An unconventional melodrama about a couple dealing with their young daughter’s leukemia, The Broken Circle Breakdown is an amalgam of disparate genres and impulses—part bluegrass musical, part cancer drama, and part soapbox for stem-cell research. It’s based on a play by Johan Heldenbergh who stars in the film as Didier, a gentle but irreligious bluegrass musician whose wild wife Elise (Veerle Baetens) is a tattoo artist and singer. Recounted out of chronological order, episodes from the couple’s past and future play out like a rambling Appalachian melody that circles back on itself....

In Sound of My Voice (11) two documentarians posing as prospective new members secretly spy on a self-professed time-traveling cult leader played by the film’s co-screenwriter, Brit Marling. The roles are reversed in The East, Marling’s second collaboration with director Zal Batmanglij: she is now the undercover investigator. As a new recruit at a private-sector intelligence agency, “Sarah” is tasked with infiltrating the titular ecoterrorist group. This entails coming up with a smooth way into their world—and the fact that she accomplishes this with improbable ease is probably less indicative of what a pro she is than of the film’s desire to keep the action speeding along (it does, after all, list both Ridley and Tony Scott as producers)....

Hospital of the Transfiguration 1. The first mention of “invaders” in Edward Zebrowski’s Hospital of the Transfiguration (79) comes nearly 20 minutes into the film. In the scene in question, the director of an isolated Polish mental hospital is introducing what turns out to be a brief, bizarre talk from the institution’s eccentric philosopher-in-residence. “I am confident that this will be a memorable event,” he tells the assembled crowd, “at a time when intellectual life has been suppressed by the invaders of our country....

For a film that eventually turns into an audacious Christ allegory, Strange Cargo (1940) has its fair share of cynicism, sex, and romance. The first two elements can be credited in large part to stars Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, while director Frank Borzage, the cinema’s great romanticist, provides the final one. This is in spite of the fact that Borzage is working outside of his most recognized comfort zone of interior-set, closeup-maximizing melodrama, the milieu of such classics as 7th Heaven (1927), Lucky Star (1929), and History Is Made at Night (1937)....

“You see a pair of laughing eyes, and suddenly you’re sighing sighs. You’re thinking nothing’s wrong, you string along, boy, then snap! Those eyes, those sighs, they’re part of the tender trap.” To Sinatra devotees the world over, the Sammy Cahn lyrics crooned by a typically insouciant Ol’ Blue Eyes, fedora cocked as he saunters hands-in-pockets through an azure Cinemascope sky, are so familiar that they signal nothing more than carefree, love-struck bliss....

For today’s podcast, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics Leo Goldsmith and Chris Boeckmann to join us for an overview this year’s Art of the Real, opening March 31 at Film at Lincoln Center. We kicked off the conversation with Diop’s early films ​​Towards Tenderness and The Death of Danton, before turning to standouts including Jacquelyn Mills’s Geographies of Solitude, Sharlene Bamboat’s If from Every Tongue It Drips, David Easteal’s The Plains, Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again, and more....

Also check out our website for more in-depth coverage on the festival and filmmakers. Let’s go now to our latest conversation from Berlin.

On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by FC contributor Ela Bittencourt and Jonathan Ali, Director of Programming at the Third Horizon Film Festival. They discuss some of the recent premieres at the Berlinale, including Claire Simon’s Our Body, Moyra Davey’s Horse Opera, Korhan Yurtsever’s Black Head, and Aaron Kaufman and Sean Penn’s Superpower; Turkish retrospective selection Black Head (1979), by Korhan Yurtsever; as well as films from the Berlin Critics’ Week’s “Artistic Differences” program, which included Lavra dor (1968), O tigra ea gazela (1977), The White Death of the Black Wizard (2020), and The Secret Formula (1965)....

On today’s Podcast, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with the writer to talk about her book, the role of memory in their watching and reading, their favorite Akerman films, and, of course, La Captive itself: a brilliant, ambiguous, and Vertigo-inflected interpretation of what might be the most disturbing volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year’s Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today’s episode features Aljafari, who discusses his new short, Paradiso XXXI, 108, and the ways in which his filmmaking draws attention to what he calls the “camera of the dispossessed....

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Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait A decade may have passed, but Reverse Shot co-founders and editors Jeff Reichert and Michael Koresky vividly remember the birthday celebration at Dallas BBQ (complete with giant blue cocktails) that gave birth to the online film journal. Tired of endless talk of the “death of film,” Reverse Shot’s editors aimed to show a way forward, or rather, how filmmakers themselves are already showing the way....

Stranded Programming a documentary film festival can’t be an easy task: wading through hour after hour of war, death, disease, environmental crises, and personal tragedies, in films too often artlessly made by anyone with access to a camera, computer, and a few dollars. Yearly retrospective selections are also challenging, as there are only so many Fredrick Wisemans, Werner Herzogs, and Errol Morrises out there. All things considered, the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival – Images of the 21st Century, little sister to the city’s larger, better-attended international fest held each November, does an honorable job, offering a number of highlights....

Manderlay Your latest film, Manderlay, is a Danish-Swedish-British-French-German-Dutch co-production… Really? That’s what the credits say, yes. Now the film could indeed be read as a European declaration of distrust against the United States. Well, you can read anything as anything, as you know. You certainly encourage different readings of your work, don’t you? I hope so. In Denmark my film has been seen very much as a traditional look on racial problems in America....