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José and Adam had much to report on from their hometown fest. They kicked things off with a discussion of some of the bigger movies on offer, including Dune, Spencer, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and Terence Davies’s Benediction, before diving into films like Silent Land, Sundown, Bergman Island, and more. Read Ela Bittencourt on TIFF’s Wavelengths section here. Don’t miss José’s dispatch from TIFF in this week’s Film Comment Letter....

For our third podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by local critics Adam Nayman (The Ringer, Cinema Scope, and elsewhere) and Saffron Maeve (Cinema Scope and elsewhere). They kick things if with a focus on Canadian films, including Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, Chloé Robichaud’s Days of Happiness, and Michael Snow’s Standard Time, before expanding their scope to encompass Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Pedro Almódovar’s Strange Way of Life, and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast....

Score Pornographer, poet of the erotic, softcore tease: will the real Radley Metzger please stand up? The truth is he’s all of the above, a filmmaker attuned to the prevailing winds regarding sexually oriented movies and dedicated to staying on the leading edge of the curve. His reputation has shifted accordingly, and in an era of sexually explicit films like Catherine Breillat’s Romance, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus—movies that polarized critics and moviegoers but clearly have little in common with the XXX porno flicks that once kept run-down theaters in dodgy neighborhoods in business—Metzger’s movies are often damned with faint and snarky praise for their pretty, retro naughtiness....

Riotsville, USA (Sierra Pettengill, 2022) There’s a way in which the True/False Film Festival is Columbia, Missouri at its very best. I moved back to the town in 2021, living here for the first time since leaving as a middle schooler. I’d describe Columbia as comfortable and monotonous: it isn’t as alienating as Maryville, the much smaller Missouri town I moved away to, but it isn’t especially welcoming in the way that college towns in conservative states can be, with their anomalous oases of progressive politics and diasporic communities....

Fueling the enthusiasm and supplying the media pipelines (welcome Oprah, thank you HBO, as ever PBS), Sundance rolled out a new section, Documentary Premieres. Add these to the worldwide, U.S., indigenous, and short docs, and it all made for a hefty slate. I was a Sundance virgin and enthusiastically chased after the nonfiction entries and yet still missed the crowd-pleasers and award-winners Senna, Knuckle, Buck, How to Die in Oregon, and Being Elmo....

Gone with the Wind Two brothel madams (or as close as Hollywood dared get to them), one a lurid gash of pornographic pink throbbing against William Cameron Menzies’ mourning-black backdrop of charred Atlanta, the other an alabaster insect queen from the depraved Far East, her hair shellacked into preposterous licorice waves: these are the defining extremes of Ona Munson’s on-screen career. Her mismatched pair of thoroughly soiled doves—Belle Watling in the 1939 Technicolor Gone with the Wind and Mother Gin Sling in the black-and-white inferno of Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (41)—are indelible classic variations on the scarlet woman....

PAUL FILERI: Roughly how many people have signed up as members in the social network?EFE CAKAREL: We have 40,000 members on The Auteurs and 30,000 monthly active users of Movie Theater, our Facebook application. How many films are now available for viewing by video stream? How many of these are unavailable elsewhere on DVD/video? Evidently, some are available in certain territories but not in others at this point.We are adding new films every day....

Two-Zone Transfer (Ulysses Jenkins, 1979) The quicksilver works of multidisciplinary video and performance artist Ulysses Jenkins indict the escapist and stultifying effects of mainstream mass media while provoking perceptual dislocations to dispel its smokescreens. Deployed across multiple mediums, and situated between the ephemerality of live performance and the endurance of digital art, Jenkins’s prolific oeuvre mounts a sharp analysis of the collusion of media technologies, dominant representational norms, and anti-Blackness....

Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2021). Stills: © 2021 Culture Entertainment, Bitters End, Nekojarashi, Quaras, NIPPON SHUPPAN HANBAI, Bungeishunju, L’ESPACE VISION, C&I, The Asahi Shimbun Company 2021 has seen the appearance of two major, challenging new works from Japanese auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. The romantic Demy-esque coincidences that spin the Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy came first, winning the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale. In this suite of Hamaguchi’s “short stories,” he plays daft Fate over a ronde of cool literary types and their enchanting missed connections....

L’Amant double Near the beginning of L’Amant double, the new film from François Ozon, a young woman (Marine Vacth) visits her gynecologist. Without warning, Ozon cuts to an ultra close-up of female genitalia; the explicit image then slowly dissolves into a shot of a single tear falling from a woman’s eye. The shocking imagery generated a round of applause and laughter from the audience during the film’s premiere on Thursday night, and set the tone for what the director calls his “playful” new movie....

Alice Through the Looking Glass is the misbegotten sequel to a blockbuster that became one of the most influential movies of the decade: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (10). Burton commercially rehabilitated a venerable title by glutting it with special effects, inserting a new story to add rooting interest and “heart,” and doing it in live action rather than animation. (Make that semi-live: there were a lot of semi-computerized bodies and faces....

Dash Shaw’s brief, cheeky animated feature, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, is in some ways what it sounds like: The Breakfast Club meets The Poseidon Adventure. But it isn’t lachrymose or message-laden like The Breakfast Club and it embraces and lampoons the excessive silliness of disaster movies. In this film, most of the In Crowd fails to act nobly or achieve redemption. Even a mean girl who teeters on the brink of amiability gets chomped to death by lots of little sharks....

Wedad That the 40th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) could not possibly honor the history of Egyptian cinema in full says more about that legacy’s unsung magnificence than any of the festival’s shortcomings. Under new artistic direction this year, the only A-festival in the Arab world advanced its mandate by inaugurating an industry section and attracting a greater number of international journalists. All this at a time when, according to the Egyptian film critic Joseph Fahim, “not since the heyday of the monarchy (the early days of Egyptian cinema in the 1930s and 1940s) has mainstream cinema [in Egypt] become so detached from reality as it is today....