The Kingdom of Naples Another two-disc assortment of key Seventies Werner Schroeter titles from the always excellent Edition Filmmuseum. The Sicilian family epic The Kingdom of Naples (78), one of Schroeter’s forays into Mediterranean melodrama, demonstrates his allegiance to Italian cinematic masters (Rossellini, Visconti, Pasolini) and adaptability to the demands of straight narrative. The Bomber Pilot (70) is for those who prefer their Schroeter served raw—that is, early-career and ecstatically impoverished....

While Shohei Imamura may not be a forgotten figure in the history of Japanese cinema, his docudrama A Man Vanishes (67) only received its U.S. theatrical release last November, while his other documentaries remain little known. Icarus Films’ collection of his nonfiction work should help to remedy this. The centerpiece is A Man Vanishes, which doesn’t fit neatly into the documentary genre—it’s a precursor to better-known mixtures of reality and fiction like Welles’s F for Fake and Kiarostami’s Close-Up....

It’s not clear how a genuinely faithful adaptation of a Franz Kafka novel might strike viewers accustomed to the reductive cliché of the “Kafka-esque.” Kafka’s work can be at once stark and protean, deeply reliant on the sense of resistance and mystery built up in its prose, and so the makers of K seem to acknowledge the necessity of taking certain liberties: their adaptation of The Castle is set in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia—a place windswept and desolate, indoors and out....

We met in the late ’60s. I was at French Film Office, Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, Mary soon-to-be-Corliss at MoMA and Richard, at, I think, New Times—the four of us on the brink of 40-plus-year marriages whose lifeblood was movies. Corliss was a leading light of the “heroic age of movie criticism,” a second-generation votary (and sometimes critic and mediator) of the passionate and influential and argumentative cinephilia of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael....

Three years in the making, Communion is Zamecka’s first film. She studied anthropology, journalism, and photography in college, and was attending the Dok Pro Program at the Wajda filmmaking school in Warsaw, when, in 2012, she saw a man in a railroad station who she thought would make an interesting subject for a short documentary. Marek Kaczanowski was a single father living with his then 12-year-old daughter, Ola, and 10-year-old son, Nikodem....

Part and parcel of a new movement of Brazilian filmmakers (see Aquarius’ Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neon Bull’s Gabriel Mascaro, and Júlia Murat, director of Pendular) working to reconcile repercussions of their country’s checkered history within diverse sociopolitical milieus, Pretto is distinctly invested in the plight of the working class. As in Pretto’s prior film, Castanha, a documentary doubling as performative fantasy, the director utilizes real people and real historical circumstances to craft a film whose fluid nature and stylistic economy leaves the particulars of its protagonist’s plight an engaging, ever-evolving mystery....

Indonesian director Edwin’s 2008 feature Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which screened as part of MoMA’s Contemporasian series, was an episodic collection of hypervivid, sometimes surreal scenes touching on Chinese-Indonesian identity. Edwin’s dreamlike new feature, Postcards from the Zoo, follows a young woman who lives and works in Jakarta’s Ragunan Zoo, as she befriends a mysterious cowboy-magician and ventures forth into the world. FILM COMMENT spoke with the director while he was in New York for the film’s North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival....

Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan, 2021) In May 1787, a fleet of 11 ships sailed from England to Australia to establish the British Crown’s first settlement on the continent—a penal colony made up of convicts, military men, and free settlers. Among them was William Bradley, an officer of the Royal Navy charged with establishing relations with the land’s Indigenous peoples. In practice, this meant abduction. Bradley participated in the violent capture of Colebee and Bennelong in 1789, two members of the Eora, a people endemic to what is now Port Jackson....

“It’s just interested in you, really,” Jeffrey Peixoto said at one point during our interview about his film Over the Rainbow, a galvanizing world premiere at the latest True/False Film Fest. Peixoto’s mesmerizing movie enters the mindsets of people with direct experience of Scientology, while also bringing in perspectives from a cognitive psychologist, an archival librarian, and, through shots that revitalize the person-on-the-street cutaway, other sentient earthlings. (Brief shout-out here to Franz Anton Mesmer, 18th-century proselytizer for “animal magnetism” and etymological origin of mesmerize....

Born in Romania in 1938, Karmitz emigrated to France with his family in 1948 and soon started finding himself—or, more likely, putting himself—in the right place at the right time. He assistant-directed Agnès Varda’s directorial debut Cléo from 5 to 7 and Jean-Luc Godard’s short La Paresse, began his own career as a director with a short written by Marguerite Duras, filmed an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Play, and was at the heart of the political ferment of May ’68, working in the new leftist press and directing politically committed features....

These kids are no joke: Slaboshpytskiy draws on his own experience as a crime reporter to render this fearsome mafia with brutal realism. But while the film is in many ways relentlessly up close and personal—the sex scenes are fairly explicit, the violence particularly visceral, and there’s a real-time abortion scene, the most hard to watch in quite some time—Slaboshpytskiy’s camera maintains a safe distance. Favoring the long shot and the long take almost exclusively, his carefully layered compositions allow the audience to take in multiple conversations and goings-on at once while firmly keeping us (at least those of us who don’t understand sign language) in our place as “the other....

I look for cinematography that is invisible to the project, that feels like it’s in service to the story but doesn’t feel so stylized that you’re noticing the cinematography itself. It should feel like [the filmmakers] are all speaking the same language. With Fruitvale Station, we wanted it to feel very much like a documentary. We never wanted it to feel like we had a wide shot and a close-up and we were cutting between the two....

A Chinese Ghost Story If your idea of Chinese horror is Tsui Hark’s phantasmal beauties swooping gracefully through blue-lit forests amidst yards of fluttering silk in A Chinese Ghost Story (87), or Li Han-hsiang’s film that inspired Tsui, The Enchanting Shadow (60), prepare for a hot poker in the eye. The 18th-century book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio formed the basis for these and many other swanky productions about ghostly ladies, fox spirits, abandoned villas, and shadowy graveyards where loss, love, and longing are elegantly expressed....

Lady Vengeance Frank Tarzi, the VP of Acquisitions and Business Development for Kino Lorber took a few minutes to talk about what to expect from the company’s fast and furious release schedule. Many of these titles will be appearing on Blu-ray for the first time, including Park Chan-wook’s grim masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which will be available this July or August. It was formerly only available as part of the Vengeance Trilogy box set....

The Imitation Game Few obvious winners emerged from this year’s TIFF crop—there was no 12 Years a Slave or Gravity to rally critics, industry, and audiences. The Audience Award (much coveted as a harbinger of Oscar) went to Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, starring an admirable Benedict Cumberbatch as the British mathematician Alan Turing, the “father of modern computer science.” Turing’s life is a fascinating amalgam of World War II espionage, triumphant code-breaking, and tragically forbidden homosexuality, and Tyldum’s carefully measured film is quite faultless in its rendering, if a little lifeless....

The Soldier’s Lagoon (Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, 2024) Since taking over as director of the Open City Documentary Festival in 2021, María Palacios Cruz has ushered in a series of structural innovations to London’s key nonfiction showcase that, on the evidence of this year’s edition, feel exemplary. Competition strands have been done away with and the restrictive need for premieres jettisoned, while the festival’s move from the fall to the spring also places it in a less frenzied section of the calendar and should bring a deserved increase in attention....