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Images from First Love (Takashi Miike, 2019) The tone of Takashi Miike’s latest film is best encapsulated by a single image: a close-up of a freshly severed head, its features wreathed in a goofy, blissed-out grin. This is apparently the 103rd film from the prodigiously prolific and versatile Japanese director, whose work is usually, though not always, considered synonymous with excess, provocation and no-holds-barred craziness in assorted genres. So it counts as typical perversity that his new yakuza action extravaganza is innocuously entitled First Love....

A protagonist—the screenwriting manuals will tell you—has to want something, and must be prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. But what happens when a protagonist doesn’t particularly want anything, or really know what they want, or would barely have the energy to pursue their desires in any case? Given the ideology of irrepressible agency that dominates mainstream cinema, there’s something a little subversive, at least discreetly dissident, about a film focusing on a character who’s not really that interested in acting—or who doesn’t get round to stirring herself until circumstances work their slow effect on her....

At a time when every other film is potentially open to interpretation as being somehow obscurely about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, The Platform has a better claim than most. Currently showing on Netflix, this dystopian horror film from Spain is about the agony of being confined in a small space with someone you’d rather not be with. Directed by Basque filmmaker Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia and written by David Desola and Pedro Rivero, The Platform is an ingenious and economical high-concept piece that uses its simple premise to generate some pithy, and fairly disquieting, sociopolitical resonances....

Last month, Stratman was in New York to present The Illinois Parables—which just began a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives—as part of Projections in the New York Film Festival. She sat down with Film Comment to give a master class in the known and not-so-well-known history of the Land of Lincoln. What was the gestation process of The Illinois Parables and how did it start to take shape? I’m interested in how you determined the in and out points of your timeline....

The trio would continue to work together over the next few years, on Vitale’s 1976 exploitation effort East End Hustle, in which a Montreal ex-prostitute and procuress turns her onetime employer’s stable against him, and The Rubber Gun (1977), the directorial debut of Moyle (Pump Up the Volume, Empire Records), shot by Vitale and starring Lack as a Montreal drug dealer and Sunday painter who quits crime in order to rededicate his life to art—just as Lack himself would back away from acting after starring in David Cronenberg’s Scanners in 1981, by which time the collaborators had drifted apart....

Mark Jenkin finds a muse in his home county of Cornwall: from stories of youthful outsiders (Golden Burn, 2002) and fragmented families (The Midnight Drives, 2007) on through his documentary work (The Lobsterman, 2001, on Cornish playwright Nick Darke), his cinema keenly captures the ways in which tourism has displaced and reconfigured working-class communities in coastal Britain. These tensions boil over in Bait, in which the protagonist, a fisherman named Martin, palpably bristles with resentment towards the vacationing Londoners who have purchased his childhood home and pushed him out to the margins of his town....

This is the Wasikowska Way, if such a formulation is even possible, 10 years into an eclectic career: favoring the taciturn, coaxing us toward her characters, building a mystery rather than proffering a map. Emma Bovary collapses spectacularly but, as embodied in this version, she prompts us to question what exactly drives her downfall, when precisely it becomes inevitable, and how fully she means her words or grasps her circumstances....

In Tsai’s films the bygone city landscapes of Taipei have been preserved in his earlier work (in Rebels of the Neon God; Vive l’Amour, 94; The River, 97) while in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, a black lake in an abandoned construction site back in his home country Malaysia has its own poetic presence; further afield, he’s carried on an intercontinental conversation between Taipei and Paris in What Time Is It There?...

The One-Armed Swordsman In 1967, The One-Armed Swordsman burst onto Hong Kong screens as anti-colonialist riots swept the city. The carnage unleashed in that year turned the city into a war zone: in 12 months, 8,000 bombs, many of them dummies, were defused by the police. Up until then, martial-arts movies had been discreet, delicate affairs, usually starring women. But director Chang Cheh channeled all the righteous anger and bloody fury erupting in Hong Kong’s streets onto cinema screens with a film that attacked audiences like a rabid dog....

Cameraperson Making documentary films is simultaneously a humbling and empowering enterprise. It takes letting real events and people dictate, at least to some degree, the contours of a project; it also involves presenting and packaging those events, and characterizing people. Most films implicitly emphasize the former while downplaying the latter. Yet among the films that don’t gloss over a filmmaker’s intervening hand, different temperaments come into play. Some worry about wielding that kind of power....

The Big Short In 1951, a filmmaker with a background in mainstream comedies directed a serious, timely movie about a subject vital to audiences of its day, which was adapted from a best-selling book and featured actors playing real-life figures. It was considered a work of nonfiction and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2015, a filmmaker with a background in mainstream comedies directed a serious, timely movie about a subject vital to audiences of its day, which was adapted from a best-selling book and featured actors playing real-life figures....

Last week we learned about the sad passing of our beloved Agnès Varda. We’ve been celebrating much of her life over on Twitter, sharing interviews, reviews, and other anecdotes. Thankfully, Varda had much time to reflect on her long life and storied career, and with Varda par Agnès, she bids farewell: “Disappearing in a blur, I leave you.” In Andy Warhol’s 1980 memoir, Popism, the artist describes his avant–pop sensibility: “That’s what so many people never understood about us....

1. The Cannes Film Festival has finally announced their competition lineup, featuring such familiar names as Dardenne(s), Dolan, and Desplechin. However, new to the mix (and new for the festival itself) is Mati Diop, the first black woman to have a film screen in competition. Her film, Atlantique, is an adaptation of her 2009 short, Atlantiques, which we covered in this 2014 article: “The Films of Mati Diop” by Genevieve Yue....

Robert Forster in Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997) After 17 days and 200 screenings, this year’s NYFF has come to an end. Capping off the event, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with a panel of our regular critics—Michael Koresky, Amy Taubin, Nellie Killian, and Phoebe Chen—to discuss their highlights of the festival. For FilmLinc Daily, festival director Kent Jones bids farewell, with NYFF57 being his last at the helm....

Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris; Photograph J. Fernandes, Tate Photography Sitting on the cool concrete floor inside the dark, massive Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern museum watching Tacita Dean’s FILM was a singularly awesome and provocative experience. A short, silent, 35mm anamorphic movie projected on a white block nearly 50 feet high, Dean’s art installation was a film about film itself....

In his latest, Dawson City: Frozen Time, the hard evidence consists of reels of nitrate film that was buried under a hockey rink in a Yukon town at the end of the silent era. Rediscovered close to 40 years ago, the restored and preserved footage includes in some cases the only extant copies of features, shorts, and newsreels from the turn of the 20th century to the mid-twenties. Using selections from this footage and a trove of archival material, Morrison examines the rise and fall of Dawson City, a gold mining town that was the inspiration for novelists, playwrights and filmmakers....