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Images from Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988) Todd Haynes can queer just about anything. That’s a compliment. It’s a particular ability, peculiar by definition. Of all the directors who rose to prominence during the New Queer Cinema’s ascendance in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Haynes has perhaps made the most persuasive case for one of the ongoing ambiguities, if not debates, about gay filmmaking: namely whether the queerness of artists is necessarily reflected in their work regardless of whether the content, subject matter, or characters onscreen are themselves explicitly queer....

The benefits of the New Queer Cinema of the ’80s and ’90s were not just artistic but sociohistorical. The reconsideration and excavation of important queer texts and figures was as crucial to the movement as the fostering and nurturing of fresh new voices. Think of Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), with its references to and evocations of the work of black gay writers and poets such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin....

In this biweekly column, I look back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay. In terms of queer representation in mainstream ’90s cinema, 1999 was the exception that proved the rule. For a long time now, the year has been perceived and commented upon as a kind of breakthrough moment of rule-flouting, a decade’s natural culmination by which time the tenets of scrappy independent cinema that defined the preceding 10 years were absorbed into the mainstream and audiences were allegedly more willing to accept the outré....

This year, in celebration of the power of the communal theatrical experience, we have started asking voters to name their favorite art-house theaters. Below, you can read comments by readers on the top films and more—and see which cinemas keep you coming back for more. (You can check out our open directory of U.S. art-house theaters here—and make sure your beloved local carries Film Comment!) Get Out Jordan Peele, USA Get Out is one of the most important movies ever about racism in the U....

Publicity still for Forgotten Faces Seventy-five percent of Hollywood’s silent film output is lost forever, dumped in the ocean, burned as scrap, or consigned to some other form of ignoble oblivion. Every discovery and restoration, then, arrives as a miraculous gift. Such is especially the case with the 1928 crime melodrama Forgotten Faces, one of the highlights of this year’s Capitolfest, the annual showcase of classic film in Rome, New York....

The first half-hour of Alamar may arouse the sort of impatience derided by online proponents of so-called “Slow Cinema” or “Contemporary Contemplative Cinema.” Pedro González-Rubio’s barely feature-length film is the sunny high-def record of the Caribbean fishing trip of a boy (Natan Machado Palombini) and his Mexican father (Jorge Machado)—quality time sanctioned by recently separated Mom (Roberta Palombini) in Rome. And at first, the pair’s setting up shop in their sea hut feels interminable, even in Banco Chinchorro’s Club-Med-poster refuge of boundless blue sea and sky, fantastically fresh seafood, and shirtless, pantless fisherhunk Dad (or, as the Film Forum release pimps him, “The strikingly handsome Jorge—muscled, tattooed and mustachioed ....

Loosely based on a 1982 Broadway show itself loosely based on Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 81⁄2, the Weinstein Company’s Oscar flagship Nine represents Indiewood’s ultimate appropriation of the European art cinema it deposed. With a cast and crew conjured up almost entirely from the Weinstein Brothers’ Rolodex, the picture seems like an attempt to engulf and devour an entire tradition of European auteur filmmaking and reprocess it into individually wrapped slices of indie cheese....

“Shall I tell you again about Einstein’s theory of spooky action at a distance,” whispers Adam (Tom Hiddleston) to Eve (Tilda Swinton) his wife of many, many years. Or maybe I’ve misremembered and she’s sweet-talking him, so intricately have they wedded their identities. They could be the most perfect couple you’ve ever met, lovers for eons, perhaps the only lovers left alive, just the two of them against the world....

There are no big revelations or moments of high drama in the documentary Planet of Snail, only small, quotidian gestures, and shifts in routine. After following young Indian temple beggars in Children of God (09), filmmaker Yi Seung-jun takes as his subject an extraordinary married couple: Soon-Ho, who has a spinal disability that results in her extremely diminutive stature; and her deaf and blind husband, Young-Chan. The two communicate with the help of a touch-based sign language whereby she taps out words on his fingers and he responds by speaking....

Documenting a road trip undertaken by one of the most plausibly despicable brother-sister pairings in all of cinema, Alex Ross Perry’s second feature The Color Wheel is an astonishing work of pathos that broaches the question of redemption by way of a sincerity shellacked with layer upon layer of cynical vitriol. The director plays Colin, a twentysomething who has all but given up on attaining an existence that is conventionally interesting....

“Some truths take their time,” says the eponymous fundamentalist, Changez, in Mira Nair’s new film. A financial whiz kid turned professor, Changez leaves New York for his native Pakistan after a series of personal and professional revelations in the wake of 9/11. His words, however, don’t hold true for the film itself, which, despite gestures toward narrative suspense, remains upfront about its political message. Those familiar with Nair’s work will notice a raft of similarities between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and her 2006 film The Namesake....

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016) In the final scene of Richard Linklater’s 2016 film Everybody Wants Some!!, a history professor stands before the class on the first day of school and writes on the board, “FRONTIERS ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM.” They are everywhere. Always. A couple of years ago, on a hot August day, my friend Mitchell and I watched two films back to back, both of which are interested in frontiers....

The affecting festival hit from Athina Rachel Tsangari about a young woman coming to terms with her father’s terminal illness is leavened with the playful perversity that has informed the puzzling work of Greek colleague Yorgos Lanthimos. As in Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, minus the urge to shock and with the addition of a sense of emotional engagement, Tsangari centers her film on an unusually naive main character. Sheltered, lanky Marina (Ariane Lebed) has never been kissed and spends her time with her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) and friend Bella (Evangelina Randou), in a desolate town....

Prominent British TV comedy writer-performer Richard Ayoade (star of the mediocre IT Crowd) makes his feature-film debut with a flatlined attempt at Wes Anderson– esque romantic melancholy and precocious idiosyncrasy—complete with Truffaut references. Perpetually duffle-coated high schooler Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is a dictionary-reading lovelorn obsessive in pursuit of the sarcastic Jordana (Yasmin Paige). Dad is a marine biologist (Noah Taylor) ready for embalming, though once probably nervously alert like Oliver; Mom (a terrific Sally Hawkins) is unsatisfied, buttoned-up, and teetering on the brink of an affair with an old-flame neighbor—a virile, mulleted New Age caricature played by Paddy Considine....

What Now? Remind Me When a film’s opening shot is of a snail oozing across the screen in its own sweet time, you know you’re in for some seriously slow cinema. But after almost three hours, Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me accrues a poetic density that owes a lot to its (not exclusively snail’s) pace. Pinto is a veteran of Portuguese and Spanish cinema, a former sound engineer, a producer, and a collaborator with João César Monteiro and Raúl Ruiz....

War Game (Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, 2024) As of three days ago, solitary confinement is banned in New York City jails. That cruel system of plunging incarcerated individuals into isolation was pioneered only about 95 miles from NYC in 1829, at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The architects who designed the institution believed that silence and solitude would move inmates closer to penitence, and therefore to God—an idea that visitors like Charles Dickens balked at....