Nothing proves the vitality of an artistic movement better than the excellence of its supposed second-tier adherents. While lacking the elegant formal conviction of the best Romanian New Wave films, Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose is nevertheless a work of sophisticated and affecting storytelling, persuasively enmeshing the fate of individuals with that of society. Luminita Gheorghiu, the chameleonic character actress who’s become the wearied face of Romanian cinema, plays a meddlesome matriarch whose interfering ways become vital when her grown son (Bogdan Dumitrache) accidentally runs over a teen-age boy....

Japanese art sensation Ushio Shinohara moved to New York in 1969. He came to break into the major leagues. Things didn’t work out. The 19-year-old Noriko fell in love with the 41-year-old Ushio a few years later, and they have struggled along together ever since. Ushio, who at the time of the film was 80, is known as “the boxing painter.” For a long time he drank like he painted—with two-fisted excess (the documentary, which has some great action-painting sequences, also contains some depressing archival footage of Ushio’s drinking)....

Two motifs predominate in Ross McElwee’s 25-plus years of autobiographical filmmaking: the search for identity in the face of handed-down ideas about family, love, and work; and the undertaking of journeys fueled by desire, curiosity, and varying degrees of irony. In his latest film, the 65-year-old director retraces his postcollegiate wanderjahrs in France jobbing for a wedding photographer, in an earnest effort to understand his son Adrian, a headstrong, restless creative type and stunt skier....

Skyping with a cute girl while she removes her shirt can be a turn-on. Doing so while she surgically mutilates herself—not so much (for most people). Both situations occur in “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger,” one of the five segments in V/H/S, “the horror omnibus of the VOD moment.” (Note instant marquee quote.) The wraparound involves four jackasses hired to retrieve a mysterious videocassette from the house of a dead guy, who’s still there, sitting in his favorite chair....

Picking up on a podcast series launched back in Cannes, Film Comment editor Gavin Smith and Film Society’s Scott Foundas sat down for a half hour conversation about the year in cinema and the results of Film Comment’s twelfth annual survey of critics and writers. The poll included more than 120 participants naming their best of 2011. [See Film Comment’s Best Released Films of 2011 and Film Comment’s Best Unreleased Films of 2011] “This as close to a definitive look at the year as anyone is going to get,” Smith proclaimed at the start of the sharp, opinionated conversation with Foundas....

Freedom on My Mind (Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford, 1994) As the United States weathers one of the most bruising, high-stakes primary seasons in its history, what better time than the evening of “Super Tuesday” for TCM to air documentaries that place current fights for justice in crucial historical context? Freedom on My Mind (1994) and You Got to Move (1985) join a suite on “the black experience on film” that also includes vital texts like Madeline Anderson’s short I Am Somebody (1970), Robert Drew’s Crisis (1963), and George T....

Marie: A True Story (Roger Donaldson, 1985) When Sissy Spacek starred in the title role of Roger Donaldson’s Marie: A True Story, in 1985, Roger Ebert shrewdly pegged it as another entry in a new genre about the “young woman with pluck, who struggles against the system and makes a stand for what she believes in.” He listed, as examples, Sally Field in Norma Rae and Places in the Heart, Jessica Lange in Country, and Spacek herself in (among others) Coal Miner’s Daughter and The River....

Secret Ceremony Wedged in with his fruitful collaborations with Harold Pinter—The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971)—Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony (1968) asserts itself by managing to push the claustrophobia of the earlier two films into more uncomfortable spheres of madness. It entertainingly compensates for the lack of dominating and diamond-like Pinter precision with a loose, improvisatory hysteria that straddles a line between horror and camp as it addresses serious issues with a batty, deviant sense of humor....

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Last year, after a long and arduous effort to recover and restore the movie’s materials, a new restoration premiered at the New York Film Festival, and introduced contemporary audiences to what still feels like a cinematic novelty. With a restored Household Saints in theaters now, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish interviewed Savoca and her star, Vincent D’Onofrio, to talk about making the film, how they infused it with their own Italian-American upbringing, and the daring mix of sex and religion that the movie explores....

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Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year’s Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today’s conversation explores the spaces and infrastructures of attention with Levin and Carmine, the director of Kunsthalle St. Gallen and the curator of Art Basel’s Unlimited Section....

For our second podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Adam Nayman (The Ringer, Cinema Scope, and elswhere)and Chloe Lizotte (MUBI Notebook and elsewhere) to talk about festival selections Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Evil Does Not Exist, Dumb Money, and The Boy and the Heron. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2023.

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Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue (Jia Zhangke, 2020) Welsh cultural historian Raymond Williams wrote that “the contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society.” It’s hard to imagine Jia Zhangke disagreeing. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution his father was deemed guilty of belonging to the landlord class and banished to the village where he had been born....