will there be more like her?” she asks. And he responds by etching out characters on an early-model computer monitor: “I swear you are my only beloved wife!”

Writing about this scene for Notebook, Saffron Maeve observes that “this bleak digital poem evokes the director’s ongoing preoccupations with networks of urban Chinese women and the men who disappoint them. Women has a loose kinship with Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 play, The Women, which also surveys infidelity and divorce within a framework where men exist only abstractly. Luce omits male characters entirely, while Kwan allows men to roam this story as losers and liars.”

On Thursday, Women will open Stanley Kwan: Ladies Man, a seven-film retrospective that Asia Society will present in New York through Sunday. Programmer Inney Prakash points out that Kwan has attributed his affinity for “engaging, multi-dimensional female characters” to growing up under “the dominant influence of his mother and sisters.”

At home, we should add, because, as Aliza Ma has noted, it was with his father that Kwan went to the movies when he was a child. Starting out as an actor, Kwan was eventually drawn to the action behind the camera, becoming a script supervisor and assistant director and “working with Hong Kong New Wave titans such as Patrick Tam (Nomad, 1982) and Ann Hui (Boat People, 1982). He soon became one of the most trusted and sought-after collaborators among important directors of Hong Kong cinema’s golden era.”

On Friday, critic Phoebe Chen will introduce Love Unto Waste (1986), featuring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, in one of his earliest starring roles, as a playboy who has been hanging out with three women friends when one of them is found dead. Chow Yun-fat plays the inspector called on to unravel the mystery and the complex network of relationships within this tight cluster.

Kwan is “one of the cinema’s truest romantics,” writes Dennis Lim. “In Rouge [1987], his third feature, and in later films including Center Stage (1991) and Red Rose White Rose (1994), Kwan does not merely tell stories of the lovestruck and the heartsick; he translates their overflowing emotions into an expressive language of desire, characterized by sinuous camera moves and patterned light and shadow.”

“Queen of Cantopop” Anita Mui Yim-fong and Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, regarded as one of the foundational performers in the genre, star in Rouge as doomed lovers in 1930s Hong Kong. They enter a suicide pact, but only she goes through with it. Fifty years later, she reemerges as a ghost and asks a couple of journalists (Alex Man Chi-leung and Emily Chu Bo-yee) to help her find the man she left behind when she went “below.”

The plots of Kwan’s films are “conundrums of desire, infatuation, boredom, and disillusionment, invariably founded on questions about the strength and durability of emotional commitments,” wrote Tony Rayns in a 1990 assessment of “a burgeoning filmography not unworthy of a latter-day George Cukor or a less cynical Fassbinder.” Writing for Film Bulletin, Rayns noted that Full Moon in New York (1989) “sustains a ‘political’ reading as a commentary on the relationship between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong while charting the development of a friendship between three Chinese women in Manhattan.”

Those women are played by Maggie Cheung, Sylvia Chang, and Siqin Gaowa, and in Center Stage, Cheung plays Ruan Lingyu, one of the great stars of Chinese cinema in the silent era. Center Stage focuses on the early 1930s, when Ruan’s career was peaking while her private life was in turmoil. She was only twenty-four when she killed herself in 1935. Kwan breaks the gorgeous spell cast by his conjuring of the period with passages in which he and Cheung discuss their approach to reenacting the professional and personal turns in a tragic life.

“Few biopics have so eloquently interrogated the very foundations of the genre,” wrote Andrew Chan a few years ago for 4Columns: “our desire for intimacy with the stars and our sense of being entitled to knowledge of their personal lives. Even as the preproduction conversations between Kwan and his cast take the form of studious research, they still revolve around the paraphernalia of a gossip industry that capitalizes on those same appetites—inert artifacts and secondhand accounts that turn Ruan into a mannequin of history. Just as unnerving is how Center Stage evokes the loneliness of the performer, who is forever caught between the emotional transparency her art demands and the privacy she requires to protect those emotions.”

Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca, Moonglow) will introduce Sunday’s screening of Red Rose White Rose (1994), a film that Variety’s Derek Elley found to be Kwan’s “most emotionally resonant and deeply realized work since his name-making Rouge.” Winston Chao stars in the adaptation of Eileen Chang’s novella as a man returning to 1930s Shanghai from Europe, sparking up an affair with one woman (Joan Chen)—whom he thinks of as his “red rose”—before marrying another, his “white rose” (Veronica Yip). Writing for Time Out, Tony Rayns noted that Christopher Doyle’s “hallucinatory cinematography accentuates the plot’s twists of the knife.”

The series will wrap on Sunday with Lan Yu (2001), introduced by Andrew Chan. Released five years after Kwan came out in his documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema and shot secretly in Beijing, Lan Yu is a melodrama based on a wildly popular novel published anonymously on the internet in the late 1990s. The film opens with businessman Chen Handong (Hu Jun) thinking back to the 1980s “and to the night he met young architecture student Lan Yu (Liu Ye), freshly arrived in Beijing from the country and ripe for mentoring and more,” as Ryan Gilbey wrote in the Guardian in 2023. “The older man warns his toy boy not to get attached. ‘When two people know each other too well, it’s time to separate,’ he says—then signally fails to heed his own advice.”

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Shifting POVs

David Hudson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:35:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Gina Gershon in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound (1996)

Thursday morning brought the shocking news that Marjane Satrapi, who told her life story in the graphic novel Persepolis and its animated adaptation, was gone at fifty-six. She “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” reads a statement released by those close to her.

Satrapi grew up in Tehran, where she attended French-language schools and wore the sort of clothes and listened to the kinds of music that had her parents worrying that she would run into trouble with Islamist authorities. They sent her to study in Vienna, and in 1994, Satrapi moved to France. She was an outspoken supporter of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, and after her husband’s death, she set up the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation to support foreign students studying film in Paris.

Nominated for an Oscar and the winner of a Jury Prize in Cannes and a César for Best First Film, Persepolis is “the chronicle of a young girl’s coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence, and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times in 2007. “And Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.”

At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz remembers editor Marcia Lucas, who worked with her first husband, George Lucas, on THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and the first Star Wars trilogy and with Martin Scorsese on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and New York, New York (1977). Marcia Lucas passed away last week at the age of eighty.

“Winning an Oscar for cutting the original Star Wars with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch is often marked as her career peak,” writes Seitz, “but personally, I’d put Taxi Driver alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ’70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave–inspired jump-cutting—particularly in the driving sequences and the ‘You talkin’ to me?’ scene, a collage of behavioral bits invented on the set by star Robert De Niro.”

In memory of sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, who died last Friday at the age of 104, e-flux has posted an excerpt from his 1956 book The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. Having coined the term cinéma vérité in his 1957 book The Stars, Morin teamed up with Jean Rouch to make Chronicle of a Summer (1961), “a film whose radical immediacy is still ahead of its time,” as Sam Di Iorio wrote in 2013. In his obituary for the New York Times, Adam Nossiter calls Morin “an autodidact sharpshooter at the edges of academia in France.”

In festival news, Karlovy Vary has unveiled lineups for its Crystal Globe Competition, the Proxima competition for “progressive works of cinema,” and thirteen Special Screenings. The Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai is particularly looking forward to Nader Saeivar’s Hijamat, a family drama coproduced and edited by Jafar Panahi. KVIFF will celebrate its eightieth anniversary with the sixtieth edition running from July 3 through 11.

Two festivals spotlighting Iranian cinema open today, one in Los Angeles, the other in Chicago. And in New York, the Museum of Modern Art is presenting a series of Universal Westerns featuring films by John Ford, Anthony Mann, Allan Dwan, Budd Boetticher, King Vidor, Jacques Tourneur, and Clint Eastwood. There are several screenings of 35 mm prints, and talking to R. Emmet Sweeney, MoMA curator Dave Kehr notes that Universal has been extraordinarily helpful. “They listen to people like us and do the work, which is not what I’m used to,” says Kehr. “We’re doing this in coordination with Narrow Margin magazine, who to me represent a really solid kind of historical criticism that we haven’t seen in a while.”

Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that we must sadly prepare to say goodbye to Slate’s Culture Gabfest. For eighteen years, Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner’s conversations about music, movies, TV, books, fashion, controversy-sparking essays, and the occasional recipe have enlightened and entertained. With just a few more episodes to go, we’re already dreading the absence of their sane and sober contribution to the discourse.

On Sunday, Tribeca will present a thirtieth-anniversary screening of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound, followed by a conversation with Lilly Wachowski, Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, and Christopher Meloni moderated by Julie Klausner. Bound is “sexy and dangerous, and it has queer characters who are villains you root for,” says King Princess. For IndieWire, Nick Newman talks with Lilly Wachowski, who recalls a pre-release screening in San Francisco. “The Castro was packed with seven hundred queer women, lesbians, and from the very first reel, they were roaring,” she says. “I have never, to this day, seen one of our films get that kind of reaction in front of an audience. So the folks who we made that film for embraced it entirely.”

A new restoration of Shunji Iwai’s first feature, Love Letter (1995), opens a four-film showcase of his work at New York’s Metrograph this evening, and Iwai will be there through the weekend. “His sensibility—which pairs J-pop music with classical recordings, and delicate compositions with free-flowing camerawork—sees internal emotion heightened in the external world,” writes Alex Lei at Screen Slate. “So palpable are the inner realities of his characters that his films become intimate examinations of contemporary existence,” writes Joshua Minsoo Kim in Metrograph’s Journal. Iwai’s April Story (1998), “about a college student struggling with loneliness, is delicate and wistful, while the feature that followed it, 2001’s All About Lily Chou-Chou, is an oppressively bleak gauntlet of teenage angst,” writes Katie Rife for Letterboxd. “Interestingly, Iwai describes all his films as comedies.”

“Our cinematographic memories of one great artist’s work reverberate across the landscapes, spaces, actors, and colors that mix in our minds so we can speak of the feeling of ‘Ozu’ as one as multifaceted as the word ‘logos,’” writes Greg Gerke in Liberties Journal. “An astute but unheralded commentator on a film website said of Ozu’s films that his characters demonstrate one truism—the older one gets, the more they sense the coming of nothing and they push away from it. I refer to this because unlike many of those characters I was not pushing away, I let it happen, and in terms of the Faulknerian equation, I took grief rather than nothing. And even if his characters did not take grief all the time, Ozu certainly did.”

It’s been quite a week at the BFI. Sight and Sound has posted Farran Smith Nehme’s cover story on Marilyn Monroe and Quentin Tarantino’s ode to Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, and the series Revolutionary Cinema: The Passion of Ritwik Ghatak is on though the end of the month. In an introductory primer, curator Sanghita Sen notes that Ghatak has been described as “a passionate and intensely national filmmaker.” While that’s “especially true of Ghatak’s powerful depiction of the Partition of Bengal and its enduring trauma, his films also speak to much larger global realities shaped by colonial and imperial oppression, constant war, genocide, and displacement.”

For Notebook, Matthew Thrift talks with “prodigious multi-hyphenate” Tsui Hark. “As director,” writes Thrift, “he leaps between comedy (Aces Go Places 3, 1984; The Chinese Feast, 1995) and time-bending romance (Love in the Time of Twilight, 1995), between fantastical melodrama (Green Snake, 1993), dizzying action (The Blade, 1995; Time and Tide, 2000), and whatever Tri-Star (1996) is. As a producer, he quickly became notorious for his meddlesome oversight, while simultaneously scoring smash hit after smash hit.” The conversation touches on action sequences, Leni Riefenstahl, AI, and gender roles. “Every time you go to see a movie, you should be getting a new perspective on who you are,” says Tsui.

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Louis Malle: Portraits of America

David Hudson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:18:00 +0000

Louis Malle and cinematographer Richard Ciupka on the set of Atlantic City (1980)

Claire Duguet’s Louis Malle, le Révolté is the ideal curtain-raiser for Louis Malle: Portraits of America, the series opening today at Metrograph in New York. In just over an hour, Duguet takes us on a brisk tour of the life and work of a restless artist. Born into a wealthy family in northern France, Malle ditched his studies to join Jacques Cousteau and his crew as they made The Silent World (1956), an undersea documentary that won both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and an Oscar. Cousteau generously gave Malle codirecting credit.

Malle’s first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), starring Jeanne Moreau and famously featuring an improvised soundtrack by Miles Davis, was a hit with critics and audiences alike. Elevator screens in Berkeley on Saturday and then again on August 28, when it wraps the BAMPFA series French Noir: From the Shadows into the Light.

“Malle spent the four decades of his filmmaking life saying, ‘Been there, done that,’ over and over again, searching constantly for somewhere he hadn’t been and something he hadn’t done,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in 2006. “From the chilly elegance of Elevator to the Gallows, in 1957, he moved quickly to the humid romanticism of The Lovers (1958) and then to the frenetic zaniness of Zazie dans le métro (1960). Next came A Very Private Affair, in 1962, a caustic film à clef about and with Brigitte Bardot, which was followed immediately by the melancholic, Fitzgerald-like The Fire Within (1963).”

Malle welcomed the occasional flop. Rejection offered an opportunity for a reset, and in 1968, Malle left France for India, where he shot two documentaries. He returned to Paris just in time for May ’68; he was the Cannes jury member who announced that that year’s festival was shutting down early, and within a few weeks, he joined François Truffaut and other directors in the founding of the Société des Réalisateurs de Films, which launched the Directors’ Fortnight the following year.

A few years later, it was off to the U.S., where he made the films screening in the Metrograph series, met Candice Bergen, and married her in 1980. “I married America a little bit, too,” he says in one of the expertly selected and placed archival clips in Duguet’s portrait. In 1995, Malle passed away far too young; he was sixty-three.

At Air Mail, writer (The Price of Illusion), actor (Julie & Julia), and former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck writes appreciatively about the documentary and its subject, whom she considered a friend. “In later interviews,” she writes, “he’s loquacious, assured, and candid, his dark eyes sincere, trusting, confessional, delighted, sometimes sheepish, fully engaged with the camera and the person behind it.”

Tonight’s screening will be followed by a Q&A with Duguet and an introduction to Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Malle’s final film, from one of his daughters, Chloe Malle. Renowned stage director André Gregory and his cast, including Wallace Shawn as Vanya, had been rehearsing David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s play for four years before Gregory asked Malle to bring in the cameras. “Malle was the ideal director for the project, which strips down Chekhov’s late-nineteenth-century story about Russian intellectuals in the provinces and reimagines it as a text for Stanislavski-trained American actors,” wrote Steven Vineberg in 2012.

On Sunday, Duguet will introduce two documentaries. God’s Country (1985) is an exploration of the farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota, which in 1979 had a population of around five thousand. Malle revisited the town five years later and discovered that Reaganomics was taking its toll. “Malle burrows beneath the fairs and bingo nights to get past the stereotypes of the narrow Midwesterner,” wrote Michael Koresky in 2007, “and, in interviewing a wide array of locals, discovers some hidden cultural vibrancy (there’s even a progressive theater group, staging a play titled Much Ado About Corn) and openness of thought, as well as the lingering pain and divisiveness of Vietnam’s legacy, illustrated both by disillusioned war veterans and parents of former protestors.”

For . . . And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986), Malle interviewed recent immigrants to the U.S., including, as Koresky wrote, “Cambodian refugees arriving at JFK airport unable to speak English, a Pakistani schoolteacher-turned–Elizabeth Arden salesperson, an Ethiopian cabdriver, a Costa Rican NASA astronaut, a Vietnamese family practitioner living and working in Nebraska, an El Salvadoran family seeking political asylum, and West Indian poet Derek Walcott, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. What he discovered, despite all the tensions in the country over border control and immigration restrictions, was an inspiring optimism and sense of pride at being new Americans.”

Atlantic City (1980), screening on Sunday and June 14, “caught the town on an upswing, thanks to the then-recent legalization of gambling and construction of casinos on the boardwalk,” wrote Sean Burns a few years ago for Crooked Marquee. “None of this new business sits well with Lou Pascal, an old-school numbers runner and relic from the mob’s 1940s heyday, touchingly played by Burt Lancaster in one of his great ‘leopard in winter’ performances.”

Susan Sarandon costars as Sara, “an oyster house waitress from Saskatchewan who dreams of being a blackjack dealer in Monaco,” wrote Burns. “With his usual wry reserve, Malle makes a study of the crumbling old tourist traps against the antiseptic new corporate emporiums, the margins bustling with colorful characters like Michel Piccoli’s blustery cardsharp and the director’s future My Dinner with André star playing a mispronunciation-prone waiter, billed as ‘Wally’ Shawn.”

And speaking of My Dinner with André (1981), this “deceptively simple two-hander,” as Amy Taubin called it in 2015, screens on June 12. Shawn and André Gregory play fictionalized versions of themselves, once-close friends meeting up again after the years André spent wandering the earth seeking enlightenment while Wally stayed planted in New York with both feet on the ground. Malle’s “enthusiasm for the project might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience,” writes Taubin. “That is to say, it was a perfect fit for a seriously eclectic career. As much as Steven Soderbergh today, Malle seemed determined to try something new with every film.”

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Tribeca 2026: “AI Is Here”

David Hudson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:13:00 +0000

Ash Koosha’s Dreams of Violets (2026)

In the run-up to today’s opening of the twenty-fifth Tribeca Festival, the New York Times’ Sarah Bahr has spoken with Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal—who cofounded the event in the immediate wake of 9/11 to help revive the Lower Manhattan neighborhood—and Rebecca Glashow, the new CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, which owns and operates the festival. Bahr asks all three what they’re most looking forward to in this year’s edition, and De Niro’s answer is the Q&A he’ll be taking part in alongside Martin Scorsese and Jodie Foster prior to Friday’s fiftieth-anniversary screening of Taxi Driver.

A few years ago, we posted a clip from the audio commentary that Scorsese and Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader recorded for our 1990 release of the film on laserdisc. De Niro, of course, stars as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam War veteran coming undone as he drives through the streets of New York at night. Schrader says he wrote the screenplay “essentially for myself—as therapy.” And he was surprised to discover that so many people had “plugged into my own neurosis, bordering on psychosis.” Taxi Driver was “very much a serendipity,” he adds, noting that he, Scorsese, and De Niro had come together at “a certain point” in their lives, “all needing to say the same thing.”

In a way, the three men have synched up again. Schrader has recently been so AI-curious that he “procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment.” But that hasn’t stopped him from predicting that the day will soon come when “us carbon-based fools spend our money empathizing and caring about silicon-based creations.” Beyond AI-generated actors, he can see a future when AI writes a screenplay that measures up to his own work.

Schrader has already prompted ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a Schrader-like script idea, and it gave him The Collection Agency, the story of a lapsed Catholic who meets a girl harboring an old secret. “I could send it out,” he told an audience at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event last month. “I know what response I would get: This is second-rate Schrader . . . but it’s going to be first-rate Schrader soon enough.”

As a kid, long before he picked up a camera, Scorsese famously drew up a set of storyboards for a historical epic set in ancient Rome. By hand, of course. “For seventy years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” says Scorsese in a statement released with yesterday’s endorsement of Flux, a text-to-image model created by the AI startup Black Forest Labs.

In an accompanying video, Scorsese describes a scene set in an “almost medieval” town in the Caucasus, and lo, Flux conjures an establishing shot. “I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences,” says Scorsese, praising the “cinematic intelligence” that he believes AI might offer. “Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”

As for De Niro, it’s difficult to imagine that he gets too deep into the weeds of programming Tribeca’s lineups, but as a cofounder, he is in a sense a cohost for the premiere of Dreams of Violets, the first AI-generated feature to screen as part of a major festival’s official selection. Directed by Ash Koosha, the film centers on a group of strangers who meet in an alleyway during the protests in Tehran against the Islamist regime in January. Those protests spread across hundreds of cities throughout Iran and led to a government crackdown and the deaths of an estimated seven thousand people.

“I would say eighty percent of [Dreams of Violets] is a recreation of events that actually happened,” Koosha tells Cath Clarke in the Guardian. Before Iranian authorities cut off access to the internet, “we saw things that were just horrifying. It was a bloodbath.” Koosha, a cofounder of the AI company Claigrid and the studio Foundation 0, decided that it was “time to use technology to keep something alive.” In less than three months, he’d completed Dreams of Violets. “If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions,” he says. “I spent under $2,000.”

“I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions,” says Koosha in a statement. “I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film. My answer is that the alternative—silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome—is worse. The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”

“AI is here,” Rebecca Glashow tells Sarah Bahr. “It’s part of our everyday lives, and so it’s inevitable that it’ll impact how people tell stories.”

A Few Highlights

Tribeca 2026 will open this evening with Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World), the latest celebration of Black music titans from Questlove (Summer of Soul, Sly Loves!). The screening will be followed by a live performance from EW&F and The Roots. Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, from director One9 (Nas: Time Is Illmatic), will close out this year’s edition on June 13.

This year’s Tribeca package in the New York Times includes Nicolas Rapold’s profile of André Holland, who stars in two films premiering at the festival, Alex Vlack’s The Revisionist and Sheldon Candis’s They Fight. In The Revisionist, Holland plays “a struggling writer who seizes the chance to interview a friend’s father, a legendary author (Dustin Hoffman), to the friend’s consternation,” and in They Fight, he’s “a youth boxing coach in Washington, D.C., pulling himself together after a stint in prison.”

Shivani Vora interviews Edward Burns, “the festival’s most frequent returning filmmaker.” Burns’s latest feature, Finnegan’s Foursome, is a comedy about two brothers who take their families to Ireland to take part in a golf tournament in honor of their late father. Erik Piepenburg talks with Jeffrey Schwarz, whose documentary Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders takes us back to the summer of 1979, when New York’s gay community did all they could to disrupt the making of William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980).

Natalia Winkelman opens her overview of Tribeca highlights with Sophia Takal’s Act One, starring “the captivating Ella Beatty, the daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty,” as Hannah, a lonely and aspiring actor who falls under the magnetic spell of acting instructor Melanie (Ari Graynor). Melanie says that she and Hannah share a calling to become “change agents” whose charge is to “show people the path to living their truth.”

“Takal wants Melanie to sound ridiculous, a spout of highfalutin creative babble,” writes Winkelman. “But the character’s rhetoric reminded me a little of the Tribeca Festival itself. For years now, the event has lived in buzzword land. Premieres occur alongside summits, performances, and showcases led by ‘storytellers’ and ‘creators.’ Some attendees may skip movies for live podcast recordings or video game demos. The festival has long been known for its kitchen-sink mélange of high and low, mixed with lots and lots of mushy middle.” And now, “securely in early adulthood, Tribeca has become its own known quantity: maximalist and scattershot, but worth moviegoers’ attention.”

For Cultured, Elissa Suh gets eight recommendations from Tribeca Director Cara Cusumano. “For something that feels slightly out of joint with reality—or, more simply, ‘weird as hell,’ as Cusumano puts it—try Ponderosa, which moves through its uneasy world with a logic all its own,” writes Suh. “Alexis Bledel, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Bill Camp star in a film that reportedly went through the festival programming team at unusual speed—the kind of work that demands immediate discussion afterward. Directed by Rob Rice and shot by rising indie cinematographer Barton Cortright (who also shot another festival entry, Lucy Schulman), it’s daring, disorienting, and best approached as cold as possible.”

At Vulture, Mike Albo profiles the subject of Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam’s Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story. From 1977 until 1998, Byrd, “perpetually clad in a spiderweb crochet bikini,” hosted strippers, porn stars, and local celebrities such as Sandra Bernhard and Michael Musto on her Manhattan Cable Network late-night show. “While AIDS was all but ignored on mainstream television,” writes Albo, “Byrd’s good-natured reminders about safe sex reached thousands across the boroughs struggling with fear and isolation. If there is a media figure she most resembles, it’s Fred Rogers, who also had an uncanny ability to send good energy through the screen and soothe viewers in the (very different) neighborhood. ‘I didn’t even show sex,’ Byrd says. ‘I wanted to turn you on and tuck you in to have good dreams.’”

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Jean-Pierre Gorin in New York

David Hudson — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:14:00 +0000

Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972)

There are two sets of program notes for Why? Because . . . with Jean-Pierre Gorin, the L’Alliance New York series opening this evening and running through June 11. The first set comes from programmer Jake Perlin, working here with Yuka Murakami. Perlin introduces Gorin as “a filmmaker, film theorist, and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego” and the cofounder with Jean-Luc Godard of the “revolutionary filmmaking collective” Dziga Vertov Group. The impact of DVG is remarkable, considering that it was only active for a few years in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Perlin notes that Gorin “offered political and theoretical guidance that ignited what he referred to as ‘the revolutionary potential in aesthetics that Jean-Luc brought to his previous films.’”

In the mid-1970s, prompted at least in part by an invitation from critic and artist Manny Farber to teach at UCSD, Gorin left France for the U.S., where he made three films that came to be known as the “Southern California trilogy.” Gorin will be at the Roxy Cinema tomorrow to talk about two of them, Routine Pleasures (1986) and My Crasy Life (1992), and on Saturday afternoon, he’ll be at the e-flux Screening Room to discuss Poto and Cabengo (1980) with Murakami and Lukas Brasiskis. Shot by Les Blank, the unclassifiable Poto and Cabengo is something like an essay film that takes as its starting point twins Grace and Virginia Kennedy, who were believed to have created their own private form of communication.

“At first glance,” wrote Kent Jones in 2012, “we sophisticates may feel like we have the Kennedy household, Routine Pleasures’ Pacific Beach & Western railway crew, and My Crasy Life’s West Side S.O.S., Sons of Samoa, 32nd Street gangbangers all figured out. We are disabused of such notions almost instantaneously. Every rhetorical move is either jarred or knocked out of place by a countermove, and we are left with a cinematic organism in which nothing is frozen and everything is in ceaseless motion. I honestly can’t think of another movie that keeps tunneling through its own foundation as relentlessly as these three do, each stopping just short of a complete cave-in.”

These are “rude and lovably inelegant movies,” added Jones, “resisting any drift into sophistication or severity, and resembling nothing so much as the earliest sound productions of Walsh or Wellman as reimagined by a political firebrand who has just escaped from the prison house of his own theories.”

Jones and Gorin will be at L’Alliance this evening to discuss Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935), a film that, as Ginette Vincendeau wrote a few years ago, signaled “a move on Renoir’s part toward a socially committed cinema and is justifiably recognized as anticipating Italian neorealism.” Toni is the first film Gorin has selected for the L’Alliance series, and it’s here that the second set of notes comes in—and gives the series its title. “Toni, why?,” asks Gorin rhetorically. “Because one who doesn’t think about the Thirties these days is a fool.” But also because, “as Sei Shonagon and Chris Marker would say: ‘There is not a shot in this film that doesn’t quicken the heart.’”

Gorin’s notes follow this pattern right on through the program. “Lumière d’été, why?” Because of “the thread that runs from Toni, Renoir, 1935 to Lumière d’été, [Jean] Grémillon, 1943. Eight years that go from the collective hopes of the Popular Front to the bloody senility of Vichy and its complicity with Nazism.”

Writing about Lumière d’été in 2012, Michael Koresky found “nothing benign about its portrayal of bitter class warfare in the guise of an overpopulated romance. In fact, the film it most resembles is The Rules of the Game, Renoir’s 1939 poetic realist class satire, which was summarily banned by the Nazis when they took power. Lumière d’été—which itself bears traces of poetic realism in its moody fatalism and sympathy with the lower classes—was destined for the same fate; the censors read it as an attack on the establishment, as well as too cynical a view of human nature to show to an already disturbed populace under occupation.”

On Friday, Gorin and David Fresko, a writer who teaches at Rutgers University, will discuss Vladimir and Rosa (1971), featuring Godard and Gorin as the title characters as well as Yves Afonso and Juliet Berto. Why? “Because the films of the Dziga Vertov Group were tagged as Sunday school Maoism and it is time to see them for what they truly were: DIY garage punk experiments.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has described Vladimir and Rosa as “a Brechtian farce of the trial of the Chicago Seven. What emerges is a probing psychological analysis of the modern radical as well as an incipient effort to speak in a new voice in another court: Godard and Gorin themselves, raising a racket on a tennis court with the help—or, rather, the decisive hindrance—of a low-tech feedback loop.”

Vladimir and Rosa was funded by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, and he brought Godard and Gorin to the U.S., where they toured with their films and—somewhat reluctantly at first—talked about what they were up to with Michael Goodwin, Tom Luddy, and Naomi Wise in what turned out to be a lengthy and substantive interview that ran in a 1971 issue of Take One. Ralph Thanhauser’s forty-minute documentary Godard in America (1970) was shot during this tour, and it will screen after Vladimir. Gorin: “I’ll pay you not to watch this film.”

Gorin has much more to say about Yves Allégret’s Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949), which screens on Tuesday. This is “a film on the cusp, both anchored to the past and announcing the future,” he writes. Shot by Henri Alekan, Such a Pretty Little Beach stars Gérard Philipe as a man who checks into a hotel in a seaside town, and while several of the other characters are played with what Gorin calls “the declamatory style of the Thirties,” this man is “another beast altogether. Walled in silence is a figure in a landscape swept by the wind and pelted by the rain. It is as if the existentialism of Sartre and Pavese was finally reaching the screen. Gérard Philipe and his preternatural wounded beauty open a door through which generations of actors will pass.”

Allégret, “nearly invisible from contemporary discussion and almost never revived in theaters,” notes Jake Perlin, “contributes a late era twist on French realism, which will be a significant discovery for many.”

The series will wrap with Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972). “Because of the names Jane Fonda and Yves Montand the film was released in ‘normal theaters,’” writes Gorin. “After years tinkering in the garage, we were out in the open.” Fonda’s Suzanne is an American reporter who arrives at a sausage factory with her husband, Montand’s Jacques, who was once a renowned nouvelle vague filmmaker but now directs commercials. Moments after their arrival, the workers go on strike and hold their boss, Suzanne, and Jacques captive for a couple of days.

“Tout va bien insists on class struggle throughout but is mainly about radicalizing its stars,” wrote J. Hoberman in 2005. “Their role in the factory is to look and learn. Indeed, Godard and Gorin upped the class-resentment ante by having the striking workers played not by real workers but by unemployed actors.”

The film was a commercial and critical flop and was “tepidly received” when it premiered in the U.S. at the New York Film Festival, notes Hoberman: “I vividly recall my own youthful disappointment that Tout va bien was not Weekend. (Of course, as Tout va bien makes clear, 1972 was not 1968) . . . It is, in any case, a far better movie than it seemed, at least to this former and then skeptical hippie, back in the day.”

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Bleak Week, Year Five

David Hudson — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:49:00 +0000

Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001)

Isabelle Huppert will be in Los Angeles this evening for a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and she’ll be taking part in a Q&A moderated by the New Yorker’s Justin Chang. Tomorrow, Sophy Romvari (Blue Heron) will have questions for Huppert about Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978) and La cérémonie (1995), and the French megastar will discuss Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) on Wednesday, Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003) on Thursday, and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) on Friday.

In The Piano Teacher, Huppert plays Erika, a repressed professor whose masochistic urges complicate, let’s say, her relationship with a student (Benoît Magimel) who has become infatuated with her. “The film is one of the most compelling accounts I know of a life undone by desire, and of the labyrinth one can be led into by mistaking one’s desire, by having been profoundly wrong about oneself and what one wants,” writes novelist and critic Garth Greenwell. “It’s a brutal film, but also an intimate and delicate one.”

Screening at the Egyptian Theatre, The Piano Teacher is one of three films opening this year’s Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the American Cinematheque festival that, in just five years, has become an annual early-summer phenomenon, spreading to nearly one hundred theaters in seventy-three cities around the world. “Turning sadness, depression, and defeat into group activities to be enjoyed together has been an ingenious masterstroke of programming,” notes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

“This is the easiest year we’ve ever programmed,” Cinematheque director of programming Chris LeMaire tells Chris Cassingham at Filmmaker. “Because once you have [Isabelle Huppert], everyone’s saying ‘yes.’ If we can have someone that big, then we can ask audiences to take a chance on some of the rarer things in the lineup. If it’s in a festival with Isabelle Huppert and Ari Aster, it must be interesting.” Tickets to the Bleak Week Aster retrospective, by the way, sold out “in just a few minutes.”

There are two other events opening Bleak Week in LA. The first is the world premiere of a new restoration of Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001); cinematographer Roger Deakins and his collaborator and wife, James Ellis Deakins, will be on hand for the Q&A at the Aero Theatre. The second is Cinematic Void’s presentation of Dead Presidents (1995) with Allen Hughes—who codirected with his twin brother Albert—taking questions at the Los Feliz Theatre.

The guest list for the LA edition of Bleak Week 2026 is pretty impressive. Al Pacino will be there for tomorrow’s screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), and then there’s Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, 2004), Theresa Russell (Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, 1980), Werner Herzog (Heart of Glass, 1976), Mick Jackson (Threads, 1984), Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, 2010), Louise Weard and Vera Drew (Castration Movie Chapter III, 2026), and Richard Kelly (Southland Tales, 2006). And like Huppert and Aster, Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country) will be in town throughout his retrospective.

In St. Louis Magazine, Max Havey notes that the Bleak Week program at the Hi-Pointe Theatre “features boundary-pushing arthouse classics (Persona, The Devil’s Backbone), European films soaked in existential angst (The Vanishing), and American blockbusters that confront the collapse of the American Dream (Unforgiven, No Country For Old Men, The Mist).” Director of programming Brett Smith: “Some of these films are difficult and very challenging, but I think they are incredibly meaningful experiences. They put you back in touch with your humanity in ways that other films can’t.”

“What’s extremely important to us,” LeMaire tells Cunningham, “is that we don’t impose a lineup. We don’t even say it has to be seven days. What is a ‘week’ to you? What would that look like in your programming?” Talking to Columbus Underground’s Hope Madden, David Filipi, Director of Film/Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, says that he and his team “wanted to show some films that seemed to be real standards of the Bleak Week idea,” such as Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). “The most interesting part of coming up with the films is coming at the theme of the series in so many different ways.” The Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society (1993) is “such a film about hopelessness and not having options.”

“In honor of the world’s current descent into madness and self-destruction, I felt it was fitting to embrace the despairing theme of combat in our selection of films,” says Glenn Heath Jr., the artistic director at San Diego’s Digital Gym Cinema. “Here you will find literal warfare, from the colorless terrain of the Volga (The Red and the White) to the sewers of Warsaw (Kanal) and the jungles of the Philippines (Fires on the Plain), and the psychological kind on the open plains of the American West (Meek’s Cutoff) and the dark canals of Venice (Don’t Look Now).”

At IndieWire, Jim Hemphill previews this year’s Bleak Week in New York, which runs at the Paris Theater from Friday through June 11. Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts have selected and will introduce Lonely Are the Brave (1962), written by Dalton Trumbo, directed by David Miller, and starring Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, and Walter Matthau. Azazel Jacobs will introduce an archival 35 mm print of Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), and Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) will introduce Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

Among those taking part in Q&As will be Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge, 1996), Michael Almereyda (Nadja, 1994), Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham (Miracle Mile, 1988), and composer Carter Burwell (The Man Who Wasn’t There). If Bleak Week were to have a patron saint, it would be the late Béla Tarr, and a good number of this year’s programs throughout the Americas and across the Atlantic feature at least one of his films. In New York, it’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

The “magnificently miserable lineup” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, “comes to a thunderous conclusion” with Tarr’s 439-minute Sátántangó (1994), notes Sean Burns at WBUR. “From the opening eight-minute sequence of cows milling around an empty village, the movie slows down your metabolism and bends your perception of time, turning grim monotony into an epiphany. You’ll never have another experience like this. Superfan Susan Sontag said she would be glad to see Sátántangó every year for the rest of her life. Indeed, there’s something ceremonial about these Bleak Week screenings that feels necessary and even fortifying now that the world around us is such a precipitous shambles.”

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Slipping Free of the World

David Hudson — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:29:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Aleksandr Kaidanovsky in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

Our Criterion Mobile Closet has arrived in Portland, Oregon! We’ll be in town all weekend, and in partnership with PAM CUT, we’ve lined up a Saturday afternoon screening of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986). Portlandia creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will join us on Sunday evening for a live recording of our Criterion Channel series Adventures in Moviegoing.

In Los Angeles, a screening of the late Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) at the Aero Theatre will serve as a prelude to the fifth edition of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the American Cinematheque festival running through June 7. We’ll take a look at the lineup next week, and wherever you are, it’s likely that some of these bleak movies are heading to a theater near you within a few days. Bleak Week expands this year to seventy-three cities across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and the UK.

In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan writes about nine highlights of this year’s UCLA Festival of Preservation, which opens today and runs through Sunday. The festival “showcases the widest variety of motion pictures in impeccable condition,” notes Turan. “This includes not only Hollywood and foreign-language features but newsreels, shorts, animation, documentary, and experimental work as well as television programming. Admission is free, no reservations necessary, so be bold in your choices.”

Also in the LAT, Mary McNamara previews Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, the exhibition opening at the Academy Museum on Sunday and on view through February 28. In New York, Film Forum’s thirteen-film series Marilyn 100 is on from today through June 11.

Philip Hartman’s No Picnic (1986) has been held over at Film Forum through Thursday. “Watching it now evokes a certain nostalgia for jukeboxes, cigarette machines, the St. Mark’s Cinema, the Atlas Barber School, and Bleecker Bob’s Records,” writes David Schwartz at Screen Slate. The cinematographer on No Picnic was Peter Hutton, and on Saturday afternoon, the Roxy Cinema will present a series of New York Portraits that Hutton shot on 16 mm from 1972 to 1990.

NYC has a lot to offer this weekend. A series of Urban Odysseys is on from today through Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives spotlights one of the late great innovators of experimental theater with Robert Wilson on Screen (through Friday), and the Museum of the Moving Image presents By the People, For the People: Real American Tales, a sesquicentennial series running through July 7. On a somewhat related note, Debra Granik is in Berlin for the opening weekend of the Arsenal series On Life in America: The Films of Debra Granik, running through June 12.

This week’s highlights:

With Cannes wrapped, the New Yorker’s Justin Chang has ranked all twenty-two films in the competition, Pietro Bianchi has posted his two-part dispatch to e-flux, and, in a delightful piece for Notebook, Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal revisits two remarkable Cannes Classics screenings: The Fast and the Furious, which we’ve touched on more than enough here already, and the Pelechian Project, a program of five short films by “the Armenian master” Artavazd Pelechian, all of which—plus one more, Mountain Patrol (1964)—will screen next month at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Called on to introduce his work, Pelechian spoke “in the manner of a man who has always been more interested in images than in words,” writes Segura Bernal, “but who can, when required, construct a sentence that illuminates a decade of thinking.” The power of the films themselves “is not diminished by the small screen. If anything, the intimacy of the [Salle] Buñuel amplified it, the way a small room can sometimes make a sound larger than any concert hall, and with this private proximity allow the audience to lose themselves in the ineffable distance between two frames.”

Pelechian is eighty-eight, and Pere Portabella, a Catalan filmmaker and former senator who took part in the writing of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, is ninety-nine. Looking back on April’s comprehensive retrospective at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI), Victor Guimarães writes in Documentary Magazine that Portabella’s “oeuvre might suggest a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure. On the one hand, he is the modernist auteur of nonlinear narratives such as Nocturno 29 (1968) and Pont de Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989). On the other hand, he’s the man who dared to capture an underground gathering of former political prisoners in El Sopar (1974). This seemingly riven personality—between uncompromising artistry and the commitments of a leftist intellectual—coexists with further contradictions . . . There is no doubt that Portabella is a committed socialist; yet, as an avant-garde artist, he is also a ferocious critic of everything that moves.”

Fitting “five ghost stories from four directors into a framework that gathers its own supernatural momentum,” Dead of Night (1945) is “the most imaginative British horror film of the postwar era,” writes Malcolm Gaskill in the London Review of Books. “The overall effect of Dead of Night is spectral disorientation, bending the familiar out of shape and reversing the reassuring thrust of time’s arrow. It’s oddly unsettling that the war, which must have loomed large in the characters’ recent lives, is never mentioned or even alluded to,” and that absence “only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic. There’s nothing more horrific than the violent removal of identity, the fate of the characters thus representing the unease of a nation peering unsteadily at the future.” Gaskill wraps with an astonishing true story that begins when a mathematician, an astronomer, and an astrophysicist walk into a screening of Dead of Night.

Based on the 1970 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who would later adapt their Roadside Picnic (1972) as Stalker (1979) for Andrei Tarkovsky, Grigori Kromanov’s Estonian sci-fi whatsit Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979) screens this evening, tomorrow, and on June 5 as part of Metrograph’s Hotel Europa series. “For two thirds of its runtime, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel operates, quite entertainingly, as a police procedural and a locked-room mystery,” writes Nick Pinkerton in Metrograph’s Journal. “There are anonymous poison pen notes, red herring clues, unaccounted for movements, contradictory testimonials, an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night, a baffling piece of futuristic technology in a dead man’s briefcase . . . and then, shortly after a scene straight out of a Hercule Poirot mystery—[Inspector] Glebsky gathering the dramatis personae around the dining room table with the intention of unmasking the killer—Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel becomes something entirely, for lack of a better word, alien. Things are not what they seem.”

As it happens, the latest stop on Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias’s climb at the Reveal from #100 to #1 as they talk their way through Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll is Stalker. “As to where Stalker fits into the tradition of thoughtful 1970s science fiction,” writes Phipps, “it’s tempting to just see Tarkovsky as sui generis, but he wasn’t alone in seeing the philosophical potential in science fiction. The beginning of the decade is filled with examples of pessimistic films that took the era’s headlines to their darker conclusions, but I think Stalker more closely resembles something like René Laloux’s trippy, animated feature Fantastic Planet, Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, or Agnès Varda’s Les créatures, all films that are less interested in the ‘science’ part of ‘science fiction’ than the places their films could go after slipping free of the world we know.”

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