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In Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Jedi wannabe Rey (Daisy Ridley) strives to compel Jedi hermit Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to teach her about the Force. Meanwhile, the fascist First Order, spearheaded by Darth Vader manqué Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), struggles to quash the Resistance, led by Luke’s twin, General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). By the end, whether the Resistance can restore moral balance to the universe remains in doubt—but there’s no question that writer-director Johnson brings a surprising new equilibrium to the Star Wars franchise....

Tommy Lee Jones, who reached a midcareer high in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (and later directed McCarthy’s “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited, for HBO), has made a movie that declares the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s no country for women of any age. In The Homesman, Jones plays a claim-jumping saddle tramp and Hilary Swank a pious pioneer woman who team up on a risky, arduous trek across the Great Plains....

These events were never far from the minds of those at this year’s Qumra, the DFI’s annual industry summit held in Qatar’s coastal capitol of Doha. Now in its fifth edition, Qumra brings together filmmakers, producers, programmers, festival directors, and journalists for a six day convention of panels, screenings, workshops, meet and greets, masterclasses, and a variety of ancillary activities. This year, 36 DFI funded projects from 19 different countries were invited to participate in the event, providing one-on-one opportunities for the talent to meet and discuss their projects with both industry professionals and established filmmakers....

The Cloud in Her Room (Zheng Lu Xinyuan, 2020) For his final year as director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, director Bero Beyer put together arguably the strongest Tiger competition of his five-year tenure. Of the ten features comprising the 2020 lineup, only two lacked much in the way of merit, while the others in most cases announced or confirmed the talents of a new crop of young filmmakers....

The Spanish Dancer One of this year’s Rediscoveries, The Spanish Dancer (Herbert Brenon, 1923), riveted the Teatro Verdi, with live string orchestral accompaniment by Stephen Horne, Günter Buchwald, and Massimo Cum. A team of archivists in the Netherlands spent painstaking months piecing together the film’s story from four contradictory, half-completed versions on 35mm and 16mm. In the film, a sympathetic but transgressive romance brews between a deposed nobleman (Antonio Moreno) and the gypsy dancer who catches his eye (Pola Negri, in the role that launched her Hollywood career)....

Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis, 2022) Alain Gomis’s archival reassemblage is a compact work of cinematic archeology. Reworking outtakes from a 1969 French television documentary about the legendary jazz composer Thelonious Monk, Rewind & Play captures, with lacerating clarity, both the irrepressible and boundary-breaking genius of the musician and the knee-jerk racism to which he was constantly subjected. Gomis’s edit is a surgical dissection of the power dynamics between those behind the camera and those in front of it: the film cuts between extreme close-ups of Monk, in Paris to close out a European tour, and the fussing, hectic efforts of the film crew as they follow him through the city....

Images from Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) Few recent films have changed direction as often and as unpredictably as Mati Diop’s Atlantics. It begins in a vein of social realism—almost Ken Loach, Senegalese-style, with an anecdote of industrial dispute—then becomes a Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed young love, before turning into a supernatural tale of mystery and revenge, with an unlikely role for a hapless young police inspector. Atlantics is so much a film of surprises that a second viewing—six months after its Cannes premiere—can’t quite equal the thrill of seeing it for the first time, and you begin to notice that, even at a relatively tight 104 minutes, the content feels a little thinly stretched....

There surely exists some master algorithm that allows one to predict how marginally a given film will connect with an audience. In theory, the more money is invested in a film, the greater the number of people working on it and the more impersonal it is as a commercial production, then the more it’s likely to be absolutely central to the international map of cinema—at least, until it’s fallen off the box-office charts....

The Cloud in Her Room (Zheng Lu Xinyuan, 2020) You might imagine the cloud in Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room as something like a comic-strip thought balloon: this is very much a film of pensive, sometimes airily abstracted moments. Or it might just be tobacco smoke. So many cigarettes are smoked in the course of this Chinese debut feature—most of them long, slim, elegant—that you wonder whether Zheng is simply reflecting current Chinese social habits or possibly harking back to the Gauloise-laden salad days of the French New Wave....

This week, I was going to review André Téchiné’s Being 17. It’s a mature, elegantly scripted, beautifully cast, altogether intelligent and sensitive piece of work. But a critic cannot live on French intelligence and sensitivity alone, so instead I’m going to write about a fairly inane, willfully repellent film called The Greasy Strangler. It’s about a man who coats himself from head to foot in grease and strangles people. We never find out why: it’s just what he does....

Anne at 13,000 ft (Kazik Radwanski, 2021) I’m searching for a scene early in Anne at 13,000 ft, written and directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski with additional writing from star—or gravitational pull—Deragh Campbell. In the scene, Anne almost gleefully tosses an emptied, disposable drink-cup at her unfavorite coworker. A familiar, delicate sing-song of children playing beyond the frame fills the colorful space of the daycare where Anne works, I remember....

Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos at the Temenos site, 1980. Image courtesy of Temenos. A temenos, as conceived by the ancient Greeks, was a sanctuary, a sacred grove demarcated from the rest of the forest as a place of asylum, protecting what is within it and excluding what is outside. As linked to Asclepius, god of medicine, the temenos also functioned as a place of healing and restoration, where the sick would consult with the oracles in whose dreams and trances they would find cures for their afflictions....

The last feature Tsangari directed, Attenberg (10), looked at a wonderfully genuine 23-year old coping with her father’s terminal illness, all set against the bleak background of a desolate, industrial town in Greece. The woman’s fascination with David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries feeds her resistance toward the human species, where sex, death, and social structures are merely parts of the eccentricities of human nature. This irrationality is further explored in Tsangari’s latest feature Chevalier, a skewed comedy that observes male group psychology....

Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar shooting American Factory (2019) When talking to Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar, issues of class and labor, of how class and labor shape and inform us as people, are often the main text, and otherwise subtext. This was the case last spring when I conducted the first of several extended conversations with Reichert and Bognar, stretching to the fall, in New York. The documentary team was since nominated for an Academy Award for their current film, American Factory, “an omnivorous account of the opening of the Chinese-owned Fuyao car windshield plant in Dayton, Ohio” [Film Comment September/October 2019]....

With Charlie Says, filmmaker Mary Harron attempts to bypass the mythology of Charles Manson and zero in on the experience of three of his female followers: Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. That might not be the most popular project to undertake, given the cruel and senseless murders of innocents committed by Manson’s circle, but Harron has already been through the ringer in this respect with American Psycho (2000), and she’s continued her variations on transgressive violence, infamy, and reflexive structure with the Margaret Atwood miniseries Alias Grace (2017)....

All images from There Is No Evil (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2020) Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, There Is No Evil, tells four stories. Often elliptical, they range far and wide within present-day Iran: a family drama, centered on a man and his wife and daughter, that evolves into something else entirely; a suspenseful prison tale about a man desperate to escape; another, partly told on the run, about a soldier on leave who must face his fiancée and his own deeds; and finally, a fraught, generation-spanning story of a self-exiled couple and their niece visiting from Germany....

Following the premiere of People’s Palace at the 2018 Geneva Biennale of Moving Images, where it’s screening daily until February 3 under the working title Restored Communication, Beloufa sat down to discuss his early resistance to filmmaking, working with an inherently political form of popular entertainment, and his evolving conception of art and filmmaking as tools for social change. Recently you said that when you started out you were sure you didn’t want to make films, and then accidentally fell into doing just that....

Natural human decay of body and mind has never bothered Swinton’s Eve in Jim Jarmusch’s philosophically ambitious and densely allusive Only Lovers Left Alive. She and her musician husband Adam (Tom Hiddleston) are terminally beautiful English vampires who might have stepped out of a Symbolist painting; as a time-traveler, three millennia old, Eve is a sister, of course, of Swinton’s title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando. Though devoted to each other, Eve and Adam start out on different continents....