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Fujiwara, an occasional FC contributor and author of several thorough and perceptive critical studies (on Jacques Tourneur, Otto Preminger, and most recently Jerry Lewis), says that in many ways he sees the project as “a magazine about film criticism.” Under the aegis of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, the journal’s focus and its cosmopolitan character seem fitting. Given the setting, it’s a credit to Fujiwara’s editorial hand that the magazine wards off the threat of professional insiderism hanging over critics’ discussions....

Twilight Portrait Coincidentally or not, the stunningly beautiful yet (seasonally) bleak locale has a history of awarding prizes to beautiful, bleak films. This year’s Golden Puffin Discovery Award winner, Angelina Nikonova’s Twilight Portrait, was certainly no exception. Contemporary Russian filmmakers seem to be in a competition as to who can capture the state of their nation with the greatest intensity, and Nikonova’s entry rates high. The film begins as a woman is tormented and raped by a trio of policemen; her screams are within earshot of the discontented heroine, Marina (Olga Dykhovichnaya), who in a matter of time also falls victim to the bad cops, after her purse is snatched....

Hell of a Note Self-defeating behavior has a way of being seen in hindsight as virtue uncompromised. Say what you will, any state of perfection is categorically foreign to the seven films made by Eagle Pennell. In a sense, Pennell was a country bluesman in the tradition of Mississippi John Hurt or Lightnin’ Hopkins. Each film has the sentimentality and weather-beaten vision, the frayed edges and simplicity of a blues standard....

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As Amy Taubin writes in an essay in this week’s Film Comment Letter, “All of Sciamma’s films contain autobiographical elements, but none are as revealing as Petite Maman’s portrait of the filmmaker as a fledgling tomboy writer/director, already eager to claim all roles on-screen and off that only have been bestowed on men.” FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with the director over Zoom to dig into those autobiographical elements, the film’s deceptive simplicity, Sciamma’s love of classic children’s films, and much more....

To discuss the book and reflect on Pasolini’s life and work, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Giovanni Marchini Camia, co-publisher of Fireflies Press, and filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the contributors to Writing on Burning Paper. Among other great insights, Giovanni reveals how the title of the book—and in fact, the name “Fireflies Press” itself—was inspired by Pasolini’s writings, and Radu recalls his first encounters with Pasolini’s work at the Romanian Cinematheque in Bucharest in the early ’90s....

The Clock In a rare instance of the editor getting top billing, The Clock is the product of hundreds of hours spent by Christian Marclay stitching together sequences from thousands of clips. It is at once a display of plenitude—24 hours’ worth of material—and of limitations and interventions that are not at first apparent. Somewhere between pastiche and what might be called database art, the artwork’s source material (movies and television) was originally compiled by a crew of assistants, some or all recruited at the London video store Today Is Boring....

Twenty minutes into Brunello Rondi’s 1963 psychological horror film The Demon, the beautiful, troubled Purif (Daliah Lavi) runs through the southern Italian hills and stares down at her village’s church, where a huge wedding is wrapping up. Purif’s stare by itself isn’t overwhelmingly sinister or furious; it isn’t easily classified as any emotion, other than some kind of intensity. The groom is Antonio, the man she loves; the bride is the woman he left her for....

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 2: In Shocking 2-D James Riffel, 1991 Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade Peter Brook, 1967 On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?...