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Following a number of shorts, Russell’s first feature, Let Each One Go Where He May (2009), a film consisting of 13 unbroken shots, each running roughly ten minutes in length, made for a striking and impressively cohesive statement upon its premiere in the Wavelengths section at the Toronto Film Festival. Four years later, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), a transfixing three-part travelogue co-directed by Rivers that bowed in Locarno’s Signs of Life program, confirmed the filmmaker’s growing stature and increased ambition....

Hubert Sauper is a very charming man. His methods of engagement—eye contact, attentiveness, enthusiasm, easy laughter and self-deprecation—seem genuine, but they’re also invariably useful in his line of work. For Sauper’s two most recent documentaries, the Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare (04), and We Come as Friends, which screened as part of this year’s New Directors / New Films—the occasion for this New York visit—the 48-year-old filmmaker served as his own cameraman, journalist, pilot, fixer, and ambassador....

Troell’s ability to write, shoot, and edit as well as direct gives his movies an exploratory dynamism and freedom all their own. As the gorgeous uncut Criterion editions of The Emigrants and The New Land illustrate, he can be the most democratic of moviemakers. He captures the diversity of individual reactions to common experiences as he chronicles a mini-migration from the province of Smaland to Minnesota. He follows two main groups: the family of farmer Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullman), including Karl Oskar’s brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), and the household and religious cell of a lay preacher, Danjel (Allan Edwall), Kristina’s uncle....

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024). Courtesy of A24 Films. The history of cinema abounds with “trans film images”—images that, directly or indirectly, purposely or incidentally, capture the life experience of trans people—even as trans creators have remained notably absent behind and in front of the camera. But recent years have seen the emergence of a full-throated trans film movement, of which Jane Schoenbrun is one of the most vital voices....

Soon after the U.S. premiere of The Nightingale at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Kent chatted with me about her approach to filming rape, her collaboration with the Aboriginal community to tell this story, and the challenges of making difficult and provocative films as a woman director. What made you want to tell this story? I think ideas come from a place that is sort of not definable. I was actually reading the Mahabharata at the time, and there’s a character, Ambika, who is full of rage, and she reincarnates to murder someone that has done her wrong....

The Yellow Mile What’s changed in the parodies over the years? MAD always reflects what’s going on, and as the movies change, the parodies change. I remember for The Sound of Music we did The Sound of Money. But I don’t know if in this day and age that we’re revealing any great truth in saying that sequels are being made to make money. Well, of course. Back then, that sort of had some currency to it, no pun intended, but now I think we have to move on....

Heart of a Dog opens October 21 at Film Forum, following its screening at the New York Film Festival and a few weeks after Habeas Corpus at the Park Avenue Armory. FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca spoke with Anderson on the grass lawn that overlooks Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza, during magic hour. “I’m glad I’m not a Juilliard student,” the award-winning artist mused on her surroundings, with her customary empathy. “They’re worried, you know?...

Denied standard devices of identification and cinematic seduction, the viewer is left to deal with Mouton as a raw presence. Yet halfway through the film, fate—or narrative—catches up with Mouton when he is attacked and severely wounded during a seaside festival. The second half unfolds without its title character, bringing the faces that had previously surrounded him to the forefront and lingering over his world without him. Mouton has the low skies and real faces of a Bruno Dumont film and the exacting, occasionally enigmatic framing of a Bresson, but it’s undoubtedly its own beast—or rather mutt....

Winner of the Orizzonti Prize at the 71st Venice Film Festival, Theeb screened in New Directors/New Films and continues its tour of festivals as well as an exceptionally successful run in the Middle East. (It opens in New York on November 6.) Film Comment spoke with Abu Nowar via Skype last week about Bedouin culture, his vision of the desert, and the intricacies of making movies in the Middle East....

After his 2012 experiment in crowd-sourced filmmaking, the made-for-Dutch-television Tricked, Elle represents an entirely new phase for Verhoeven. It is his first French-language production, his first collaboration with the inimitable Isabelle Huppert and his first feature in 10 years since Black Book (06). Little is known about Elle, other than the fact that it is an adaptation of the French novel Oh . . . ! by Philippe Djian, who also wrote the source novel for Betty Blue (86), and that it’s scripted by David Birke (who wrote the 2014 remake of 13 Sins)....

This November and December, Lincoln Center audiences can enjoy a peek into Haynes’s creative process through a film series called “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams,” which runs November 18 to 29. With the necessary exception of the legally black-boxed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (87), Haynes has curated eight double- or triple-bills linking each of his features and shorts with movies that inspired something in their textures or constructions....

Grisebach sat down with Film Comment during the Cannes Film Festival following the premiere of Western in the Un Certain Regard section to discuss the film’s protracted genesis, the pressing influence of an increasingly corporatized Europe, and the search for a present-day equivalent of the iconic Western male. Western screens Saturday, September and 30 Sunday, October 1 at The New York Film Festival. It’s been more than a decade since Longing....

Hong Kong is home to a fistful of directors who are their own genres: Wong Kar Wai, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, and John Woo. Add to that list Jeff Lau, a comedy craftsman whose fingerprints are all over the industry as a writer, producer, and director, an excavator of talent, and a man who chases his whiskey shots of cynicism with gulps from the wine cooler of sentimentality. With a style that blends broad slapstick, deft satire, subversive politics, over-the-top visuals, sharp wordplay, vulgar dialogue, forays into time travel and reincarnation, musical numbers, animated interludes, over-the-top characterizations, airborne action, a gleeful evisceration of Chinese classical literature, and some of the most intricate plotting ever put on film, Lau’s movies stand alone....

Lion of the Desert The most tragic irony of Akkad’s death, though, may be its inexorable logic in retrospect. His odd two-track career as both the successful producer of the Halloween films and the embattled director of The Message (aka Mohammad, Messenger of God, 77) and Lion of the Desert (81)—two ambitious epic projects dear to his heart and cause—made for a life that was equally steeped in the American Dream and Middle East fatality (and bloodshed)....

One Cut, One Life In a written diary, there’s really only one point of view. Depending on how it’s written, depending on how generously the author imagines and conjures the experiences and feelings of others, you can get a version of other perspectives, but it’s one literally and wholly created of words written by the authorial hand. But in autobiographical cinema, even if a filmmaker forcefully expresses his or her point of view, using the camera as an extension of his or her gaze, and editorializing and shaping experience through the edit, the machine employed offers at least a chance of a hint at another’s perspective....