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We also want to give listeners a head’s up on the subject of our next podcast, posting Friday, March 20, when we’ll be welcoming a very special guest to discuss Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang, starring Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant. Read Dan Sullivan’s essay on the film here. Finally, if you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times....

It’s an unpredictable and expansive film that brings together references from cinema, literature, art, and internet culture into a movie that feels classical in its construction and, at the same time, extremely contemporary in its subject matter and narrative twists—a vision of what it feels like to be alive today. And boy, is it creepy! On today’s Podcast, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish was joined by Bonello to talk about the film, which arrives in theaters on Friday, April 5....

On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by FC contributors Jordan Cronk and Giovanni Marchini Camia to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2022 edition. Thanks to James Wham for production assistance....

One of the standouts of the festival so far is The Adults, directed by Dustin Guy Defa. The film tells the story of Eric (Michael Cera), a young-ish man returning for a quick visit to the upstate New York town where he grew up. As he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters, played by Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, his obsession with poker—and his drive to beat every player in town—keeps prolonging his stay, and forcing long-delayed familial confrontations....

To kick things off, we invited official FC friends and otherwise renowned critics Cassie Da Costa and Abby Sun to dig into some of the standouts from the opening weekend, including docs like Fire of Love, Riotsville, USA, and Mija, along with some of the buzzier fiction features like Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick and Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World. To stay up to date on all our Sundance 2022 coverage, keep your eyes on this space, and subscribe to the Film Comment Letter....

Detour The Rep Report, our new Film Comment podcast series devoted to repertory programs and new releases, continues this week with its latest installment. Once again we talked about the latest movies (new and old) that we’ve seen, desperately want to see, or have wept bitter tears over missing, with special emphasis on the rich offerings of repertory / art-house cinemas. For the first half, I was delighted to join FC contributing editor (and Screen Slate board member) Nellie Killian, and Screen Slate founder, publisher, and editor Jon Dieringer....

Leonera Appearing in the official competition for the first time, Argentinean Pablo Trapero unveiled his fifth feature, Leonera, in which a pregnant woman, Julia, wakes up one morning to find the dead body of her boyfriend and the wounded body of his boyfriend. She’s charged with murder and sent to prison, where she is housed in a special wing for expectant and recent mothers, who get to live with their children until they’re four....

The pieces were produced while I was in college at McGill University and hosted a weekly late night radio show called Curiouser and Curiousear on CKUT in Montreal. Sometimes I just played music, which ranged from The Stooges to John Cage to Inuit throat chanting to L’Trimm. But with time, I started to use my two hours of airtime as my own sonic playground, a space where I could do anything, from bringing together Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to jam with Elliot Sharp, to having a group of experimental musicians create a live soundtrack to a Yul Brynner film that happened to be playing on TV at the same time, to going to a strip club to tape just the audio and then playing it back on my show an hour later, to hosting a talk show on how to become a better liar, to playing literally dead air....

In the director’s commentary for the excellent Blu-ray of The Counselor, the most underrated and indeed ridiculously maligned film of 2013, Ridley Scott muses that the proliferation of devices and the amount of time people spend looking at media hasn’t made them more sophisticated. If anything, audiences have less tolerance than ever for movies that don’t spoon-feed them the story. They also may not find a movie as pitiless as The Counselor sufficiently entertaining....

Miró l’altre In Pere Portabella’s short Lectura Brossa (03), avant-garde Catalan poet Joan Brossa describes himself as an “inventor of strategies” and an “unsubmissive opponent of official culture”—two definitions that also well describe the role assumed by Portabella in the bosom of Spanish cinema. And if we’re talking about strategies, let’s invoke one more: cinema as a point of interaction between different artistic disciplines. It’s impossible to think of Portabella’s films without recalling his ongoing dialogue with poetry, painting, music, or architecture....

Photo by Eugene Hernandez Agnès Varda looms large over the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The official poster of this year’s festival—emblazoned on a striking orange billboard that sits atop the Palais des Festivals—features an image of the iconic French filmmaker, who died in March, at age 26 shooting her first film, La Pointe Courte. She’s standing on the back of a technician, looking through a camera lens....

Can a film covered in honey be bitter? To answer the question we need to retrace the carbon footprints that nature and pre-industrial societies left on the machinery of cinema and the stories that came out of its factories. The cultural dimension of the “agrarian question” has crossed paths with the history of postwar Italian cinema on a regular basis, sparking debates and speculations on the value and supposed idyllic nature of pre-consumerist life....

Kodachrome Color Motion Picture Tests Every October, the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) meets in Washington, D.C., to help determine which 25 titles will be added to the National Film Registry. The new titles are generally announced in mid-December. Each year’s additions result in a wave of publicity focused predominantly on two or three familiar Hollywood titles. Shorts, experimental films, and documentaries are often treated as also-rans, if they are mentioned at all....

Anna and the Apocalypse began life when aspiring writer-director Ryan McHenry declared that the only thing that could make Disney’s High School Musical bearable would be seeing Zac Efron get eaten by zombies. McHenry spun a delectable 18-minute short, Zombie Musical (2010), from that inspiration, but he died from bone cancer before he could expand it into a feature. A script credited to McHenry and his school friend and collaborator Alan McDonald now brings his low-high concept to the big screen with an unsettling charm and odd humor all its own....

—Gregory Corso, “I am 25” Juliette Binoche catalyzed the captivating Clouds of Sils Maria on the set of Summer Hours (08), when she told writer-director Olivier Assayas that their shared history lacked some essential component—a film waiting to be made that would tap the very roots of their artistry. Assayas had helped catapult Binoche to French film stardom by co-writing the fluid, jolting erotic melodrama Rendez-vous (85), in which she played a hyper-sexualized gamine....

Too often when directors use natural lighting and handheld cameras, their quest for spontaneity comes off as artificial and affected. They seem to be selling realism rather than collaborating with their actors on capturing actual behavior. Jean-Marc Vallée, who also uses those techniques, has the talent to nail down a time, place, and atmosphere definitively, whether in the trailer parks and strip malls of Dallas during the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic in Dallas Buyers Club (13) or the Pacific Crest Trail vistas and 1990s drug pads in Wild (14)....