Tyldum, educated at New York’s School of the Visual Arts, spent a decade working in Scandinavian television, making a name for himself through shorts and music videos. He made his feature debut with Buddy (03), a low-budget romantic comedy that connected with critics and audiences alike, earning the Amanda Award (presented at the Norwegian International Film Festival) for best Norwegian film of the year. He followed up with two thrillers adapted from best-selling novels, Fallen Angels (08) and Headhunters (11), expert genre films with refreshing emphases on characterization....

One of the most striking things about the movie is the extent of detail, from your performance down to the set design and sound effects. Could you talk about the research you did to get into the role? It was a role where I knew there would be no possibility of talking much, to explain her. I would have to do a different kind of work, to make it interesting, her being silent, but always being present....

Radu Jude with cast and crew on the set of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024) At the Closing Ceremony of the Locarno Film Festival last year, Radu Jude and I huddled together at the entrance to the red carpet with about two dozen other folks, holding up a banner that read “Woman Life Freedom”—the slogan of the Iranian women’s uprising of 2022. Jude had won the Special Jury Prize earlier that day for his new movie, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World....

In Sofia Bohdanowicz’s first feature Never Eat Alone (2016), actress Deragh Campbell plays Audrey, a young woman who helps her grandmother try and reconnect with an ex-lover. Based partly on Bohdanowicz herself, the Audrey character would reappear in the director’s subsequent short film Veslemøy’s Song (2018), in which Campbell searches the New York Public Library for a rare recording of a song by Kathleen Parlow, a music instructor who taught violin to Bohdanowicz’s grandfather....

“I hope so, man. I like to see things burn. I must admit, I’ve never enjoyed these burning nights. I’ve never worked on a picture with hundreds of extras, muskets, and battle scenes before.” Joe Strummer, ex-leader of the Clash, most incendiary and politically right-on of British punk bands, and burgeoning but reluctant movie star, is propped against a pile of logs in the palace square in Granada, Nicaragua, nipping rum, keeping his own peace, and watching Alex Cox orchestrate a charge of the campesinos for Walker....

Film festivals are full of financing forums where invited directors pitch projects to investors and co-producers, but as far as I’m concerned the best of the bunch is Hong Kong’s HAF (Hong Kong Asia Financing Forum). Why’s it so good? Because it’s been running since 2000, because the project proposals have to be in English, and because they put all the past and present proposals up online, making it an invaluable window onto the filmmaking process....

The Island As the weather gets warm your thoughts naturally turn to… an island vacation! After watching hundreds of Asian movies, I have one word of advice: don’t. According to these movies, the only reason to go on an island getaway is to be murdered by rednecks, eaten by zombies, or drained of blood by vampires. From Thailand to Korea, from Japan to China, there’s one thing Asian movies agree on: islands suck....

So it comes as a surprise to speak to Michael Jai White, one of American action cinema’s biggest talents. He shot his fight scene in Skin Trade (14) with Tony Jaa in one day. “That whole interior piece we might have created in 10 minutes,” he says, talking about a 22-second sequence utilizing one long tracking shot and a few other quick angles. “Everybody just left us alone and we ran in there and practiced that stuff....

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (Preston Sturges, 1949) Audiences returning to the George Eastman Museum’s Nitrate Picture Show, which just wrapped its fifth edition, are by now familiar with what makes a weekend of projected silver nitrate prints so special. They know the history of the celluloid stock—phased out in the late ’40s and ’50s due to safety concerns over its intense flammability—and its rather unparalleled look, a gorgeous sheen and nearly three-dimensional depth of field....

Self-portrait of Joann Hogg in her flat (frame grab from Super 8), 1980, © Joanna Hogg Lucrecia Martel, hard at work on her forthcoming film, Chocobar, recently spoke with MoMA’s Post from location: “Without a doubt, this is the most difficult thing I’ve done so far.” The film will be Martel’s first feature documentary, detailing the life of photographer and activist Javier Chocobar, who was murdered while protesting the rights of his indiginous community in Argentina (Martel told us her plans for the film back in 2018)....

This week, Banksy dropped 100 points on the Consumer Coolness Index. He can afford to. A peerless figure in the world of street art, the pixel-faced, voice-masked but audibly working-class Brit evolved from street-corner tagger to the world-class conceptual artist who stenciled “cut-here” lines across the security wall of Gaza’s West Bank. He also created a small fortune of British pound notes with Princess Di’s face replacing the Queen’s, works that ended up getting passed as actual currency, raising Banksy’s criminal profile from petty vandal to felony forger....

A Camel (Ibrahim Shaddad, 1981) The Sudanese Film Group was born at the fulcrum of two crises. “No art in recent times has been subject to such oppression as the art of cinema in Sudan,” began the SFG’s founding statement, published in April 1989. Composed by a handful of filmmakers who had trained abroad and returned to work with the country’s Ministry of Culture, this manifesto bemoaned the dire lack of funding, propagandistic pressures, and “limited horizon of officialdom” that curtailed the directors’ artistic ambitions; the SFG, they declared, would be a beacon “against armies of darkness....

What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994) Loneliness is difficult to discuss because the experience defies language itself. Acute loneliness is such a terrible thing that people will do anything—anything—to avoid it. Songs are better equipped to express loneliness than speech or the written word. Certain chord changes evoke it (The Beach Boys were masters at this), and lyrics can cut to the heart of the matter. Hank Williams knew loneliness from the inside out: “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky / And as I wonder where you are / I’m so lonesome I could cry....

Why has Film Comment chosen now to once again consider the place of the Internet in film journalism? The short answer is: we got confused. Confused by a number of recent online border skirmishes that threw into relief the dilemmas facing the readers and providers/caretakers of movie-related websites. The question being: who is this for, anyway? If one of the indisputable benefits of the Internet is its spirit of semi-egalitarian, everybody-join-in informality, that same spirit also ups the potential for total chaos: in the time it takes to flick a switch, the floating cyber-party can degenerate into a free-for-all of personality mongering and petty bickering....

Right on cue, the summer yields yet another Woody Allen movie—only this time its not “just another Woody Allen movie.” Leaning heavily on A Streetcar Named Desire and propelled by the sheer force of the central performance by Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine is (almost) free of shtick and full of substance. Like To Rome with Love, the film begins in the first-class cabin of an airplane. Decked out in her wealthy WASP uniform—a white Chanel blazer complete with gold buttons and a string of pearls—Jasmine (Blanchett) can’t stop herself from blathering about the details of her personal life to the hapless woman seated next to her....