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An American Romance Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes and a hairpiece; Brian Donlevy added dentures and a corset. For Bogart, when the cameras rolled, all shortcomings vanished and movie magic took over. With Donlevy things were a bit more complicated. The seams were never visible, but he carried himself with the air of a man afraid of being found out. From his hobo-turned-political stooge in The Great McGinty to his sadistic legionnaire Markoff in Beau Geste, you can picture every Donlevy character repeating positive affirmations to himself in the mirror: “Fake it till you make it, lad” (or in Markoff’s case, “…you scum!...

At last, postmodernism. I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it. This is the thing, I thought, after visiting “Cinema Vezzoli” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the third part of Francesco Vezzoli’s “trinity” of exhibitions (following on from those last year in Rome and New York) that constitute an early career retrospective. I had been put off by a statement from Philippe Vergne, the museum’s director, quoted in a Los Angeles Times art blog: “His work is about capturing ambiguity, it’s about design, sex, oppression, and the narcissism of Western culture....

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On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sits down with critic Mark Asch and Miriam Bale, artistic director of the Indie Memphis Film Festival, for an conversation that is pulled inexorably, like a mosquito to a well-toned ab, toward the festival’s thirst traps, including David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Louis Garrel’s The Innocent, Serge Bozon’s Don Juan, João Pedro Rodrigues’s Will-o’-the-Wisp, Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself, and more....

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Imogen Sara Smith wrote these words about Andersson’s latest, About Endlessness, which graced the cover of Film Comment’s May-June 2020 issue. The global pandemic was just starting to take hold back then, and the Swedish filmmaker’s work seemed to offer an uncannily apt vision of life in 2020. With About Endlessness finally opening in theaters, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed Imogen and another long-time FC contributor, Jonathan Romney, for a conversation about the film and its place in Andersson’s utterly distinctive filmography....

On today’s podcast, Miriam Bale (Indie Memphis Film Festival) and Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) return for another round of Sundance conversation with FC’s Devika Girish. This time, the three discuss festival selections Fair Play, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Rye Lane, and The Tuba Thieves. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here.

This talk was co-presented with New Wave, a special community for Film at Lincoln Center members in their 20s and 30s. For a limited time, become an FLC member at the Contributor level or above and get 25% off with the promo code HOLIDAY25. Learn more and join today!

Noah Baumbach’s screwball update Mistress America is our July/August cover story—and fellow filmmaker Alex Ross Perry is on hand to do our in-depth interview about Baumbach’s films, getting them made, and cats. Amy Taubin hails the sexual revolution of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s book. Kent Jones marvels at the fine-grained social portraiture of Pedro Costa’s Horse Money. Jonathan Romney journeys into the past, and the undead present, portrayed in Christian Petzold’s unnerving oeuvre, up to and including his latest, Phoenix....

There will be no thumbs up or down in this article. Antichrist is neither disgusting and worthless, nor is it one of the great films. It is a transitional work made by an artist clearly in crisis, but not necessarily the psychological crisis he discussed at length in the press at Cannes. But this movie shouldn’t have come as such a shock to the festival’s film journalists. Crisis has been a regular if not predictable feature of von Trier’s career from the start....

The podcast in question was Love & Radio, a now 10-year old program richly crafted from interviews with hard-to-define, often morally slippery characters. This latest episode conjured all kinds of imagery, thanks to New Age subject Timothy Willey’s tales of telepathic dolphins and psychedelic visions, and his discordantly professorial English accent. But where was I supposed to project that imagery? How was I supposed to exist in that space when there was something to hear but nothing to see?...

Readers should also note that this is a work in progress. We will continue to add more entries whenever we learn of them, and expand details about those already included. We invite you to contact us directly if you have further information or know about any additional unproduced films among the many we have overlooked. Send your suggestions and additions (with the subject heading “Unproduced Films”) to the following email address: fcpoll[at]filmlinc....

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019) Stories about migration are not just about those who leave—the political or economic refugees whose journeys fill the news—but also about those who stay behind. Two strikingly beautiful films showing in the 57th New York Film Festival, Mati Diop’s Atlantics (Atlantique) and Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, focus on women left alone when men cross the sea to find work, and the lives that they make in places haunted by loss....

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What a boon it would be to know that Freeman was bringing wisdom, gravitas, and immeasurable calm to the highest bench in the land. The idea isn’t original: as well as playing Chief Justice Frawley in a 2015 episode of Madam Secretary, Freeman was an unwaveringly presidential president in Deep Impact (1998) and a steely acting president in both Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and London Has Fallen (2016). He was also the judge in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and twinkly-eyed omniscience personified as the white-clad God in Bruce Almighty (2003) and Evan Almighty (2007)....