I’m intrigued by the fact that you’re comparing Welles and Hitchcock. Would you comment on the way in which those two influenced each other? Yeah, well, you know, it’s a very tantalizing question, because there was almost no communication between the two of them, no social thing. I think they influenced each other much more than either wanted to admit. You might say that Journey Into Fear influenced North by Northwest, perhaps, although North by Northwest was largely a remake of The 39 Steps: Hitchcock had been working in that picaresque form long before Welles got into movies....

The Wind Rises is the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s first film to take place in a recognizable, non-magical world entirely populated by humans. It’s also his first to draw explicit (if loose) inspiration from the life of a historical figure: the brilliant World War II–era aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi. But then both fantasy and reality have long informed Miyazaki’s work: he has always had a sharp eye for the clunky, unbalanced movement of physical objects in space, while his stories owe more to fables and fairy tales than histories or headlines....

This brief look is a few seconds in only a handful of minutes of a performance, better known for Hoffman’s apoplectic “Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut up!”, an early example of the actor’s distinctive mastery of The Outburst, that loud moment when an always volatile character purges stifled bile. In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (07), it’s a tear-streaming “It’s not fucking fair!” hurtled at wife Marisa Tomei. In The Master (12), the outburst arrives suddenly, mid-sentence: “If you already know the answers to your questions, then why ask, pig fuck!...

—Michelangelo Antonioni, My Experience Like his great Italian predecessor, French director Bertrand Bonello is a poet at heart. Constantly exploring the links between cinema and music, between cinema and painting, Bonello’s movies are delicately composed canvases of sensorial and bodily experiences, where images, like musical notes, resonate with one another. Perhaps the formal liberty of Bonello’s mise en scène is echoed by his characters’ continual search for freedom or grace—they are struggling bodies that desire to break away from the confines of consuming relationships, corrupted mentalities, and capitalist institutions....

Robichaud’s previous work, particularly her 2013 debut feature Sarah Prefers to Run, explores the role of choice and experience in articulating identity. Rather than unify her characters in Boundaries with a declarative thesis on women in politics, Robichaud gives them space to independently process their experiences and shape their futures accordingly. Reflecting on her decision to quit high-school cheerleading, Emily admits to Félixe, “I liked the sport, but not everything that went with it”—Boundaries stages the dance of negotiation along with its accompanying aggravations, but then challenges its characters to find their own ways through it, or even out of it....

The Damned (Roberto Minervini, 2024) Roberto Minervini’s The Damned opens with an epigraph that sets us up for a period movie: a few lines of text tell us that in the winter of 1862, during the Civil War, the U.S. Army sent soldiers to patrol the unchartered territories of the western frontier. Yet the footage that follows, capturing a small band of uniformed men in a sparse, snow-covered landscape, betrays a slippery sense of time....

Steven Soderbergh’s pop sensibility is exuberantly displayed in Magic Mike, his most breezy movie since Ocean’s Eleven. Set in a Tampa strip club, where cute guys bare their bums while women of all ages (they’re our surrogates) laugh and scream and stuff dollar bills in the talents’ jock straps, it has the optimism of a 1930s Depression-era musical about a bunch of kids who fix up a barn and put on a show....

Midnight Special traverses backroads (and genres) as a cultish religious congregation figures into the scenario and Alton demonstrates some extraordinary abilities. Last week, FILM COMMENT chatted with Nichols (whose next film, Loving, concerns the interracial couple sentenced to prison in 1958 for marrying) about the ins and outs of the studio process, the meaning of final cut, and the negotiations with narrative that he makes with his viewers. How do you describe the movie without giving anything away?...

Naked Killer Suspenseful synthesizers squeal on the soundtrack as a woman in a poufy orange top, invisible miniskirt, and high-fashion hat clip-clops nervously down empty, blue-lit Hong Kong streets. Someone is stalking her! She barely makes it to the elevator of her chromed-up apartment building before a faceless man wearing armored shoulder pads pushes his way into the lobby. The steadicam trails her into a vast apartment, the killer following right behind....

There are roughly 65 film labs left in the world, of which around 20 are in North America. These ranks, along with the number of film stocks being manufactured, dwindled as digital technologies have saturated the realm of production and studios have moved away from film. When it comes to labs that process 16mm film—a mainstay of experimental film—and small-gauge stocks, only a few commercial options exist, mostly in the United States: Cinelab, in Boston; ColorLab in Maryland; in Kansas; and Fotokem in Burbank....

Night Train to Lisbon The Berlinale’s competition is changing for the better. The shifts toward more focused or edgier choices noted last year were no accident or stroke of world-sales-agent luck. Art-house White Elephants like Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Best Offer (as usual, simply unwatchable) or Yoji Yamada’s post-Fukushima Tokyo Story remake, Tokyo Family (actually quite lively) were safely parked in the “Berlinale Special” sidebar. Just a few years ago, films of their ilk would have clogged the Competition....

There Is No Evil (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2020) The Berlin International Film Festival has announced this year’s award-winners, with Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil taking home the Golden Bear for Best Film. Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always won the Grand Jury Prize (Hittman will be present to discuss the film for one of our upcoming FC talks), with other winners including Hong Sangsoo for Best Director, Undine’s Paula Beer for Best Actress, and Hidden Away’s Elio Germano for Best Actor....

Duet For Cannibals (Susan Sontag, 1969) Though mentioned in passing a few weeks back, Strand Releasing’s monumental 30th Anniversary celebration has finally come to a head. Screening tonight at MoMA, 30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing commemorates the event with short films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lulu Wang, Catherine Breillat, Brady Corbet, and many, many more. We’re happy to kick things off a little early with this look at Alain Gomis’s addition: a two-month travelogue spanning museum corridors and city streets....

Our Nixon (Penny Lane, 2013) So ends the first week of quarantine here in NYC, and in keeping with the work-from-home guidelines, we’ve launched a brand-new podcast series—doing our part to flatten the curve. Releasing new episodes daily, “At Home” sees editors Nicolas Rapold, Clinton Krute, and Devika Girish joined by a range of special guests to discuss how we’re all coping in containment (i.e. what we’ve been watching). For more on how COVID-19 is affecting the film industry, we have another new series, “Reaching Out,” where writer Mark Asch does just that—reaching out to directors, distributors, and other industry workers to see how we might better manage during these unprecedented times....

Saratoga Trunk The scene was set early in my life—before it began, in fact. On Saturday evening, November 23, 1946, while my mother was in labor until early the following morning, my father, like most expectant fathers at the time, was unwelcome at the hospital. So he went to the movies. Subsequent microfilm research revealed what was playing at the Zaring Egyptian Theater in Indianapolis: Sam Wood’s Saratoga Trunk, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman....

Planet of the ApesClick to enlarge Whether it’s Shakespeare, the Bible, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, properties with a built-in audience have been especially attractive to producers almost since audiences first paid to see a film. For nearly as long, comics have provided inspiration (or at least content) for live-action films, at least since 1898, when the Biograph Company produced an adaptation of Rudolph Dirks’s newspaper strip The Katzenjammer Kids....