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Recalled Such inclusivity inevitably makes the festival a very mixed, XXL-size bag for critic and ticket-buyer alike. Since more than 90% of the features debuted at previous festivals, a little homework could separate the played-out fest vets and imminent releases (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Take This Waltz, The Ambassador) and third-tier slot-fillers (Bel Ami, Liberal Arts) from the truly new (Recalled, Duck Beach to Eternity) and noteworthy (the exuberantly formalistic, ingeniously hilarious, 207-minute dose of Russian absurdism that is Sergey Loban’s Chapiteau-Show)....

To be sure, a few thorns threatened to burst the big bubble of empathy: Dick Cheney, Ginny Thomas (wife of Clarence, Tea Partier in Citizen Koch, and bothering the still-heroic Anita Hill in ANITA), the activist-billionaire Koch Brothers. But what I mainly encountered was a heartwarming parade of good guys. Moreover many of the films are out to do the right thing by raising money for their associated causes (the entire proceeds in the case of Blood Brother)....

Lil Bub & Friendz Has this critic lost her mind? Not exactly. After all, even the chill Steven Soderbergh mentioned, in his much-quoted address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, that he didn’t want to risk being shot for running his mouth because “I love my cats.” Which is to say that the reasons the TFF, now 12 years old, has become a New York institution—with a 95 percent attendance at screenings and panels this year—has to do with seductions other than the greatness of the films in the lineup....

The Last Time I Saw Macao Much as Godard’s special brand of cultural tourism quickly became a dominant influence at international film festivals half a century ago, the literal tourism of the late Chris Marker became a major reference point in many of the edgiest offerings at the Viennale, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Fittingly, the last to date of the festival’s annual commissioned one-minute trailers, 19 of which were just issued on a DVD, was by Marker himself—a somewhat jaundiced view of the “perfect” film viewer as sought by Méliès, Griffith, Welles, and Godard, eventually and rather sadly achieved in the sad figure of Osama bin Laden watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon on a TV set....

Here at Film Comment hardly a week seems to go by when we don’t dream up a cool new idea for a regular department to add to the front (or back) of “the book” as we call it in the print world. If we were a monthly, or had a higher page count, we might have activated some of these ideas, but as it is we’re bursting at the seams with columns and sections—so much so that some of our trusty mainstays like Olaf Möller’s “Olaf’s World” or Harlan Jacobson’s “Brief Encounters” are occasionally sidelined for an issue (much to the dismay of these two longstanding contributing editors)....

Terence Davies’ dream project, Sunset Song, is now officially shooting: an adaptation of a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, it’s a coming-of-age story about the hard life of young woman growing up in a dysfunctional farming family in northeast Scotland at the turn of the century. And get this: it’s being shot in 70mm. Agyness Deyn plays the heroine, and her co-star is Peter Mullan, the undisputed champion of Scottish dysfunctionality … At last, what the world’s been waiting for: Johnnie To is finally making… a musical....

Moon, 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou, 2022) A study of mutual trust, Moon, 66 Questions calls itself “a film by Jacqueline Lentzou with Sofia Kokkali,” announcing this director-actor partnership as a package deal. Rightly so: as suggested by the acclaimed shorts Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year and The End of Suffering (A Proposal), and now affirmed in their collaborative feature debut, the duo’s rapport feels almost telepathic. Returning to Athens after some time away, twentysomething Artemis (Kokkali) finds her father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos), afflicted by multiple sclerosis....

Images from “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (Radu Jude, 2019) Radu Jude was one of the first directors of the Romanian New Wave to stray from the austere visual realism that seemed to have become the default mode for that country’s reinvented national cinema. Aferim! (2015) was a black-and-white 19th-century epic with a visual style somewhere between Miklós Jancsó and Sergio Leone, while the ’30s-set Scarred Hearts (2016) used tableau-style compositions to depict life in a sanatorium, with striking use of horizontality to reflect the fact that its hero spent much of his time lying immobile with his chest in a plaster cast....

If a science-fiction film featured a scene in which scientists debated the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” what might you expect that hypothesis to concern? The rate of combustibility of rocket fuel required to propel a metallic cigar-shaped object to the edge of the universe? The likelihood that extra-terrestrial beings would come in insectoid or jellyfish-like form? Wrong on both counts. The hypothesis, otherwise known as the theory of linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ cognition or worldview....

It’s not always easy to know what’s going on in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk—which makes the film seem all the more convincing as an evocation of war. There’s a sharp, cold note of realism in the opening minutes of last week’s release, War for the Planet of the Apes, in which a terrified human soldier, part of a platoon taken unawares in an ambush, admits in a radio call to his command post that he has no idea what is going on....

I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke, 2010) There’s a great deal of travel by water in Jia Zhangke’s documentary I Wish I Knew—much of it around Shanghai’s port area and on the city’s Suzhou River. This is a regular motif in the films of a director who, since the late ’90s, has been foremost in Chinese cinema in mapping his nation’s relentless social and economic flux. But “flux” understates what is at stake in I Wish I Knew, which looks back at Shanghai’s history and offers a picture of drastic, often violent change that has left a legacy of uncertainty alluded to in the film’s English title—taken from the American ballad crooned in one scene by a dapper elderly gent....

I wouldn’t say that I altogether have a blind spot with Philippe Garrel, but he’s one of the major French filmmakers that I have the most trouble mustering enthusiasm about, at least consistently. I’m not the only one—Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about his own problems warming to Garrel’s work, given that so many of his colleagues are passionate supporters of this director. I certainly admire a number of Garrel’s recent films, although I only caught up with his work with 1999’s Night Wind....

Werner Herzog’s documentary about the Internet, Lo and Behold, is subtitled Reveries of the Connected World, and in the last week, the connected world has shown us some very curious oddities. It has, among other things, given us Herzog’s responses when told about Pokémon Go (“Is there violence? Is there murder?”); and the German sage’s opinions on Kanye West’s “Famous” video, which he perhaps overrates as a revelation of the moving image, but which triggered some curious speculations about the prevalence of döppelgangers online (not least of all, the ever-popular soundalikes who have spoofed his solemn Bavarian tones on monologues about everything from speed dating to Where’s Waldo?...

All images from The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1968) The Czechoslovakian director Juraj Herz, who died last year, started out as a puppeteer, and was actually born on the very same day—September 4, 1934—as animator Jan Svankmajer, with whom he collaborated more than once. Svankmajer’s animation characteristically made uncanny use of live action; conversely, Herz’s best-known film The Cremator (1968) is a live action film that not only includes a certain amount of puppetry, but actually feels like a puppet show mounted using living flesh-and-blood mannequins....

The Green Fog is a new version, in a wonderfully oblique fashion, of Hitchcock’s Vertigo; it could also have been named San Francisco Plays Itself or, to borrow a title from Peter Greenaway, Vertical Features Remake. Hitchcock’s film is one of the most vertically obsessed films ever and The Green Fog follows suit, but since this is a work co-directed by Guy Maddin, you can imagine that it’s also obsessive on many other levels that Hitchcock could never have dreamed of....

There was a time when, given his advanced age and the themes of his films, every new work from the Portuguese veteran Manoel de Oliveira would be hailed by critics as his definitive swansong. This state of affairs went on for something like 30 years, before Oliveira eventually bowed out at the age of 106. Jean-Pierre Léaud could well have many years in him yet—let’s hope so—but in the last year alone he has made two films that it’s hard not to see as valedictory statements....

One of the best films to premiere last year, Western is probably also the best film since Claire Denis’s Beau Travail to be made by a woman about men (indeed, about men who are without women, most of the time). Like that film, it’s also about men at work—about breakin’ rocks in the hot sun, as the song goes, although the Eastern European climate in Valeska Grisebach’s film is somewhat more moderate than the pitiless desert where Denis’s legionnaires toiled....

All human life is present in Otar Iosseliani’s films—and a fair amount of animal life, too. In any given work of his you might find dogs, goats, cows, even the odd leopard, and in Farewell, Home Sweet Home (99), the undisputed star of the show was a highly unpredictable—and no doubt undirectable—marabou stork. His interest in this bestiary might lead you to think that Iosseliani has more patience with animals than with humans—and it’s true that the Paris-based Georgian veteran, now aged 82, is one of cinema’s great curmudgeons....