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The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1973) Poland is the birthplace of a number of modern cinema masters—Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Roman Polanski, to list but a few. None, however, was as consistently brilliant and also under-recognized as Wojciech Jerzy Has. Has’s international prominence grew in the ’80s, when his bold fantasy of interconnected picaresque tales, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), found popularity as a midnight movie (the film was purportedly a favorite of Jerry Garcia, who helped fund a restoration project in the early ’90s)....

Masculin Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966) Midway through last year we reported that Jonathan Glazer was in the process of developing a new film about the Holocaust. According to Deadline, Glazer is set to begin filming in Poland next year, with the film to be loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, set in Auschwitz. The news follows the release of Glazer’s recent short, The Fall, apparently inspired by the Goya sketch The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters....

Pedro Almodóvar (Photo: Philip May) In July, production is scheduled to start on Pedro Almodóvar’s 21st feature, Pain & Glory. According to a statement from Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo, the film concerns an aging director’s “[f]irst loves, second loves, his mother, mortality, an actor who worked with him in the past, the seventies, the eighties, his present, the void, the unbearable void brought by the fact that he cannot keep shooting....

FILM COMMENT spoke to Almereyda last week about Experimenter in advance of its premiere at The New York Film Festival on October 6 and 7. The film opens theatrically on October 16. How did you decide to make a film about Stanley Milgram? I was involved with a young woman who was finishing up at Bard, and she was taking a class that was strictly Milgram, the whole class was on the obedience experiment....

La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973) Daniel Fairfax. Amsterdam University Press, $241 In 1991, when Antoine de Baecque, a future editor in chief at Cahiers du cinéma, wrote his history of the legendary French film magazine, he deemed it necessary to commit two large volumes to the project. Volume one—appropriately wrapped in a Cahiers-yellow dust jacket with a young Jean-Pierre Léaud peering out at the reader—dedicated roughly 320 pages to the journal’s most star-studded period, from 1951 to 1959....

Two extraordinary scenes bookend Catherine Breillat’s latest film, inspired by her experience of a stroke in 2004 and subsequent entanglement with con man Christophe Rocancourt. First, in a striking overhead shot, film director Maud Shoenberg (Isabelle Huppert) awakens in bed and with growing panic tries to feel the left side of her body. She attempts to stand but falls to the floor, facing away from the camera as if her very identity has collapsed....

At first glance, the modest council-estate apartment where much of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank unfolds seems lovely—filled with sunshine, soft colors, and decorative flourishes like seashell wind chimes and a photomural of a tropical beach. Music is often playing, and an affectionate dog is clearly a cherished pet. But a water-stained ceiling and soiled walls around light switches suggest that it’s a place where dreams are tinged with neglect. More tellingly, a sign on the mother’s bedroom door reads “Parental advisory—keep out,” as if she’s forgotten she’s no longer a teenager....

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s true-crime saga hustles viewers into a clever confidence game: a deathbed confession riddled with delayed revelations, bait-and-switch surprises, and unpredictable reversals of trajectory and tone. But what else would you expect from Steven Russo (Jim Carrey), a conman à clef based on an infamous real-life grifter and compulsive liar Steven Russell? Revisiting the subgenre of the screwball caper, Bad Santa and Bad News Bears scribes Ficarra and Requa have made a wildly successful directorial debut....

Let’s start with the bad news. The screenplay isn’t good. We suspected as much from the coverage at Cannes and our in-house appraisal of the Internet trailer. But we’ve now seen the press screening, and, I’m sorry to say, the script’s terminal-illness and teen-angst clichés are more aggressively malignant than we feared. The details recycled from better films, the maudlin emotional overreach—those we were prepared for. But there are ....

Musty, sticky, hot, and taut with psychopathological tension, Amy Seimetz’s feature-length directorial debut is, to put it mildly, a bad trip. With Sun Don’t Shine, Seimetz—most immediately recognizable for her roles in recent features by Joe Swanberg, Lena Dunham, and Shane Carruth—has chosen to flex her directorial muscles with the road-trip thriller, a genre already tethered to the history of low-budget filmmaking. Indebted to foundational American independent films such as The Honeymoon Killers and Wanda (another relevant, non-American point of reference might be Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms), Sun Don’t Shine is an unhinged, washed-out noir in which death and madness constantly lurk just out of sight, whether in the broiling trunk of a car, a run-down rest stop, or a mosquito-laden swamp....

The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane, 2020) Much has been said of the universality of Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, linking its failed-musician protagonist and his forbidding mentors to Western films such as Inside Llewyn Davis and Whiplash. Nevertheless, despite traversing familiar paths, The Disciple has an opaqueness that feels quite slippery. The painstakingly detailed visual and cultural world rendered by Tamhane somehow feels intimate and inaccessible all at once. Such impenetrability is not merely because of the film’s chosen milieu, namely the world of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai....

Taking its title from Oscar Wilde’s children’s fable, Clio Barnard’s second feature might seem a drastic departure from her docufiction hybrid debut, The Arbor (10). But the new film draws more on the director’s experiences and observations on location at the Buttershaw estate—the public housing project in Bradford, England where The Arbor is set—than it does from Wilde’s story. Gritty and grim, The Selfish Giant serves up an ample second helping of British miserabilism, but this time Barnard has softened her story with a tenderness that makes the film (slightly) easier to digest....

The Chorus Viewers feeling flummoxed by Kiarostami’s features might have an easier time with his shorts. The most important are the nine he made between 1970 and 1982 for the film division of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which he co-founded in 1969. Assigned to make educational films, Kiarostami scoured a National Film Board of Canada catalog for ideas, regarding Norman McLaren as one of his guides....