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On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish talks to FC Podcast superstars Jonathan Romney and Jessica Kiang about the festival’s denouement, touching on Baz Luhrmann’s batshit Elvis; the latest slice of la vie quotidienne from the Dardenne Brothers, Tori and Lokita; the divisive new Claire Denis film The Stars at Noon; and two films from Ukraine, Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of festival coverage, and catch up on all our Cannes 2022 podcasts, interviews, and dispatches here....

At last month’s Getting Real conference, organized by the International Documentary Association, Film Comment co-presented a critics panel exploring the relevance of such lists especially when it comes to documentary films. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Nick Bradshaw, Emerson Goo, Girish Shambu, and Kelli Weston to ask questions like: Are lists still useful in an age of democratizing cinema? What is the relationship between list-making and canonization?...

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year’s Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today’s episode features the Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat, whose film, Rule 34, won this year’s Golden Leopard. Check back here for our next episode from “The Future of Attention” at the Locarno Film Festival, featuring filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl....

The Mother and the Whore Jean Eustache (217 minutes) Sátántangó Béla Tarr (450) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Chantal Akerman (201) A Brighter Summer Day Edward Yang (237) Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick (184) Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler Fritz Lang (restored version, 297) Edvard Munch Peter Watkins (210) Andrei Rublev Andrei Tarkovsky (205) The Godfather: Part II Francis Ford Coppola (200) Once Upon a Time in America Sergio Leone (229)...

Unsolved Mysteries (Park Chan-wook, 2022) In a talk at the 60th New York Film Festival, director Park Chan-wook described how audiences reliably laugh when he refers to his movies as romances. No one could miss the love story at the center of his latest film, Decision to Leave, but its romanticism also lies in the intoxicating brio of its style. There is something seductive about the way the twists of the convoluted police-procedural plot unfurl in a baffling yet beguiling striptease of hints, tricks, and revelations....

On a Monday afternoon in the middle of the holiday cluster that the Japanese call Golden Week, the Salonpas Louvre Marunouchi in central Tokyo was mostly empty. Attendance was concentrated at the back of the theater, where three rows had been designated as “Premium Aroma Seats.” There, patrons waited to be wafted back to the 17th century by a special smell-enhanced presentation of Terrence Malick’s The New World. The history of attempts to combine cinema with smell is limited....

Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021) Early in Bergman Island—the sixth feature from French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve—a character refers to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage as “the film that made millions of people divorce.” This much-cited, apocryphal correlation is delivered with tongue-in-cheek levity, but the underlying implication is profound: by intimately modeling one possible method for navigating the problem of marriage, Bergman’s searing dramatic opus might have encouraged its viewers to reevaluate their own circumstances, and consider what might happen if they, too, were to follow a similar course....

Buzzin’ Around We inevitably look at the 13 two-reel comedies starring Roscoe Arbuckle and co-starring Buster Keaton through the wrong end of the telescope—intent on finding evidence of Keaton’s nascent genius at the very beginning of his screen career, when he was only 21 years old. But the revelation of the new Kino Blu-ray set that packages all of Keaton’s starring shorts along with his apprentice work with Arbuckle is not Keaton, but Arbuckle....

The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023) Though not a household name like directors Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, Atsushi Okui has been the cinematographer on almost every Studio Ghibli feature and short since 1992’s Porco Rosso. As the artist responsible for coordinating the process of translating storyboards into moving images, Okui’s influence on Ghibli’s look cannot be overstated. As the animation industry has transitioned to digital tools and platforms, Okui has led the charge in incorporating computers into Ghibli’s meticulous workflow....

Sideways Alexander Payne, U.S. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Michel Gondry, U.S. Before Sunset Richard Linklater, U.S. Million Dollar Baby Clint Eastwood, U.S. Goodbye Dragon Inn Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan Notre musique Jean-Luc Godard, France Vera Drake Mike Leigh, U.K. Kill Bill Vol. 2 Quentin Tarantino, U.S. Dogville Lars von Trier, Denmark Moolaadé Ousmane Sembene, Senegal Bad Education Pedro Almodóvar, Spain The Aviator Martin Scorsese, U.S. The Incredibles Brad Bird, U....

The Immigrant And we also talked about James Gray’s The Immigrant which, for anyone keeping score at home, has come up in this column for the last three weeks running. The substance of the conversation was this: if film criticism can’t do anything to get people out for James Gray, what can it do? This isn’t to say that Gray is the Greatest Living Filmmaker, or even part of that conversation—just throwing this out there, a movie by Marco Bellocchio, Dormant Beauty, opens in New York today—or that The Immigrant is a Masterpiece, or not....

Pamfir (Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, 2022) Pamfir, the Ukrainian crime drama that debuted in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight last week, is a film of dualities. The director, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, describes the lead character as a Janus-like figure, and opens his film with the image of an unknown man in costume—grass poncho and devilish mask—which we soon discover conceals both the titular character and his brother. The film tells the story of a decent family man, a well-digger just returned from working abroad, who is dragged back into crime for one last job....

Ilo Ilo Because of the scarcity of films this year in Cannes that dare to stretch the boundaries, break with conventions, or experiment in any meaningful way with form, the best alternative is to seek out work that does something interesting with storytelling. Among the debut work competing for the Camera d’Or—the prize for best first film, and one of Cannes’ most meaningful awards since it spans all the sections from the main competition to Critics Week—three fine examples stand out in the festival’s first half: Anthony Chen’s insightful family drama, Ilo Ilo, in Directors’ Fortnight; Flora Lau’s impressively disciplined Bends, also in Fortnight; and, in Critics’ Week, Ritesh Batra’s charming The Lunchbox, starring Irrfan Khan in one of his richest performances....

Bachi Valishvili and Levan Gelbakhiani in And Then We Danced (Levan Akin, 2019). Photo by Lisabi Fridell While the Cannes Film Festival can stoke industry and artistic interest through its gala premieres, local audiences in a movie’s home country can have a very different reaction to the buzz. That’s definitely the case for And Then We Danced—a quietly revolutionary movie that is now garnering attention in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where its story is set....

The first must-see movie of 1967 actually arrived in 1966, and for many of those in the surprisingly large audience it found, it was more than a film—it was the demarcation of a cultural battle line. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up opened in New York City’s now-demolished, then first-tier Coronet Theater on 3rd Avenue and 59th Street in late December. The release came just in time for awards consideration, a strategy that paid off almost immediately....

Here’s a little taster from back in the day, a snippet of an interview between actor-punk-icon Joe Strummer (one of the stars of Straight to Hell) and Film Comment contributor Graham Fuller (from our August 1987 issue): Graham Fuller: How did you become part of Alex’s travelling band of actors? Joe Strummer: Dunno man. Nothing better to do. GF: What do you think are his special attributes as a director?...

James “Whitey” Bulger mythologized himself as a South Boston neighborhood boy made good—or at least, “bad good.” Beneath that aura he reached new peaks of insolence and brutality as a ruthless crime boss. For all his Irish-American sentimentality about his ties to Southie, he controlled drug traffic on its streets while practicing extortion and working gambling and other rackets throughout his city, state, and country. His Winter Hill gang was based in Somerville, not Southie....

Jeremy Saulnier shows a puckish sense of humor by dubbing his third feature Green Room after calling his breakthrough second feature Blue Ruin (14). But he told The New York Times that the newer movie is decidedly “not tongue-in-cheek.” Saulnier probably said that because in Green Room, a tongue is less likely to stay in place than to be ripped from the mouth and eaten by pit bulls. The plot is so simple that relating any part of it risks destroying the film’s aura of menace....