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Birdman is both a departure and a renewal for Iñárritu. Markedly lighter than his past efforts—star Michael Keaton just earned a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy (and Iñárritu shared the prize for Best Screenplay)—the film nonetheless makes fervent, contradictory, and topical points about the lives of artists today—the drive to create meaningful work, the compulsion to stay “relevant” while retaining integrity. FILM COMMENT spoke with Iñárritu recently about the beauty of imperfection, the plight of the critic, and the hilarity of the fragile ego....

Images from The Cave (Feras Fayyad, 2019) Feras Fayyad’s Oscar-nominated Last Men in Aleppo (2017), about a group of volunteer rescuers in the Syrian town of Aleppo, was an extraordinary documentary about trauma and a desperate hope for survival. His second feature documentary, The Cave, is set in besieged Ghouta in southwestern Syria, and follows up on Fayyad’s previous themes. It opens with the line, “War brings out the worst in humanity and the best in humanity....

Comprised of three vignettes set in 1999, 2015, and 2025, Mountains May Depart tracks the lives of childhood friends from Jia’s native Shaanxi—singer-dancer Shen Tao (in one of Zhao Tao’s most tremendous performances), brash young capitalist Zhang (Zhang Yi), and poor mineworker Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong). Each grapples with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness and isolation brought on by the pressure to survive in the nation’s ever forward-thrusting milieu of industrial, technological, and economic progress....

FILM COMMENT spoke to Guerín, best known for In the City of Sylvia (07), shortly after the second screening of Academy of the Muses in Locarno. The film screens April 16 in Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Academy of the Muses I wanted to start with a comment you made after yesterday’s screening, that Jean Rouch’s The Human Pyramid was one of your biggest influences....

After simultaneously astonishing and horrifying critics and audiences with his debut feature, Son of Saul, the Hungarian director László Nemes returned this year with Sunset, presented in the competition of the 75th Venice Film Festival. In Sunset, Nemes’s filmmaking is as absorbing as it was in Son of Saul. Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century—where an orphaned young woman, Irisz, searches for her mysterious brother while working at an upscale hat emporium—presents its own kind of nightmare, made ominous and fantastical through Nemes’ claustrophobic framing, chiaroscuro look, and fluid camera movement....

You’ve said that this film reflects your own high-school commute home. Why did you choose to set The We and the I in the Bronx? We shot in the Bronx because I was (and still am) living in New York. We could not find any school in Manhattan that wanted to be part of this project so we eventually found this after-school center, The Point, where people were [open to] this type of project....

All images from Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991) Of all the female filmmakers to reemerge in recent years, Nina Menkes is perhaps the ripest for rediscovery. Her small but crucial body of films—five features, two shorts, and one co-directed documentary, produced intermittently over the course of three decades—remain startlingly fresh and near peerless in their intense focus on violence, power dynamics, and the inner workings of the female psyche....

The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1975). Courtesy of Icarus Films On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with the support of the United States, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was 32 years old at the time, and had been filming the events leading up to the coup for a year and a half—in marches, on the backs of trucks, inside the chambers of commerce....

After writing for short-lived but acclaimed TV series My Own Worst Enemy and Tower Prep, Stearns moved to short films, writing and directing Magnificat (11) and Casque (12), both featuring Winstead (to whom Stearns is married), and The Cub (13), a five-minute parable marked by the warped comic sensibility fast becoming his signature. The Cub, which screened at Sundance, introduced the “dubious role models” trope he identifies as a motif in his work, embodied in Faults by both the desperate, disgraced Ansel and Claire’s hapless, frustrated parents (Beth Grant and Chris Ellis)....

Arabian Nights (1974) — Pier Paolo Pasolini The Three Stooges (2012) — Bobby & Peter Farrelly Mekong Hotel (2012) — Apichatpong Weerasethakul Outrage Beyond (2012) — Takeshi Kitano Viola (2012) — Matías Piñeiro The Birds (2012) — Gabriel Abrantes Passion (2012) — Brian De Palma Fill the Void (2012) — Rama Burshtein Gebo and the Shadow (2012) — Manoel de Oliveira Without Title (2011) — Lisandro Alonso

RRR (S.S. Rajamouli, 2022) S.S. Rajamouli literally puts his stamp on his films. From the 2004 rugby drama Sye to the new revolutionary action movie RRR, a seal reading “an s s raja mouli film” is imprinted on the final shot of each of his movies, accompanied by a celebratory whoosh on the soundtrack. This stamp has become a guarantee of success: Rajamouli’s works have famously never flopped at the box office, even as they range wildly in tone and subject matter—from Buster Keaton remakes (Maryada Ramanna, 2010) to reincarnated-fly revenge dramas (Eega, 2012) to Lord of the Rings–style fantasy sagas (Baahubali: The Beginning, 2015 and Baahubali: The Conclusion, 2017)....

Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) The Cannes Film Festival has now come and gone, with Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite taking top honors. Other winners include Mati Diop’s Atlantics (Grand Prix), Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (which shared the Jury Prize with Les Misérables—the non-Valjean version), and Antonio Banderas (Best Actor) for Pain and Glory. For a look at how these choices compare with the critical consensus, check out these infographics from Germany, Argentina, the International Cinephile Society, and Screen Daily....

Barbara Hammer, On the Road, Baja California, 1975. Courtesy the artist and Company Gallery, New York. Word came in over the weekend that the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer passed away at the age of 79. In the September-October 2018 issue of Film Comment, Max Nelson wrote that Hammer possessed a “lush, romantic sensibility, and it meant filming bodies with friendly erotic admiration. She interspersed footage of her friends and lovers over images of flowers in bloom (Women I Love, 1976), laid ecstatic close-ups of her face and vagina over footage of rock formations with which they seemed to merge (Multiple Orgasm, 1976), and intercut images of a beckoning woman with short strips of 16mm film painted in red strokes that resemble layers of cellular tissue (Dream Age, 1979)....

Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2019) Yorgos Lanthimos is in talks to direct an adaptation of The Hawkline Monster. The novel, a “gothic western parody” by Richard Brautigan, has been on the cusp of production for years—first as a Hal Ashby project with Jack Nicholson set to star, and then later as a Tim Burton project with… Jack Nicholson set to star. Set mainly in Oregon, the story follows a pair of oddball gunmen hired by a young Native American woman, Magic Child, to hunt the “monster” that lives in the “ice caves” under her home—a strange place filled with magic and mind-bending chemicals....

Kirsten Johnson. Photo by Godlis. Kirsten Johnson’s next film is a unique collaborative work with her father. Dick Johnson (which shares his name) will, according to Johnson, “explore the unexpectedness of death, the surrealism of dementia, and cinema’s capacity to create life.” “With the magic of fiction, and the help of stuntpeople, my dad will die unexpectedly in each scene of the movie, until he dies for real, and then nothing will be able to help us,” Johnson told Film Comment....