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Vanessa Gould’s brisk, affectionate documentary Obit suggests that obituary writing as practiced by the ace team at The New York Times could be the most imaginative and organic form of journalism in contemporary newspapers. The movie notes that obit writers used to be shunned as verbal undertakers, and that the obit department was often viewed as a dustbin for worn or flaky talents. But readers appreciate the obituary pages of the Times as an oasis of discernment, unpredictability, and evocative writing....

Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960) In 2016, I visited Guadalajara for the first time to spend some time with relatives from my stepfather’s side of the family. When I wasn’t watching Chuck Jones’s Road Runner with the 6-year-olds, I was talking with my uncle, Paquito, about the films he watched in his youth. He gifted me a set of his bootleg DVDs, some of his most treasured favorites: Phantom of the Paradise (“Have you seen that crazy thing by De Palma?...

Ash Is Purest White When a filmmaker is accused of repeating himself—and especially when that charge is leveled within the attention-deficient atmosphere of Cannes—there’s a good chance the accusers just aren’t watching closely enough. Case in point: Jia Zhangke’s stirring Competition entry, Ash Is Purest White, unrewarded by the jury and dismissed by some as simply more of the same. Since his debut feature, Xiao Wu (1997), the tale of a small-town pickpocket struggling to adapt to the new black-market economy, Jia’s extraordinary body of work has doubled as a record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations, assuming the role of witness and at times of critic and conscience....

Grizzled veterans of the Latin American festival scene will remember when Guadalajara started 27 years ago as a modest but important event, located mainly at the Cineforo, the city’s cinematheque (its exterior on one of the campuses of the University of Guadalajara even recalls the old Cinémathèque Française). Mexican cinema was seeing its first real resurgence in substantial production since the end of the “Golden Era” of the 1940s and 1950s; figures as diverse as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Arturo Ripstein had made Mexican cinema relevant again, and younger filmmakers were getting busy....

Eisenstein in Guanajuato At Syros, the show went on, with only small and occasional indications of what was happening politically. Some mishaps—cancellations, or last-minute venue changes, for instance—were obliquely related to the crisis, while others were mere consequences of overly ambitious plans. In its third year, organized by a cohort of young American expats and Greek nationals, the festival was still in a nascent state. The programming tends toward under-the-radar festival-circuit fare and demonstrated a tremendous amount of freedom from constraints....

Spring Blossom (Suzanne Lindon, 2021) Spring Blossom reimagines a trope of European cinema—a besotted affair between a naive teenage girl and a brooding older man—with a disarming freshness. The secret lies in the film’s gaze: directed by 21-year-old Suzanne Lindon from a script she wrote when she was 15, Spring Blossom is the rare arthouse film about a young girl’s coming-of-age that’s actually told from a young girl’s perspective. Slipping in and out of daydreams and musical interludes, the film captures the thrill of first passion and the sting of heartbreak, but without sordid clichés of disillusionment, so that the world of its charming protagonist (played by Lindon herself) seems widened, not shrunk, by the film’s ending....

Summer of Soul (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, 2021) Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s archival concert film—compiled from footage shot in 1969 during the Harlem Cultural Festival and then forgotten for decades—has a staggering lineup: a young Stevie Wonder on drums; Nina Simone in a barn-burning rendition of “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black”; Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples in duet, paying tribute to the recently assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. But just as thrilling as these acts are the shots of the (largely Black) crowds gathered in Mount Morris Park, decked out in bright ’60s fashions and receiving the music with infectious rapture....

This week’s suggested subject for further study: unlikely feel-good moments in art cinema. The topic comes to mind partly because of this year’s transcendent moment of joy in Cannes, the scene in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann in which an uptight young corporate woman is persuaded by her father to sing Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” at a party and ends up pouring her entire soul into it. Toni Erdmann, admittedly, is anything but a bleak, demanding art film, but the example demonstrates how all cinema, not just the mainstream variety that depends on gratifying our sentiment, can benefit from a little straight-down-the-line emotional release from time to time....

The first thing that comes to mind watching Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace is Andrew Marvell’s phrase “a green thought in a green shade.” At the very start, the film is steeped in the richest, deepest, greenest shade you can imagine, as a man and a teenage girl, viewed from above, walk through thick forest. Shot by Michael McDonough, the film is dominated by variations of green—from the chlorophyll-charged intensity of the forest to the murky, faded khaki that’s the camouflage uniform of a father and daughter living wild in nature, permanent campers....

Images from Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (Nick Broomfield, 2019) One of Leonard Cohen’s most famous songs was originally going to be called “Come On Marianne.” The fact that he changed it to “So Long Marianne” meant that the woman who inspired it, Marianne Ihlen, would not only become famous as his inspiration, but would be forever associated with farewells, with tragic love. The story told in Nick Broomfield’s documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is about a relationship that isn’t necessarily tragic; indeed, a friend of her says that their last moment of contact, as she listened to a valedictory letter from Cohen on her deathbed, was “a very beautiful end....

When Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs premiered in Venice last year, Guy Lodge predicted in his Variety review that the film would only appeal to the director’s hardcore fans, and that it was possibly “best suited for the gallery circuit.” As it happens, Stray Dogs this week gets a theatrical release in the U.S. through Cinema Guild—although it still seems fated to stay unreleased in Britain. Even so, it’s hard to argue with the idea that Stray Dogs is unlikely to expand Tsai’s following significantly....

Over the next few years, keep an eye on Solène Rigot. Actually, I happened to think of her but I could have mentioned any number of promising young actors in French cinema—Maud Wyler, for example, or Laetitia Dosch, Kirill Emelyanov, Pierre Rochefort… There’s never any shortage of young acting talent emerging from France, not least because of the sheer volume of the country’s film production (last year, 209 features were approved for funding by the CNC, the industry’s government body)....

The Sparrow Dream (Robert Beavers, 2022) Three critics recommend standouts from this year’s First Look festival, an annual showcase for adventurous new cinema at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The 2023 edition wrapped up on March 19. Last June, a dedicated group of avant-gardists, myself among them, gathered at the Temenos, a plein-air projection space in the Peloponnesian mountains, founded by Gregory Markopoulos and his partner, Robert Beavers....

The Australian tourist board’s worst nightmare, Wake in Fright is a fever dream of heat, drunkenness, blood, rutting, and macho brutality, which to the local way of thinking is what makes outback hellhole Bundanyabba “a friendly place . . . where nobody cares where you come from as long as you’re an alright fella.” John Grant (Gary Bond), sweating off his debt to the government for financing his higher education by teaching in a godforsaken flyspeck outpost, is only there because “the Yabba” has an airport from which he can fly to Sydney for the holidays....

Better known as Rabbit Horror, this 2011 3-D movie from Ju-On director and J-horror pioneer Takashi Shimizu and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, is less a horror movie than a trippy take on Alice in Wonderland. It opens with a splat as 10-year-old Daigo puts a sick rabbit out of its misery with a cinderblock. Daigo is constantly taunted by his classmates and so his mute sister lets him withdraw from school, much as their bereaved father has withdrawn from life and locked himself away in their house....

At the 22nd City of Women festival in Ljubljana, Akerman’s La Chambre (“The Room”) was shown, edited, and staged by Atherton at the MG+MSUM, in collaboration with the Belgian M HKA. Film Comment spoke with Atherton at the opening of the installation about collaborating with Akerman, the intuitive process of filmmaking and editing, including Akerman’s final film. La Chambre, the installation How does La Chambre, the installation, differ from screening it as a short film?...

Shortly after the filmmaker’s arrival in New York for the series, FILM COMMENT sat down with him in the vicinity of his Williamsburg Airbnb to figure out what, precisely, he’s on about. A History of Mutual Respect Until pretty recently, you were credited as co-director on a lot of the films but they seem to me to have some pretty clear through-lines in terms of the way that they look, in terms of the performance style, and also thematically....

Wild at heart, grotesquely beautiful, always poetic, Harmony Korine’s tales of the margins often come with unexpected pockets of wisdom. So it is with The Beach Bum, his new, candy-colored version of a ’70s stoner film, set, like Spring Breakers, in a Southern Florida that feels very much like the edge of the world. From his native Tennessee (the backdrop of several of his previous films), Korine moved to the area a couple of years ago, like several pop art painters....

All images from Men of Hard Skin (José Celestino Campusano, 2019) In 2018, the International Film Festival Rotterdam hosted a near-complete retrospective of Argentine iconoclast José Celestino Campusano. For many, including your humble correspondent, it was at once an overdue introduction to a director whose work is more often rumored about than seen, and the highlight of a festival with no shortage of diverse multimedia offerings. Appetites sufficiently whetted, Campusano returned to Rotterdam in 2019 with two projects: the new narrative feature Men of Hard Skin, and a 59-minute virtual-reality piece, The Trigger’s Cult, about a corrupt cop in suburban Buenos Aires....