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To preview the lineup, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Vadim Rizov and Chloe Lizotte—both veterans of our 2020 New Directors talk— for a live taping of the podcast. The four discussed festival highlights including Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers, Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser, Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden, Mani Kaul’s Duvidha, and more. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: MUBI....

Hitler presented an obvious problem for the immigrant and first-generation Jews, who largely founded and ran Hollywood. Upon taking power, the Nazis purged Jews from the German film industry while demanding the removal of those employed by American firms in Germany. The moguls protested but complied because, as Welky notes, Germany had more theaters than any other country in Europe. There were also difficulties at home. Joseph Breen—the new head of the Production Code Administration—saw Hitler’s rise as a useful tool to reform Hollywood....

Too Late for Tears In this election season, with its resentments roiling in all directions, noir fits the zeitgeist like nothing else. The system’s rigged, chump. Play the game as long as you can—you’ll still roll snake eyes. But this bitter little world does have its compensations, and this month brings two: a couple of films restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation that are—or might as well be—brand spanking new....

The Godfather: Part II Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 Dawn of the Dead George A. Romero, 1978 The Empire Strikes Back Irvin Kershner, 1980 Before Sunset Richard Linklater, 2004 The Bride of Frankenstein James Whale, 1935 For a Few Dollars More Sergio Leone, 1965 Toy Story 2 John Lasseter, 1999 Gremlins 2: The New Batch Joe Dante, 1990 Aliens James Cameron, 1986 Evil Dead II Sam Raimi, 1987 The Testament of Dr....

In addition to the spiffy new design, Film Comment is keeping you supplied with new, daily posts covering the latest in international, experimental, and repertory cinema. Now you can get your fix every weekday with quality film criticism, trenchant reviews, engaging interviews, reports on festivals and events, pictorial and video essays, and, yes, lists. And we’re not stopping there: Film Comment is also expanding its digital presence to Tumblr and YouTube in addition to Twitter and Facebook....

So Much Water One such example is So Much Water, the feature debut of Uruguayan writer/director duo Ana Guevara Pose and Leticia Jorge Romero, which had its world premiere in Panorama. In the film, a divorced father goes on vacation with his two children—a daughter in her early teens and a son a few years younger—both of whom usually live with their mother. From the moment they leave, they are plagued by a ceaseless downpour that only exacerbates the father’s desperate attempts at connecting with his children, particularly the daughter....

20 BEST FILMS OF 2000 Beau travail Claire Denis, France The Wind Will Carry Us Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France Yi Yi Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan The House of Mirth Terence Davies, U.K./France/Germany/U.S. Time Regained Raoul Ruiz, France/Italy/Portugal Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Ang Lee, Taiwan/Hong Kong/U.S./China Almost Famous Cameron Crowe, U.S. Dancer in the Dark Lars von Trier, Spain/Argentina/Denmark/Germany/Netherlands/ Italy/U.S./U.K./France/Sweden/Finland/Iceland/Norway You Can Count on Me Kenneth Lonergan, U.S. Wonder Boys Curtis Hanson, U....

During a press conference at Cannes this week, Yorgos Lanthimos proclaimed his love for the sitcom Friends. In the show’s second season, the character Phoebe refers to someone finding their “lobster,” i.e., their true love, their mate for life. The single men and women in Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s fourth feature, The Lobster, seek the same fulfillment, but if they can’t find a match in a few weeks, they will be transformed into an animal....

WarGames Since the days of Napster, Hollywood films have been readily available online. Conversely, the Internet has been seeping into Hollywood films since the Eighties. Twin teenage comedies—WarGames (83) and Real Genius (85)—reveal the sentiment that would characterize future iterations of Hollywood’s Internet imaginary. In WarGames a young Matthew Broderick inadvertently brings NORAD paranoids to the brink of World War III, and Real Genius features Val Kilmer as a Spicoli-esque hacker whose computer skills best those of his superiors....

Andy Serkis’s Breathe soars out of the inspirational true-story genre into its own airy realm of action-packed high comedy. Andrew Garfield gives his most spirited, expansive performance to date as Robin Cavendish, a swashbuckling British Army vet turned tea broker. In 1957 Robin sweeps the beautiful, headstrong Diana Blacker (Claire Foy) off her feet and whisks her away with him to Africa. They embark on an exciting married life as they ramble across Kenya....

“It’s not a biopic.” That’s the mantra behind the publicity for Steve Jobs, the flashy biographical feature written by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), about the (positive spin) spellbinding visionary and the (negative spin) ruthless entrepreneur who cofounded Apple. If a movie is good enough, it transcends categories. When was the last time anyone called Young Mr. Lincoln or Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia a “biopic”?...

Matteo Garrone’s erotic, gory, and imaginative Tale of Tales freely adapts three stories from Giambattista Basile’s 50-fairy-tale collection Lo cunto de li cunti. The movie, like the stories, unfolds in a ribald Neverland that’s part paradise and part hell, where a witch can transform a crone into a lissome beauty and a giant cannibalistic brute can wed a sheltered storybook princess. Basile’s original two-volume tome, published posthumously in 1634 and 1636, and also known as The Pentamerone, became an inspiration for the Brothers Grimm (and many others) because it put earthy oral traditions into exuberant literary form....

The sweet-and-sour mystery of youth gets a funky fact-based workout in the volatile urban comedy-drama White Boy Rick. It’s 1984, and in the drug-ravaged streets and roller-boogying play lands of riot-scarred East Detroit, Rick Wershe Jr., aka White Boy Rick, becomes a 14-year-old FBI informant—the youngest in agency history—and evolves into a mini-kingpin of the Motor City crack trade. Pitting the intensity of childhood against the decay and corruption of underclass city life has been the strategy of many Young Adult novels and a packet of great movies from De Sica’s Shoeshine to Hector Babenco’s Pixote....

Some reviews of Buster’s Mal Heart have used the term “science fiction,” which isn’t entirely off the mark—there are references to wormholes, bugs in the system, and footage of a TV boffin ranting about the possibility of finding peace at the center of a black hole. In her director’s note, Sarah Adina Smith says, “I like to make movies that have their cosmology,” but rather than cosmological in any scientific sense, you could call Buster’s Mal Heart more theological than anything....