Birth director Jonathan Glazer returns with a deeply creepy film that, despite its science-fiction premise, is just as much a horror flick of disassociation. Putting the “alien” in “alienating,” Glazer’s third feature fuses a cryptic stranger-in-a-strange-land narrative, guerrilla shooting approach, and a tightly contained audiovisual scheme that makes for a claustrophobically seamless and unnerving drama of self-awakening. Much of the film is set in the front of a van driven by an extraterrestrial predator in the form of a wigged and English-accented Scarlett Johansson, who picks up hitchhikers in and around Glasgow (almost all played by unwitting nonprofessionals, according to press notes)....

Just as the number of women involved in film production remains below the expectations of a great many observers, the number of female film critics at influential publications continues to decrease. The online quarterly cléo was launched in 2013 out of frustration with this state of affairs, providing a home for criticism that reflects the complex and shifting nature of feminism. Each issue is devoted to a single-word theme: flesh, home, doom, crave, and, most recently, labor....

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982) Across a career spanning nearly half a century, Dutch writer and filmmaker Marleen Gorris has explored with delicate precision the aesthetics of kinship among women, and the ways in which women generate intimacy and collective identity in unexpected places. Trained in drama in the Netherlands and England, Gorris made her debut narrative feature, A Question of Silence, in 1982, with an audacious premise: a psychiatrist investigates three women, all strangers to each other, who are accused of spontaneously joining together to beat a shopkeeper to death....

The Kindergarten Teacher [2018] Nadav Lapid’s acclaimed but low-profile 2014 film The Kindergarten Teacher might not seem an obvious candidate for a remake. But a producer on Lapid’s film, Talia Kleinhendler, knew that the story—about a 5-year-old wunderkind poet whose talent is seen and nurtured by his teacher, until her care for him turns into an obsession—could resonate with more diverse, audiences around the world. All the reviews were glowing, and thrillers are historically successful at the international box office, yet getting people to buy tickets for a “poetry thriller” could be a hard sell....

Kneecap (Rich Peppiatt, 2024). Courtesy of the Sundance Institute. One of the most striking images I saw at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival was a picture posted on Instagram by the Irish rap group Kneecap, the subject of an eponymous film in this year’s NEXT program. The trio and their team showed up with Palestinian flags—the colors in vibrant conversation with the green, white, and orange of the Irish-flag balaclava worn by one of the members—to a daily vigil organized on Main Street by the newly formed coalition Film Workers for Palestine....

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Nina Menkes, 2022) Brainwashed, a new documentary from California Institute of the Arts professor and filmmaker Nina Menkes (Queen of Diamonds) that premiered at Sundance last weekend, aims to make American cinema a more hospitable place for women who conceive, create, and consume mainstream movies. “It is essential that this visual code of oppression be exposed and understood,” Menkes wrote in a well-received Filmmaker Magazine essay in 2017....

Hi, Nellie! It will come as no surprise that the real Glenda Farrell wasn’t like the screen types she was known for—brassy gold-digging chorines, mouthy brothel proprietresses and, most famously, word-spitting, scoop-hoarding newspaperwomen like her Teresa “Torchy” Blane, the popular character who featured in nine Warner Bros. quickie B movies, seven of which starred Farrell. For one thing, no human ever truly resembled the exaggerated Torchy type; if you met someone who actually went around speaking 400 words in 40 seconds (as she does in 1938’s Torchy Gets Her Man), you would react with irritation or horror, and possibly recommend observatory medical quarantining....

For the first edition, NYFF welcomed filmmaker Albert Serra, known for singular and transgressive films like The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté. An avowed fan of Vogel, Serra also wrote the foreword for the French edition of Film as a Subversive Art. Serra’s original lecture was followed by a conversation with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim, and is published here for the first time. Don’t miss our previous podcast, a roundtable discussion on the extraordinary life and work of Amos Vogel, featuring programmers and writers Richard Peña, Tom Waibel, and Edo Choi....

On our latest episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, critics Beatrice Loayza, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Caitlin Quinlan join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to dig into their recent festival viewing, including Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, and Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope. Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition....

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On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times), Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker), and FC contributor Madeline Whittle to discuss mid-festival selections A Different Man, A Real Pain, Sujo, Good One, and Black Box Diaries. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here.

“Isabel Sarli squeezes more sexual frisson into the space between breathing in and breathing out than most of us could spread over a lifetime of ordinary love-making,” wrote Roger Greenspun in The New York Times of one of Argentina’s most celebrated sex symbols, an actress all but unknown to contemporary American film audiences. Born in 1935 in the province of Entre Rios, Sarli was the first actress to appear completely nude in an Argentine film....

The Rays of a Storm (Julio Hernández Cordón, 2023) The same message flashed up before every screening at this year’s FIDMarseille festival, spelled out in letters of shifting colors: “Le FIDMarseille est l’espace de tous les cinémas,” which roughly translates as “FIDMarseille is the home for cinema of all kinds.” Taking place just a few weeks after that other key French festival on the Mediterranean coast, FID has always been a place open to a multitude of forms, not least since it dropped the word “documentary” from its name in 2011....

Roger and Me In documentary, ethics are part of the natural landscape, invoked constantly and from a variety of angles. Not just unavoidable, ethical concerns often factor directly into the action or bubble up as potent subtext. In recent successes such as Capturing the Friedmans and Fahrenheit 9/11, how the footage was obtained, how it was edited and embellished by visual or aural devices, gained a critical weight in excess of any purely aesthetic function....

Gone Girl A big part of the case for David Fincher, at least as I’ve heard it put forward by his more eloquent defenders, is that he’s a throwback—that is to say that, with his unfailing technical luster and easy traverse between genre subjects, he’s a holdover from the days of studio professionalism. Dave Kehr, for example, has compared him to Otto Preminger: “[D]istanced, cool, he’s not making too many judgments for you, he’s amassing data that you can then sift through, very similar camera style, these beautiful long takes....

No matter what happens at tonight’s Palmarès awards ceremony, the film from Cannes 2012 that seems sure to have the greatest resonance as it goes forth into the world is Michael Haneke’s Amour (Love). It is a title that, at first, may seem unusual for a film about the human body’s gradual betrayal of itself, and the effect this has on those who experience it and those who merely bear witness to it....