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All images from Aliens (1986, James Cameron) In the director’s cut of Aliens (1986), James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s nihilistic, gloomy Alien (1979), there’s a moment when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) watches a rescue plane crash, dashing any hope of an easy exit from LV-426, the alien-infested exomoon to which she has returned voluntarily, this time with a group of ferocious Marines, many of whom resent her authority. As everyone races for cover in a nearby structure, Ripley, twitchy with PTSD, hesitates....

Images from Citizens Band (Jonathan Demme, 1977) “Wall-to-wall” – CB slang for “Signal is crystal clear” The night is full of voices, voices bursting through thick static and then receding, voices overlapping in a fragmented symphony. Voices fling themselves into the void: “Hello? Hello?” The opening sequence of Jonathan Demme’s 1977 film Citizens Band is dreamlike, the voices murmuring and barking and whispering, restlessly, over close-up drifting shots of wires, circuits, dials, blinking On the Air signs … Chilly technology and warm humanity, wedded....

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Matt Wolf, 2019) As a technology, videotape was both deeply flawed and radical in its impact. Magnetic media, VHS in particular, degrades quickly, and in an especially unattractive way: there is no elegant patina to the image quality of old videotapes: the picture gets fuzzy and melted, like an old cough drop you find at the bottom of your bag. It gets wobbly and jumpy and eventually shreds into static....

Le Pont du Nord In the spirit of Rivette’s play with narrative, the following notes on Le Pont du Nord are sequenced in numerical order. They can also be read in linear order (as they appear here), or at random. Le Pont du Nord screens March 22 to 26 in a new 35mm print at BAMcinématek. 1. “Don’t try to understand,” Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) tells Marie (Bulle Ogier) 20 minutes into Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord....

In the films of Nagisa Oshima, sexuality and mortality are always knotted up in a double-bind, and nowhere is this more apparent than in one of his most challenging works, The Ceremony. Oshima’s schizoid style precludes the film from engaging with his signature interests in the same manner as some of his better-known (but also radical) films such as Cruel Story of Youth (60) and In the Realm of the Senses (76), yet its strategies for staging oppressive and fascinating psychodrama are among the most effective in his oeuvre....

Though based on an actual case of 17 nearly simultaneous pregnancies at a Massachusetts high school, Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s 17 Girls matter isn’t a salacious story of teenage promiscuity but a meditative take on a woman taking charge of her own body, albeit in an incredibly misguided way. With the setting changed from a Massachusetts fishing town to a French fishing town—improbably populated by the most unfailingly beautiful group of high school girls possible—the rash of pregnancies happens after school tastemaker Camille (The Class’s Louise Grinberg) tells her friends that her unwanted pregnancy is not a total drag....

As if adolescence didn’t involve enough angst already, Ginger, a politically minded teenager, has the atomic bomb to worry about. Sally Potter’s new feature, set in 1962 England, sketches the friendship between Ginger (Elle Fanning) and her sultry pal Rosa (Alice Englert) and then, against the backdrop of nuclear menace, goes on to observe Ginger’s lesson in disillusionment. With a rich sense of lived experience, Potter first portrays the blithe excitement and sense of joyful conspiracy shared by the two friends....

French animator Sylvain Chomet’s follow-up to his rambunctious 2003 pastiche The Triplets of Belleville is just as ambitious but in different ways. This scaled-down study in melancholy centers on an aging music-hall magician who settles in Edinburgh and toils to support a spoiled country lass whom he has taken under his wing. There’s plenty of crack-a-smile humor, but the underlying mood recalls the diminuendo stretches in a Jacques Tati film....

Guillaume Nicloux’s hostage comedy features a prime slice of stunt casting that works like a charm. The stunt man—and genuine selling point—is award-winning novelist Michel Houellebecq, an equal parts admired and reviled figure who in the long shadow of recent current events might more likely be the subject of a story entitled The Killing of Michel Houellebecq. But this is, more innocently, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, directed by French journeyman Guillaume Nicloux, who wrote this scenario about a curmudgeonly writer whisked away from his family and held against his will in a safehouse by basically genial thugs....

The Dardenne Brothers love a good story, and Two Days, One Night, their radiant new film, features one of their best. After emerging from a bout of depression, a young woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard, seamlessly inhabiting the nearly celebrity-free universe of the Dardennes’ films) loses her job as a factory worker. Over a single weekend, husband in tow, she visits her co-workers one by one and tries to convince them to fund her re-hiring by giving up their scheduled bonuses....

IndieWIRE, which began in 1996 as an e-newsletter co-founded by current editor-in-chief Eugene Hernandez, has grown exponentially. Back in January, it launched a “re-imagining” of its website to coincide with the Sundance Film Festival’s kickoff, and announced its increasing integration with its new owner, SnagFilms, an online documentary-focused video distribution platform. Now arrayed with the characteristic accoutrements of fashionable journalistic ventures—feeds for news and blog links, rankings of articles, prominent advertising—indieWIRE will further consolidate its status as an alternative to Daily Variety....

La furia umana (aka White Heat) is a top-shelf online journal of cine-culture written by a multinational, multilingual constituency of contributors, with a special focus on whatsoever they damn please. Or in the words of their masthead: “[a] quarterly of theory and history of cinema, fire, daydreams, and drifts.” Approaching its 14th installment, furia has an unabashed flare for the wonkish and even—gasp—academic, and every variety of -ist theory mobilizing its verbiage....

May 30, 2007 We, the Undersigned, have all made significant contributions to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As regards the administration of his legacy, we have so far been silent. We can no longer do so. Not only have the dubious methods that Juliane Lorenz employed to lay claim to and secure her status as sole representative of the entire legacy now come fully to light. Not only has she systematically excluded as “undesirable” [Fassbinder’s] closest co-workers from all Fassbinder Foundation activities....

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022) Americans abroad might be any number of things: dissidents, dilettantes, lost souls, or spooks. At times they are easy to pin down, but some of these characters slide between categories—a privilege granted to the citizens of an empire. Somebody’s “here” becomes an “over there,” reduced to a remote backdrop against which to play out a game of power politics—or merely to lose one’s mind....

The Lost Patrol Lawrence of Arabia, at least in David Lean’s interpretation, favored the desert because he found it clean. The titular corps of John Ford’s The Lost Patrol had a harsher take on their arid surroundings, summed up in the film’s florid opening titles: it “seemed on fire with the sun” and “wore the blank look of death.” The desert, like the sea or outer space, is boundless in its opacity and sprawl, thus it can be at once ablaze and immaculate, and films about desert warfare—several of which are spotlighted in TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars”—suggest a parched ocean of unfathomable secrets and terrifying grandeur....