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On Sunday, October 3, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute joined Haynes, Lachman, critic Amy Taubin, and the editors of The Velvet Underground, Affonso Gonçalvez and Adam Kurnitz, for a roundtable talk. In our wide-ranging conversation on the stage of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, we touched on the making of the two films, as well as the enduring legacy of the historic moment of artistic innovation they so vividly evoke....

Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka The fact that many important Japanese filmmakers have been overlooked or ignored by foreign critics and distribution companies should come as no surprise. The Japanese film industry has been a robust and prolific one since before World War II, and its five major studios (six until 1960) operated very much along the lines of the classical Hollywood studio model, elevating filmmakers based on their prior box office performance and critical regard, and assigning top projects to them accordingly....

Futura (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher; 2021) Year after year, attendees at the Toronto International Film Festival flock to the Wavelengths section in search of cinema’s infinite formal possibilities. The 2021 edition of the festival is presented in a hybrid format, with both digital and in-person screenings. Even so, Wavelengths is vastly scaled down, with a single shorts program compared to four such programs in 2019. (It’s a welcome change from the 2020 edition, however, which had no dedicated shorts program at all)....

Mean Streets Martin Scorsese, 1973 McCabe & Mrs. Miller Robert Altman, 1971 American Graffiti George Lucas, 1973 Cold Water Olivier Assayas, 1994 Killer of Sheep Charles Burnett, 1979 Dazed and Confused Richard Linklater, 1993 Trainspotting Danny Boyle, 1996 Easy Rider Dennis Hopper, 1969 The Royal Tenenbaums Wes Anderson, 2001 Super Fly Gordon Parks Jr., 1972 Distant Voices, Still Lives Terence Davies, 1988 The Big Chill Lawrence Kasdan, 1983 The Graduate Mike Nichols, 1967...

When you think of the golden olden days, you don’t tend to think of white shoes—certainly not filthy, nasty white-leather bucks that stop at scabby bare ankles, propped up on a faded red footrest. That’s what the POV tracking shot lands on after taking in the interior of a hazy opium den and the pubic thatch of an approaching Chinese concubine. The intertitle says “1900: New York City,” but even with the sepia-filtered lighting, there’s an immediate sense of period-pic cognitive dissonance....

To this aesthetic displeasure, we can add the moral compromise that comes of supporting an indefensible bloodsport steeped in human misery. The primary emergent narratives of this young season have surrounded Raven Ray Rice and, now, Viking Adrian Peterson, both involved in off-the-field incidents of violence involving loved ones far smaller and less equipped for self-defense than themselves.2 These aren’t narratives of the sort encouraged by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his organization, and he has shamed himself in his response or lack thereof to them....

L’enfance nue Lists which seriously endeavor to quantify and valuate for history—rather than personal edification—can be useful barometers of either popular opinion or a single publication’s editorial values. They’re also a bit of a drag. A list that is arbitrarily constructed and entirely useless for any purposes other than pleasure, however, is not without a certain charm. For example, I recently enjoyed this bare-bones ranking of Muppets from Deadspin, which is basically a long wind-up to a Scooter-bashing gag....

Whiplash Chazelle’s passion for the movie musical was evident in Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench his no-budget, 16mm, black-and-white, Harvard-film-student ode to the French New Wave and its love for postwar song ’n’ dance flicks. A leap up the ladder of professionalism, Whiplash shows Chazelle in command of every aspect of directing and writing, with a pure and uncompromised vision of what movies can and should be. Much more complex than the logline bestowed by Sundance fans—“Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard”—the film is indeed a musical, its live jazz core fused with an ambient score by Justin Hurwitz that keeps your pulse rate elevated from beginning to end....

A man to match his sport, Bulgarian soccer superstar Hristo Stoichkov is a figure of big passions, and he comes across as reflective and richly engaging in Borislav Kolev’s loving docu-portrait, Stoichkov. A highly skilled and speedy scoring machine who won no less than two Golden Shoes—the most coveted trophy for individual achievement in world soccer—Stoichkov probably deserves a stronger, more artful film than this one. But Kolev’s will do for now, especially since its straight-ahead approach is able to deliver the basics about and essence of the man to fans and non-fans alike, and perhaps even those who wouldn’t give soccer the time of day....

Set in Mexico City’s lowest depths, where sun gets strained through frayed awnings and ramshackle staircases, Arturo Ripstein’s Bleak Street is the grimiest kitchen-sink movie imaginable. Most of the characters live without kitchens or sinks, and they wash up in basins by the street or with communal rooftop taps near a tenement’s water pipes. What’s supposed to give the film a magnetic charge is the real-life mayhem at its core....

The filmmaker best known as the spirited chronicler of 20th-century New York’s vitality and decay, notably in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), gets the Very Important Director treatment in Nancy Buirski’s By Sidney Lumet, a 109-minute rendering of a 14-hour-plus interview conducted over five days with Lumet in 2008 by the late documentarian Daniel Anker. It’s not a good look for him. Don’t get me wrong: Lumet was an important director, but for reasons that defy deification....

To change one letter from President Clinton’s famous line, this picture depends upon what the meaning of the word “it” is. Writer-director Trey Edward Shults has slapped a monster-movie title on a miniature horror film about the friction between two families under one roof during an apocalyptic plague. More than anything in the actual movie, the “it” in the title fuels our hope for a cathartic thrill or a tingling frisson....

On my way to the screening of Money Monster, I got stuck behind a gleaming white BMW with vanity plates reading “RVLTION.” I couldn’t help thinking of that car and those plates during this limousine-liberal melodrama about a deliveryman (Jack O’Connell) who holds a cable financial news clown (George Clooney) hostage for recommending a trading fund called Ibis. Yes, that’s Ibis. Rhymes with Isis. Loaded gun in hand, the working-class antihero, Kyle Budwell, sneaks onto a finance show’s live set in New York, forces Lee Gates, the buffoonish star, to don an explosive vest, and demands that Gates and his scheduled guest, Ibis CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West), explain how $800 million of stockholders’ investments could have gone up in smoke in one day....

Selma begins with the camera squarely framing Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo), as if for a formal portrait. The immediate effect is ironic. He’s rehearsing a solemn line for an award speech, and he’s unhappy about something, which turns out to be his tie—or, rather, his “ascot,” as his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), calls it. She adjusts the neckwear. King complains about feeling ill at ease in such a swanky getup....

Lina from Lima (María Paz González, 2019) This year’s Toronto Film Festival featured a special tribute to the female filmmakers of history: Mark Cousins’ 14-hour documentary series, Women Make Film, traced the trajectory of cinema as seen exclusively through the work of women directors. Torn between a thousand options in my four days in Toronto, I couldn’t quite eke out time for Cousins’ omnibus (or judge, for myself, the irony of a male director helming a series about women’s auteurship), but I caught several titles at the festival that I imagine will find a place in the series’ future installments: bracing, inspired films by up-and-coming women directors from all over the world....

The Los Angeles Film Festival faces an annual challenge: can the selection of its competition sections for narrative and documentary features—leaning heavily toward American work, with an emphasis on world and U.S. premieres—include enough fresh, vital, and good films that haven’t already been unveiled in Sundance, South by Southwest, and Tribeca? I’ve attended the festival since the beginning, and the challenge has never been met. LAFF can serve as a useful metric: if you’re playing the world premiere game, there are simply not enough good U....

La tierra roja The first screening I attended, La tierra roja, set me off on a string of films that challenged audiences to spend time with—and gradually sympathize with—morally questionable characters. In the opening scene we see our antihero, the bearded and ruggedly handsome Pierre, stumble across a half-dead peccary in the rain forest. He puts the boar-like animal out of its misery and for a brief moment we place our trust in him, while poachers are instead put into question....

The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang Too, 1998) Though this restrained, precise drama lacks much of the humor and playfulness that has come to define his work, Hong Sangsoo’s second feature nonetheless fits in seamlessly with the director’s ever-proliferating filmography. Sandwiched between the angsty, violent The Day a Pig Fell into the Well and the more austere, puzzle-like Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, The Power of Kangwon Province appears at first glance to be a positively warm movie, radiant with magic-hour light and the rich colors of its rural setting....

The Tale of King Crab (Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, 2022) Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s fiction feature debut is a Matryoshka doll of tales within tales. The film unfurls as a legend passed down through generations, paying tribute to a culture where communities are held together by the fables they share and reshape with each new telling. The Tale of King Crab opens at a lodge in present-day Tuscia, in central Italy—where a gaggle of elderly hunters share pasta and local lore—before teleporting us to a nearby hamlet at the turn of the 20th century....