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Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021) With its third new director in four years, the Locarno Film Festival has been in a state of near-constant transition. Following the abrupt departure last September of previous head Lili Hinstin, the festival quickly hired Swiss-Italian critic and curator Giona A. Nazzaro to oversee its 74th edition. Vowing, per two recent interviews with Variety, to take Locarno in a more “audience-friendly” direction in an effort to “broaden the moral imagination” of the festival, Nazzaro appears to have a vision more in line with what the organization’s executives have long sought....

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022) There is a familiar trick of mise en scène in the long-form profile of a working artist. The chronicler goes on a studio visit and sets their subject in situ, discerning minutiae from work-strewn surfaces—a pile of canvas scraps, a tool in unusual isolation—as if every chance arrangement might reveal some worthy secret. This is how Kelly Reichardt introduces Lizzy (Michelle Williams), the sculptor protagonist of Showing Up: surrounded by reams of sketches, she is rapt with focus, coercing clay into tender figuration....

“What interests me is history, and politics only interests me to the degree that it is the mark history makes on the present.” The French release of Sans soleil and La Jetée on DVD is an event, as is every furtive apparition in the news by Chris Marker, one of the great cineastes of our time as well as one of the most private. Marker, 81, has always preferred to allow his filmed images, rather than his image as a filmmaker, to speak for him....

For a profitable survey of character acting, in all the term’s elasticity, consider New Directors/New Films. A number of movies in the series regard eccentricity of mien through social and dramaturgic lenses, examining both how character actors create assumptions by their very presence and how these assumptions demarcate character from conventional performance. Such slippage is exemplified in Richard Ayoade’s jet-black comedy The Double. Channeling Dostoevsky’s novel through a prism of Gilliam-esque absurdity, Ayoade’s film follows office milquetoast Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) through his daily rounds of shame and rejection, eventually pitting him against a doppelgänger (also played by Eisenberg) who brims with the very confidence Simon lacks....

In Sexy Durga, Sasidharan unfurls a diabolical nightmare on the streets of Kerala, an Indian state celebrated as “God’s Own Country” for its abundant natural splendor. A young Hindu-Muslim couple, Durga and Kabeer, elope together in the dead of the night and hitch a ride with two punkish youths who promise to deliver them to the nearby railway station. The sinister undertones of the men’s enthusiastic offers to help reveal themselves slowly through the details—the decapitated head of a goddess Durga statue that dangles in the front of their van, the abrasive thrash-metal music they insist on blasting, their leering glances at Durga, and their relentlessly intrusive curiosity about the couple’s relationship....

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) Rachel Morrison, who worked as the Director of Photography on Dee Rees’s Mudbound (becoming the first woman nominated for an Academy Award in that category), is currently eyeing her own directorial debut. Based on a script by Barry Jenkins, the film, tentatively titled Flint Strong, will focus on the life of boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields and her quest for Olympic gold. Cristina Álvarez López, a critic best known for her video essay collaborations with Adrian Martin, recently published this essay on Philippe Garrel’s Rue Fontaine (with the full film included!...

Fans of pointy Fifties boobs take note: this poverty row noir is for you. The first half of Edgar Ulmer’s 1955 film economically unravels a seemingly bland murder mystery through stock footage and the narrated flashbacks of detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton). But what raises doubts about whodunit in the mind of the Brylcreem-addicted cop—and effectively ends his career—are the curves and possible innocence of tried-and-convicted Eden Lane (the tragic starlet Barbara Payton, in her penultimate screen appearance)....

Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) By the time you read these words, the detonation of Barbie discourse will likely have faded to its most tedious aftereffect: commentary on the mountain of gold it accumulated on opening weekend and What This Means for the Movies (and for Women). You have surely endured, and perhaps contributed to, one of the half-dozen meme cycles the film has engendered since it broke the internet. You will have followed the factions of the Barbie vs....

Une simple histoire The retrospective for Marcel Hanoun held at New York’s Anthology Film Archives this past spring represented a tremendous opportunity for those who have heard about the filmmaker’s elusive contributions to the history of French cinema but have been unable to experience it firsthand, save for his debut, Une simple histoire (59). The series marked the first dedicated survey of Hanoun’s work in the U.S. and benefited from a recent comprehensive retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française (for which a number of gorgeous 35mm and 16mm prints were struck) to bring a selection of Hanoun’s films to the city where Une simple histoire received its belated U....

In 1967 a London screening of Thomas White’s Who’s Crazy?, a small independent picture that had premiered a year earlier in Cannes, was canceled after the authorities deemed it to be encouraging disrespect toward the London police. The film chronicles the fortuitous escape by a group of mental patients when a bus carrying them breaks down in the middle of the Belgian countryside. Fleeing the enclosed space in which they were confined, they reach a house inhabited by a lone, taciturn man....

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is bound to be regarded by some as its director’s most mature film to date—mistakenly so. It’s true that particularly in its truncated, “international” form—i.e. the version prepared for export by the film’s producers and released on American screens—13 Assassins is notably consistent in tone, with only occasional doses of humor that are provided for the most part by the film’s only non-samurai character, raucous mountain man Koyata (Yusuke Iseya), who is this film’s equivalent of the Toshiro Mifune character in Seven Samurai....

Above all, bodies and races: when I try to understand why this film has been so violently rejected, those are the first words that come to mind. To begin a film with a fellatio scene is nothing. That’s been a permissible audacity for a long time. But if the guy is obese and half-caste, and the girl beautiful and white, well, that’s a scandal: not that cock in that mouth!...

Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man Completed a few months before Jonas Mekas’s 90th birthday, Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man is both the latest installment in the series of some two dozen “film diaries” that Mekas has made since the late 1960s, and a new beginning. In other words, more of the same and radically different. Having watched it four times, I also think it is Mekas’s most essential film, although if right now, I were to look at the earlier, grander masterpieces of the film genre that Mekas made his own through 60 years of invention and perseverance—for instance, Walden (69) or Lost Lost Lost (76)—I might modify that last statement....