Dark Passage Delmer Daves is the most forgotten of the American directors championed by French film critics in the Fifties—why? The reasons have little to do with his true stature as a filmmaker. He was unlucky enough to end his career with a string of Warners sudsers that seemed sorely lacking in ambition (although a good deal of them are visually quite remarkable). Some of his masterpieces are westerns, a genre that has now fallen back into disrepute....

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We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Our final episode is with a guest who has a job like no other: it’s Kevin B. Lee, Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Locarno Film Festival and USI....

I walked into a pre-Toronto screening of Donnybrook unaware that Tim Sutton—director/writer of Pavilion (2012), Memphis (2013), and Dark Night (2016)—had written and directed this one too. “Haunting,” “ephemeral,” “lyrical” were adjectives I’d used when praising Sutton’s previous films, although I also remember Dark Night as etched with unspoken dread. Donnybrook, while speaking to the beauty of rural American landscapes as Sutton’s earlier work did, is a pulverizingly violent film....

The Mafia Only Kills in Summer Television host and satirist Pierfrancesco Diliberto, commonly known as Pif, makes his feature writing and directing debut with The Mafia Only Kills in Summer, a warmhearted memoir of childhood in Palermo, Sicily. The protagonist, Arturo (Alex Bisconti as a boy, later Pif himself), believes his conception occurred in tandem with a local mob massacre, ensuring his destiny would entwine with the Cosa Nostra in bizarre and bewildering ways....

The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023) On Friday, August 4, the day Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World premiered at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival, online influencer Andrew Tate—the self-proclaimed “king of toxic masculinity”—was released from house arrest in Bucharest, Romania, pending his trial for rape and human trafficking. That Jude’s film and this news item had simultaneously emerged at the top of the festival’s mental feed struck me as divine coincidence: one of the sprawling movie’s many masterstrokes sees the protagonist, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), ventriloquizing Tate’s visage via a TikTok filter....

The American Friend Met a girl, fell in love, glad as I can be Met a girl, fell in love, glad as I can be But I think all the time, is she true to me? ’Cause there’s nothing in this world to stop me worryin’ ’bout that girl These lyrics from The Kinks’s 1965 album Kinda Kinks turn up about 40 minutes into Wim Wenders’s 1977 film The American Friend....

“A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam,” so the paperback tie-in for the 1959-60 television series Johnny Staccato describes its protagonist. “He’s the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade.” That might be one way to describe John Cassavetes. Cassavetes was just 30 when he took the gig as a Greenwich Village shamus with a penchant for jazz piano. Staccato (the softening “Johnny” was later added, over Cassavetes’ objections) may have been a one-season wonder, but it enabled its leading man to underwrite Shadows, throw work to his pals, and hone his directing chops, while providing the closest thing he would ever have to a glamorous star vehicle....

On its penultimate day, the Competition presented the strongest contender for the Golden Bear yet. Extraordinarily, it is the feature debut of a virtually unknown 28-year-old, and the only Kazakh film in the festival. Harmony Lessons is a bona fide tour de force that may well turn writer/director Emir Baigazin into the next art-house sensation. An early scene would seem to herald a realist portrait of the hardships of life in rural Kazakhstan: a 13-year-old boy named Aslan kills, skins, and guts a sheep in front of the secluded hut he inhabits with his grandmother....

Fourteen years ago as of tomorrow, Don Weis went to his reward. You may be excused for not immediately recognizing the significance of this event. In cinephile circles, the name “Don Weis” is probably best recalled for the enthusiasm that it sparked in a handful of French film-lovers in the middle years of the 20th century. It may seem perverse, but those are the years in which the groundwork for modern film culture was laid, for better or worse, and their preferences and prejudices continue to resound through the decades....

Pitfall Of course the women who were involved in that loosely defined phenomenon we call film noir would outlive their leading men. Women live longer, and they were younger to begin with—that was part of the setup, the Venus flytrap baited with something sweet. Jean Simmons, who wasn’t especially associated with noir but gained a measure of immortality in Angel Face when she backed off a cliff with Robert Mitchum in the car, went in 2010....

The Salesman Increasingly critical, and sometimes exhibiting a disconcerting lack of civility and respect, the journalists who cover the annual Cannes Film Festival expressed widespread dissatisfaction over the jury’s selection of winners last year, taking to social media or voicing their opinions aloud as last year’s event came to a close. Gathered in a massive cinema to watch a simulcast of the awards ceremony, attendees groaned in unison when Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan won the Palme d’Or, cinema’s most important international festival prize....