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On today’s episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute interview two members of COUSIN Collective, filmmakers Adam Piron and Sky Hopinka, about the series, the origins and activities of their collective, and the community of artists that they’ve cultivated.

With EO making its U.S. premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, we sat down with Skolimowski over Zoom to discuss his radical reimagining of Bresson, which follows a pure-hearted donkey set adrift in a cruel world. Though the filmmaker—known for classics like Walkover, Deep End, Moonlighting, and The Shout, among others—wasn’t able to attend this year’s festival in person, he was happy to field our many questions about his latest, a powerfully empathetic work of striking beauty and visual imagination....

Links & Things The New Republic‘s list of 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time J. Hoberman’s essay on the poll The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) Red Dawn (John Milius, 1984) Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000) The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966) No (Pablo Larrain, 2012) Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975) All the President’s Men (Alan J....

To delve into these questions, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited scholars Anastasiya Osipova (founder and editor of Cicada Press) and Lukas Brasiskis to the podcast. Lukas, a curator at e-flux, recently programmed films by the young Ukrainian artists Piotr Armianovski and Mykola Ridnyi as a fundraiser event. With these two works as a starting point, Osipova and Brasiskis go deep on the cinema of Ukraine—from the archival documentaries and searing fictions of Sergei Loznitsa, to the work of Sergei Parajanov, Larisa Shepitko, and more—and what it reveals about the current political moment....

In childhood, where did you go to the movies? What would your top 10 have been when you were 12 or so? Did you have guilty pleasures yet? Germantown, the Philadelphia neighborhood I grew up in, boasted more movie theaters than any part of town except Center City. The Orpheum, the Upsal, the Sedgwick, the Bandbox, the Rialto, the Walton, and the Wayne Avenue Playhouse were all within walking distance or a short trolley ride away....

A magisterial meditation on narrative and cinema, Mysteries of Lisbon is the most glorious achievement of Raúl Ruiz’s prodigious career and one of the first cinematic masterpieces of this century. Based on the multivolume work (untranslated into English) by 19th-century Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco, the four-and-a-half-hour film whets the appetite for its original six-hour incarnation for Portuguese television. Less starstruck and more satisfying than Time Regained (99), Ruiz’s take on Proust, Mysteries immerses us in the unbounded pleasures of plot, character, action, and intrigue, replete with a lyrical score and grounded in a myriad of vibrant performances....

L’Argent Robert Bresson, 1983 Gertrud Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964 F for Fake Orson Welles, 1975 An Autumn Afternoon Yasujiro Ozu, 1962 Lola Montès Max Ophuls, 1955 Yi Yi Edward Yang, 2000 The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse Fritz Lang, 1960 Eyes Wide Shut Stanley Kubrick, 1999 Love Streams John Cassavetes, 1984 Street of Shame Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956 Ivan the Terrible Part II Sergei Eisenstein, 1946 Tabu F.W. Murnau, 1931...

A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, 2022) “The following is a story that is somewhat true” reads the handwritten title card that opens A Woman Escapes, one of the standout features at this year’s FIDMarseille. The line might be used to describe much of the slate at this year’s edition, which was a showcase for essay films, mid-length hybrid documentaries, and experiments in autofiction. The festival was inaugurated in 1989 as the International Documentary Festival of Marseille before changing its name in 2011 to the International Film Festival of Marseille—but doc-heads needn’t panic: with an international jury presided over by French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, whose own practice straddles documentary and fiction, this year’s festival was full of films that played with notions of documentary form, authenticity, and duration....

As if recalling the original French title of The Measure of a Man—“the law of market”—Brizé again explores the laws of an inherently exploitative social system in A Woman’s Life. This time, however, it is the 19th-century economics of marriage and family instead of the neoliberal labor market. As Jeanne’s married life falls far short of the ideals she admires as a young girl, Brizé reaffirms that the exploited cannot help but play their own part in the exploitation, influenced and pressured by the ideologies of work ethics or romantic and maternal love, with their respective moral imperatives....

Genre Collage In one of his earliest and best-known essays, Sergei Eisenstein described five types of montage, illustrating each with scenes from his own films. The first four types (metric, rhythmic, tonal, and overtonal), deeply influenced by Ivan Pavlov’s study of reflexology, were conceived to trigger distinct physiological effects in the viewer. Now imagine if you will Eisenstein’s realization that inherent within this methodology was a collusion with the forces making life miserable for himself and his fellow countrymen....

The skeptic hero of Joseph Conrad’s Victory is embodied in John Cromwell’s fascinating 1940 screen adaptation by a typically distinguished yet unusually mustached Fredric March (though he appears clean-shaven in the film’s promotional materials). Forever spewing biting quips about the sorry state of humanity, he finds happiness in seclusion and lives on a Dutch East Indies island with only his Chinese servant. But after a brief departure, he returns with a young woman he rescues from ill treatment (Betty Field, in a role turned down by Ingrid Bergman), which leads to a sweet if age-inappropriate romance....

Then come the explosions, the giant metal screeching bird hovering over New York City, the chaos, the panic, and the army jets whizzing overhead. This is a job for Birdman, defender of truth, justice, and A-list stability. And with that, Keaton suddenly launches into the air, gliding over Gotham with a serene look on his face. He’s left behind this blockbuster outtake and we’ve gone from digressive day trips into Riggan’s imagination to a headlong plunge into his fractured psyche....

“The Decay of Cinema” was the title of Susan Sontag’s notorious 1996 New York Times Magazine think piece, but she made clear that she was concerned less with a decline in the quality of films themselves than in their audience: “Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired.” When something is said to be dead or dying, we are bound to hear more about it than ever....

To what extent then is it meaningful to maintain traditional distinctions between fiction and documentary, much less the varieties of hybrid fiction? This seems one of the central questions underlying many of the films included in Art of the Real—but it’s also one that has haunted cinema since the late 19th century and the pioneering efforts of Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers. The notion that there is such a thing as the documentary/fiction hybrid is just as venerable—though the terms may have changed—and has been reinforced over the past 130-odd years by works as superficially disparate as Edison’s The Kiss, Warhol’s Blow Job, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno....