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With All These Sleepless Nights, Marczak captures this splintering vision again, netting a Best Director award last year at Sundance. Controversies over staging have not deterred Marczak; if anything, they have emboldened him. An all-hours daisy-chain chronicle of Warsaw partygoers focused on friends Michal and Chris, All These Sleepless Nights seduces us with its mysterious, magical personalities and narrative flourishes, to the point of seeming fictional. Michal’s falling madly in-and-out of love with a young woman is not only fraught with pain, but also tests his male friendship....

All About Ah-Long Can you talk about how you broke into films? I was singing on television and somebody spotted me and asked me if I was interested in doing films. I was very young, about 18. I just said, okay, let’s give it a try. That’s how I got in. Accidentally. I was very much on my own, I didn’t have a manager or agent. The series includes several of your important early titles, like the Shaw Brothers’ The Dream of the Red Chamber [1977], where you played opposite Brigitte Lin, and Legend of the Mountain, directed by King Hu....

And yet, the film industry goes on. Despite opening the day after the MV Sewol ferry disaster, independent movie Han Gong-Ju became the biggest indie hit of all time in Korea, selling 100,000 tickets in nine days, breaking the records previously held by Breathless and Bedevilled. This drama about a bullied teenaged girl has been praised at festivals around the world, and it’s become a popular favorite in Korea, hanging on in the box office top ten....

In the mid-Seventies, when porno chic still held sway, fledgling director Henri Charbakshi found backers for his now-lost first feature, The Last Affair—an art-house-inflected story about prostitution—with the proviso that he include hardcore sex scenes. Reluctantly he agreed; surprisingly, his cast of first-time performers and more seasoned Chicago theater actors (including Betty Thomas and Ron Dean) stayed on. Filmmakers Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman arranged with Charbakshi to film this behind-the-scenes documentary and avoided Affair’s main narrative, focusing instead on the discomfort of the cast and crew in handling the X-rated scenes....

A chador-clad vampire on a skateboard, the heroine of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as quietly defiant as the film’s title. Preying primarily on menacing misogynists, our protagonist (Sheila Vand) silently slinks through the shadowy streets of “Bad City,” a fictional Iranian ghost town, maintaining her own code of moral justice deep into the hours of darkness. But when she meets Arash (Arash Marandi), a down-and-out hipster who never seems to have a bad hair day, she finds her thirst for blood quenched by his companionship....

Like Fast’s previous works, Remainder is at once a fulfilling and ungraspable experience. In the medium-length Continuity (12, and its 2015 extended version) and 5,000 Feet Is the Best (11) he edits stories about the conflicts in the Middle East into a continuous loop that immerses us in the subject matter but flouts our expectations of linear storytelling. The influence of memory and language, the cyclical nature of individual and collective experience, the confusion between fiction and reality, and the dismantling of experience through reenactments all recur in his oeuvre....

Françoise’s introspection and art appreciation (she visits museums and gives talks on Medieval theology in Renaissance painting) are balanced by the parallel and increasingly intertwined story of Ion (Kaou Langoët), a geography student at the University. Creating a fresh new start for himself in Rennes, Ion begins dating a pretty blind girl, Lydie, and plunges himself into his studies only to have his newly balanced life threatened by the return of his homeless mother (Elina Löwensohn), who knew Françoise back in their punk-rock days....

“Da Cunha’s book has quite a mythical reputation,” Gomes told Film Comment via e-mail. “Like many others, I had heard about it but never read it.” In 2015, when he finally began to read the novel—on a flight to Brazil, no less—it took him just 50 pages to realize that he wanted to adapt it into a film. “It was a bit insane because the book has more than 500 pages, and the first 50 are just about geography, climate, animals, and plants,” he said....

Casque d’Or The films Jacques Becker made in a remarkable run between the mid-Forties and the mid-Fifties—including two melancholic crime dramas (Casque d’Or and Touchez pas au grisbi) and three under-seen, tonally unpredictable comedies (Antoine and Antoinette; Rendez-vous in July; Édouard et Caroline)—tend to ripen in an atmosphere of patient observation, letting their characters make an impression slowly and accumulating local and period detail as they move. In the climate they maintain, loud declamatory speeches and grandstanding gestures don’t grow easily....

The Present The first time I saw The Present, the rueful, digressive video essay Robert Frank produced when there were—in his words—“another 1,347 days until the year 2000,” it was during an eccentric program at the Museum of Modern Art of films somehow concerned with the notion of “free time.” Frank’s short came after a Humphrey Jennings short from 1939, a Looney Tunes cartoon called “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” and a fragment from Josef von Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith (among other selections)....

Perhaps no Hollywood film better exemplifies the passive-aggressive game of hide-and-seek the industry has long played with queerness than Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 Tea and Sympathy. Based on a sensational 1953 play by Robert Anderson, this unorthodox ’50s movie melodrama is in some ways not all that thematically deviant from other American films of the era, such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life or Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind or Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Miller’s A View from the Bridge, all of which are preoccupied with similar questions around American masculinity as a social construct....

Few filmmakers were as formally complete as Chantal Akerman. Perhaps none ever put forth an oeuvre as richly unified in character and technique; the narrative and structuralist conceits of her films were equally informed by her sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. Though the Belgian filmmaker spoke of her influences—including Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Jonas Mekas, all of whom she discovered upon her epochal relocation to New York in 1971—not one of her films feels like it’s flaunting avant-garde technique or received ideas of durational cinema....

THE FILMMAKER: ELIZA HITTMAN, NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always opened as scheduled on Friday, March 13—a cursed date, as its release, along with a scheduled Film Comment Talk with the director, was subsumed in the domino-collapse of theater closures in NYC and elsewhere. Interview conducted by phone at 10:30am, Thursday, March 19. Condolences—that seems like a big word, but I was so excited to see this film....

An innovator in cinema exhibition and an engineer, Benicheti (1943-2011) once made a film about the Normandy landing designed to be exhibited on a site-specific 360-degree screen, and a 3D musical about wine production. In Cousin Jules, he creates a vibrant and minutely detailed soundscape that is at times orchestral in its use of ambient noise and the precisely textured clatter of Jules’s metalworking. Shots are often held for a beat or two after an action has completed or a subject has left the frame, the syncopated clangs of an anvil or crunching of clogs on gravel replaced once more by quiet and stillness, but never by silence: insects hum, the wind whispers through the trees, animals cluck and huff in the distance....

“I’ve only loved girls with dead fathers,” Alex (Denis Lavant) tells Anna (Juliette Binoche) during a sleepless night of romantic near-connection. Is it any surprise that enfant terrible Leos Carax would so explicitly link the ecstasy and agony of puppy love to a father figure? After all, he has spent most of his career transcending the influences of his spiritual forefathers Jean-Luc Godard and Philippe Garrel (both of whom have cast their surrogate son in their own films) by shooting off an arsenal of spitballs and fireworks at both the screen and the public....

Spending a lot of time with something—a film, a genre, a culture—doesn’t always guarantee a more profound understanding of it. The simplest things can be irresolute, refusing easy categorization or moral binaries. And because we live in a time when even very plain statements are judged not for their aesthetic value but solely by the “politics” they evince, Eiichi Yamamoto’s beautiful and obscene anime Belladonna of Sadness (73) requires such a disclaimer....

Wild Girl The early 1930s were a period of intense creativity for director Raoul Walsh, one of those artists who could immediately capitalize on the possibilities of new technology. In 1930 he filmed The Big Trail starring a young John Wayne, using an early 70mm process that Fox called Grandeur. While a box office failure at the time, it stands today as a masterpiece of the widescreen form, with its epically choreographed masses battling in deep focus....