Only a filmmaker who possesses the hubris to imagine that art and moral adventure matter could have composed The Portrait of a Lady in the densely telling hues and uncompromising forms Jane Campion has achieved. To start with, the novel’s author has always been rated as a “hard read,” even in the days when reading wasn’t rare. Henry James works every word, every phrase, every description or discourse, so that you must travel his narrative attuned to the minute changes in social/spiritual weather and the moral and psychological reverberations of every bit of small talk....

Every year since 1954, the Flaherty Film Seminar, named after the influential American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, has brought together directors, educators, programmers, critics, and students from around the world to watch and discuss a varied program of experimental films organized around a unifying theme. This year’s theme, Queer World-Mending, explored how, as co-programmers Jon Davies and Steve Reinke put it, “queer desire, through its very non-productive fucked-upness, can mend the world better than more stable, normative approaches....

All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966) We’re almost five weeks into quarantine here in New York (or is it five years?), with our dutiful podcast team working overtime to bring you near-daily updates of our new At Home series. Last week we were joined by the preeminent David Bordwell to discuss his book, Reinventing Hollywood, as well as a broad swath of international cinema. But one film seems to be stuck in Bordwell’s mind of late, the ill-fated The Hunt—initially delayed due to back-to-back mass shootings, only to be released at the outbreak of COVID-19....

Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022) Learning about how a film is constructed can make its artifice difficult to ignore. While watching Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (2022), I kept thinking about an interview with the director I’d read in Reverse Shot, which revealed that the lead actor, Benoît Magimel, was fed lines through an earpiece during certain takes. Serra’s a loose-handed director, and though Pacifiction is his most focused narrative feature to date, he still accrued 540 hours of footage during production—the result of continuously recording his actors with three cameras while they interacted in partially scripted situations....

I inhaled the 13 hour-length episodes of House of Cards over one weekend, as the pre-release publicity encouraged. Binge viewing is the card that Netflix is playing with its very pricey foray into original programming ($100 million is reportedly the cost of two 13-episode seasons). Adapted from the BBC series of the same name (also streaming on Netflix, which makes comparison shopping impossible to resist) House of Cards stars Kevin Spacey as Congressman Francis Underwood, the House majority whip whose desire for revenge, after the newly elected president passes him over for Secretary of State, sends his lust for power into overdrive....

The films of folklorist and documentarian William Ferris are geographically specific, bound to his home-state of Mississippi. These short documentaries from the ’70s and ’80s—five of which will screen March 29 and 30 at Anthology Film Archives in New York City—are rough-hewn, loving portraits of people living, praying, and creating on the margins of society. The selection at AFA focuses primarily on the lives of musicians, from the multigenerational communal living of gospel singer and faith healer Fannie Chapman to the frankly shocking rural poverty of diddley bow player Louis Dotson in Bottle Up and Go....

With its legion of 2,500 orange-clad volunteers, TIFF certainly handles “big” with admirable order, efficiency, and ease. But “big” in TIFF’s case is also more than a variable to be managed. It has in many ways, especially in the absence of a distinctive curatorial line, come to be the Festival’s defining characteristic, its identity. It is certainly what has fostered TIFF’s emergence as a focal point in the global film ecosystem....

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1936) Few movie subgenres fit as naturally yet uneasily into the queer canon as the cross-dressing farce. While it’s difficult to envision the span of even a loosely defined gay cinema without such altogether wonderful comedies as Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Victor/Victoria, or Barbra Streisand’s musical melodrama Yentl, each of these films distinctly posits the choice of the main characters to don the disguise of the “opposite” gender as one of desperate necessity, whether for reasons of professional gain or life-or-death well-being....

For gay filmgoers in 1974, A Very Natural Thing, Christopher Larkin’s nuanced depiction of the burgeoning relationship between two twenty-something men, was an unusual event, a persuasively casual representation of gay love and sex at once mundane and culturally specific. Seen today, it stands alone: tender yet unafraid of sexual explicitness; sweet-natured but not blind to the realities of living in a minority group that had historically been denigrated and, at the time of the movie’s release had no legal protections....

Since the history of cinema as we know and write about it has been almost exclusively a staunchly heterosexual (and white and male) one, watchers of capital-C classics have long had to look in the margins and crevices for signs of queer life. The major players of American auteur cinema in particular—those artists whose names invoke entire, self-contained universes of cinematic feeling and imagery, like Hitchcock, Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Tarantino, the Andersons—have been demonstrably disinterested in exploring gay characters in any significant way....

Images from Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) Love is transformative in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady. Provocatively cleaved in two, it’s the rare film to have felt radical and exciting upon its release and still feel like a monumental work 15 years later. Even considering the trio of features the Thai director has made since, each of them epochal, rigorous, and structurally daring in its own way—Syndromes and a Century, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and Cemetery of Splendor—this unorthodox 2004 romance still might be his most cleanly conceived statement of authorial intent....

Instead of focusing on Eluana Englaro or portraying those closest to her, Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the script, chooses to follow several sets of fictional lovers and families in separate storylines that in some way mirror or comment on the Englaro case. The plots intersect only tangentially, but each develops a variation on a similar set of themes: human connection, the sacrifices people make for those they love, and what it means to be both dead and alive....

Now, who might you imagine playing this colorful character? Asia Argento? Jennifer Jason Leigh? Naomi Watts? Mickey Rourke? Julia, as it turns out, is a showcase for the hot-mess side of that supremely poised ice queen of the cinema: Tilda Swinton. No stranger to the aesthetic wild side, the former muse of Derek Jarman has always been exquisitely controlled in her effects, even when called on to go off the deep end (cf....

Writer-director Andrew Dominik’s third feature, Killing Them Softly, stars Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan, a mean-as-sin hit man with a cynical streak as long as his ‘72 Cadillac. A no-nonsense enforcer, Jackie is called in to tend to a set of events that have all but shut down the city’s criminal economy: three crooks—young, dumb Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), with the support of Johnny (Vincent Curatola, who was Johnny Sack on The Sopranos)—have robbed a mafia-owned poker game presided over by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta)....

Tchoupitoulas On the same day in New York, two differently lyrical documentaries about two different but equally non-famous trios of superficially ordinary young Americans open for theatrical runs. Tchoupitoulas, by Bill Ross IV and his brother Turner Ross, is set in the French District of New Orleans at night, and seen mostly through the eyes of three adolescent brothers from across the Mississippi who have missed the last ferry back....

To say that Peter Strickland traffics in Seventies Euro-schlock is to tell only half the story. True, he’s better than anyone this side of Todd Haynes at conjuring the textures and tones of anterior subgenres, in Strickland’s case the pulp art imports of Jess Franco and Dario Argento. But underneath the veneer of exploitation is the last thing you’d expect—a portrait of midlife angst, a longing for stability and acceptance in a pitiless world....

When, following the box office failure of its 2017 The Mummy reboot, Universal scrapped plans to launch its eagerly touted Dark Universe franchise of interconnected monster movies, the studio announced that it would instead adopt a more modest strategy, drawing on its storied corporate legacy to resuscitate old Universal horror characters in standalone “filmmaker-driven” vehicles, with the goal of fostering a cycle of auteurist studio horror films designed to “appeal to modern audiences....

Early in The Northman, a father forces his young son to thrust his hand into an open wound in the elder’s stomach. As the boy reaches in, he passes into the ether: suddenly, he witnesses a pantheon of his royal ancestors all connected by a branch-like umbilical cord to a cosmic family tree. In each of Robert Eggers’s three feature films to date, the director hones in on these ruptures in the fabric of the world, waiting for something mysterious and otherworldly to break through....