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Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006) Somewhere in the interminable spiral that was the past year and a half, I finally got around to watching the alternately despised and beloved Tony Scott time-travel action-thriller Déjà Vu (2006). Later, just after this summer’s more conclusive return to theaters, I stepped into IFC to catch Theo Anthony’s semi-experimental surveillance documentary All Light, Everywhere. Seeing the two in quick succession, I realized that Anthony’s doc features a segment about a real-life surveillance device that is almost comically close to Déjà Vu’s central sci-fi conceit....

Before any of the subjects speak, Dror Moreh’s documentary comes endowed with unique cachet: the filmmaker has reeled in six former heads of Israel’s spy/counter-terrorism agency the Shin Bet—men whose professional lives have been defined less by conventional law than by risk management, who were entrusted with the power of life and death on behalf of the state, and who seem to know the score when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....

David Sorfa, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, has been Film-Philosophy’s managing editor since 2006. “We have special issues coming up on disgust and on animation,” he says. “One theme that runs through many of the recently published articles is the question of what it might mean for films to ‘do’ philosophy themselves (rather than merely act as examples of prior philosophical theses).” That’s a major challenge, and it’s been most recently met by, for example, an issue (edited by Douglas Morrey) devoted to Claire Denis and her sometime collaborator Jean-Luc Nancy; articles on the Dardenne Brothers’ cinema in relation to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas; and a compelling reconsideration by Gal Kirn of the collectively made 1932 German film Kuhle Wampe....

The Man Who Came to Dinner If great writing, to borrow Edison’s view of genius, is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, the movies have always had a hard time showing the 99 percent. A scribe at a keyboard is not the most vibrant cinematic subject, and the creative process which consists of staving off self-doubt and distraction is too interior to translate lucidly to the screen. Thus we get origin stories for authors, and their actual labor overshadowed by a montage of events....

Anton’s Right Here Lyubov Arkus, Russia A portrait of an autistic boy as seen through the eyes of a film historian with her own psychological baggage. Alternatively: a film historian finally comes to grips with her own life by learning to care for another “marginal” human being. A mind-bogglingly multilevel, multifaceted documentary, equal parts diary, essay, and political exposé.—Olaf Möller Ashes Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand Small is beautiful. Partnering with the boutique camera outfit Lomokino and cinephile 2....

Below are nine restorations (and two new 35mm prints) that I was l able to see in 2022. These represent what I consider to be some of the best work done this year, in terms of both the actual restoration and efforts to make difficult-to-see films accessible to the public. Following each film title are the available technical specifications of the restoration, as well as the organizations that did the work....

Has the feebleness of so-called studio filmmaking stimulated an appetite for Hollywood backstories? I’m not thinking of the miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan so much as the crazy distortions in the Coen Brothers’ ’50s pastiche Hail, Caesar!, the tales recounted in Jon Lewis’s recent Hard-Boiled Hollywood (a scholarly riff on Kenneth Anger’s scandal compendium Hollywood Babylon), and the revived interest in L.A. memoirist Eve Babitz, whose Eve’s Hollywood is filled with promising scenarios....

On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by Inney Prakash (programmer and founder of the Prismatic Ground Festival) and Vadim Rizov (director of editorial operations at Filmmaker, to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2022 edition....

For our latest episode from the shores of the Riviera, critics Robert Daniels, Miriam Bale, and Mark Asch join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish for a discussion of their recent festival viewing, including David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, and Claire Simon’s Elementary. Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition....

To discuss the role of these festivals and some selections from recent editions, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with one of FC’s most trusted festival correspondents—curator and critic Jordan Cronk. Jordan talked about some of his favorite small festivals, including Black Canvas, RIDM, and True/False, and discussed the prize-winners from the recent edition of FIDMarseille, including Outside Noise and Haruhara San’s Recorder. They also discussed picks from an upcoming archival film festival organized by the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, and some of Jordan’s personal highlights from Locarno....

Among the films discussed are Garrett Bradley’s Time; Khalik Allah’s IWOW: I Walk on Water; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth; Daniel Hymanson’s So Late So Soon; and Sky Hopinka’s Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore. Rapold was joined by Hymanson and Hopinka, critic Dessane Lopez Cassell, filmmaker Mustafa Rony Zeno, and more. Finally, please bear in mind that this was recorded before a live audience at Cafe Berlin. Special thanks to Em Downing of True/False for keeping the show running....

Before Midnight, like its two predecessors, is about the flowering of a mood over a period of less than a day between two characters: an American, Jesse, and a Frenchwoman, Celine. But where the earlier two films achieve erotic release, the third keeps veering off into irritable argument, which curiously seems proof that the couple have finally achieved a true intimacy. For those who have seen Before Sunrise (95) and Before Sunset (04), the shock, which comes early in the new film through backstory dialogue, is that Jesse and Celine have apparently been together ever since he missed his plane to prolong his stay with her at the end of the previous film....

Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024) Even though the weather was unsettlingly balmy, there was a chill in the air at this year’s Berlinale. As Jordan Cronk detailed in his dispatch last week for this publication, last September the news broke that artistic director Carlo Chatrian would be stepping down, putting an end to his team’s inspiring commitment to the cinematic vanguard and making this his fifth and final edition....

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023) It’s been a good year, cinematically speaking, for hit men in Paris. John Wick: Chapter 4 staged its wittiest set pieces in the City of Lights, whirling a bone-crushing melee around the Arc de Triomphe followed by a tour-de-force massacre accounting for each of the 270 steps leading up to Sacré-Coeur. With The Killer, David Fincher opens one of his slyest, most concentrated pictures in a chic arrondissement where an unnamed assassin (Michael Fassbender) holes up in an abandoned WeWork office with a view into a penthouse hotel suite, and waits, and waits, and waits for his target to arrive....

Mick Jagger Performance, 1970 Charles Aznavour Shoot the Piano Player, 1960 David Bowie The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976 Deborah Harry Videodrome, 1983 John Lurie Stranger Than Paradise, 1984 Dean Martin Some Came Running, 1958 Faye Wong Chungking Express, 1994 Dennis Wilson Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971 Jacques Dutronc Van Gogh, 1991 Frank Sinatra Some Came Running, 1958 Tom Waits Down by Law, 1986 Burl Ives Wind Across the Everglades, 1958...