A longtime champion of foreign and art-house cinema, Glover first assumed the role of executive producer with Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (90), a uniquely haunting magical realist story of a black family in South Central Los Angeles, in which he also starred. Glover went on to co-found Louverture Films (named after the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture) with Joslyn Barnes. The production company has since helped produce Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (06), Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s Trouble the Water (08), Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (09), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme D’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (10) and Cemetery of Splendour, Göran Hugo Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (11) and Concerning Violence (14), and Lucrecia Martel’s upcoming Zama....

This may seem a little out of left field, but speaking of true stories: could you tell me a little about the Church of the SubGenius? It’s something I’d never heard of before I researched this film. Really? And did you fall down a rabbit hole? Just a little bit. Church of the SubGenius is like a parody, ironic organization. I think a lot of their adherents are based out of Texas....

Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021) The first film directed by a woman to win a solo Palme d’Or in the history of Cannes, Julia Ducournau’s Titane folds a surprisingly moving, even tender story of redemption into one of the most thrillingly violent body horror dramas to grace screens in some time. The film follows a murderous, amoral, and pregnant mechanophile, Alexia (a Buster Keaton–like Agathe Rousselle), as she goes on the run following a gruesome mass killing....

Block hasn’t had much luck with Hollywood adaptations of his work, the most prominent disappointment being 8 Million Ways to Die (86), a chaotic production which transposed these essentially New York novels to Los Angeles. A Walk Among the Tombstones, from the tenth novel in the series, published in 1992, breaks that streak of bad luck. Written and directed by Scott Frank, and starring Liam Neeson as Scudder, it accurately conveys the books’ grimy sense of place, as well as Scudder’s ever-shifting moral compass....

In Wang’s new film, the members of a family in upstate New York suffer and recuperate in their own ways following the death of the baby. The relationship between the father, John (Trevor St. John), and mother, Ricky (Wendy Moniz), unravels. Their overweight adolescent son (Jeremy Shinder) is bullied at school; their younger daughter (Oona Laurence) skips classes to hang out by the Hudson River alone. Out of the blue, the father’s teenage daughter (Sonya Harum) from his first marriage shows up at their door and befriends a neighbor, Gordie (Mike Faist)....

The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004) A recent study from the American Sociological Review found that Americans believe atheists are the group least likely to share in their “vision of American society”. (Previous studies have confirmed that atheists also rank as the most strongly disliked group in America.) But in the interest of religious freedom—including the freedom to have none at all—Film Comment presents commentary by the inimitable Ken Jacobs in time for Passover and Easter....

The avant-garde, bizarrely singular, artfully photographed Fear and Desire would make for fascinating curio viewing under any circumstances, but any consideration comes freighted with the fact that Stanley Kubrick made it—his first feature. Since in so many ways it is not up to the recognized standards of the director’s better-known work, its flaws and indulgences can strike a viewer as either flagrant or, if he’s feeling apologetic, as precious precursors of Kubrickian feats to come....

Rapado When the so-called new argentine cinema emerged, Martín Rejtman was already there. Several years before the names Lucrecia Martel, Adrián Caetano, Pablo Trapero, or Lisandro Alonso became familiar, Rejtman had already shot his debut feature, Rapado (91). Belatedly released in 1996, Rapado bombed at the box office, but became a cult movie. Thanks to its DVD availability and the attention of cinema studies, it eventually became a crucial Argentine reference point in the discussion about finding new filmmaking strategies....

Otar Iosseliani is starting work on his next film, Chant d’hiver, with the help of France’s advances-on-receipts production fund. Other recipients include Jean-Paul Rappeneau for his project Belles familles; Louis Garrel, whose Les Deux amis will team the writer-director with Vincent Macaigne; and Christophe Honoré … Michael Caine will star in Paolo Sorrentino’s In the Future, a drama about “friendship between two old people” … Abdellatif Kechiche is contemplating another helping of wrenching romantic anguish with a movie version of Héloïse et Abélard … Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are currently shooting an adaptation of Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints, with Ethan Hawke and Hailee Steinfeld, about a young man (played by Hugo star Asa Butterfield) who moves in with his estranged father in Manhattan in 1987 at the height of the East Village punk scene … Jim Jarmusch is rumored to be planning an opera, and hopes to be shooting his next feature this fall … Steven Soderbergh is producing David Gordon Green’s made-for-TV film Red Oaks....

Ken Takakura, who died last November at the age of 83, and Bunta Sugawara, who died two weeks later at the age of 81, were the twin pillars supporting genre filmmaking at Toei studios throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Both made significant films outside the studio as well, but their defining characters were, for the most part, created within film series produced as part of the “program picture” factory at Toei....

Do the Right Thing Joie Lee has these large, owlish eyes, and, in a film, they’re the first thing you notice about her. Then there’s her dense, tightly coiled hair that sprouts from her head like fresh flora so that her long face seems to flow upwards in follicles. It’s a shame that both that face and her voice—which has a fluid rhythm that’s musical, calming, and measured even when it’s expressing displeasure—haven’t been used more in films....

Even if you hadn’t seen the film, you knew what a Stepford Wife was. I remember a woman refusing to go on the pill because she feared doing another stint as a “mindless, busty Stepford Wife.” I remember friends dubbing the exurbs “Stepford World,” briefly deluding themselves that their beloved city was still pre-mall. In 2003, there was the New York Times’s “Stepford Spring” fashion supplement and a Maureen Dowd column headlined “The Stepford Wives: Now Showing at the Botox Salon Near You....

Chasing jazz hoop dreams and fleeing a paternal legacy of failure, drummer Andrew Neyman arrives for freshman year at a prestigious New York music college. His whole character might be defined by a sound that plays over a black screen to open Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash: a few taps on an open snare, the sticks held in a tensile grip, taut Mylar and coiled steel escalating to a steady, sizzling roll....

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) In the introduction to her interview with directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles in our March-April 2020 issue, Ela Bittencourt writes, “In Bacurau, a remote, isolated town is attacked by a small group of armed, drone-assisted outsiders. The sertão, or backcountry, where the action unfolds, has often featured in Brazil’s popular culture and arts as a forbidding, uncharted, and parched territory....

A Streetcar Named Desire You are what you eat, but odds are great that you aren’t what you watch. As individuals each of us is too singular, too complicated, too erratic, and too imperfect to be truly reflected on the screen. For true movie addicts, who devour as many different kinds of films as possible and dig into the past of the medium to have a better understanding of its present, there’s perhaps even less of a chance of seeing oneself onscreen....