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Wife of a Spy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2021) This unpredictable and engrossing World War II tale embeds an exposé of Japan’s infamous bio-weapons program in the drama of a civilian couple’s dueling loyalties. Cult horror director Kyoshi Kurosawa demonstrates an unexpected mastery of suggestion and restraint as he supplies (in James Agee’s words) four essentials of good historical moviemaking: “visual, aural, and psychological authenticity, and the paralyzing electric energy of the present tense....

BRUCE JENKINS curator, Harvard Film Archive Close-Up—Made at the start of the decade, Kiarostami’s reenacted documentary perfectly interweaves a surface simplicity with a rigorous conceptual sophistication. In the process Close-Up prefigured a significant cycle of independent productions that have attempted to resolve the often contradictory demands of articulating a progressive politic while deploying new formal, genuinely alternative means. Abbas Kiarostami Ten Best (alphabetical): An Angel at My Table, Archangel (Maddin), Blue (Jarman), The Book of Life (Hartley), Close-Up, From the East (Akerman), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Herzog), One False Move (Franklin), Silent Movie (Marker), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye) KENT JONES Film Society of Lincoln Center A tie between Eyes Wide Shut and Independence Day....

All images from Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani, 2018) Digital technology has made it possible to cleanly and imperceptibly erase any aspect of a still or moving image that you don’t want to be seen—wires in an action movie, blemishes on an actor’s face, Kevin Spacey. Ghassan Halwani’s Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible—screening in FSLC’s Art of the Real on Saturday April 27—is not specifically concerned with the now routine matter of digital-age erasure, but at a time when it’s increasingly hard to believe in the fidelity of images to any original truth, this film makes us acutely aware of what erasure can entail, politically and philosophically, and what it might mean to attempt to counteract its effects....

Watching Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work can be a source of joy, but also of terror—especially if you’re trying to write about it. Your eyes are bombarded with violent, abrupt changes of texture, color, and form, sometimes obliged to take in several superimposed images and captions at once—and now, in Goodbye to Language, with the additional stimulus, or demand, of a very idiosyncratic use of 3-D. Your ears, meanwhile, try to apprehend snatches of text, often spoken off screen, fragments of music that start and stop with equal suddenness, and a dizzying array of sound effects—barking dogs, gunshots, a particular intense burst of cawing crows that, in this new film, had me putting my hands to my ears....

Images from In My Room (Ulrich Köhler, 2018) The Apocalypse in cinema doesn’t need to be upper-case Apocalyptic. The alternative to “Behold the devastation!” can simply be a pensive, “Hm, strange—where’s everybody gone?” There’s the Roland Emmerich approach—and then there’s Ulrich Köhler. In My Room, from the German director of 2011’s Sleeping Sickness, is an unusually low-key vision of the end of the world—or at least, the end of someone’s world....

Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful is what you might call a UFO of a film—in this case, an Unidentified Folkloric Object. It’s partly a documentary, partly a poetic fantasy in which the characters include, as they are listed in an opening caption, “Sarchiapone: a Campanian buffalo; Tommaso: a Shepherd and guardian of an abandoned palace; Pulcinella: a traditional Campanian character, intermediary between the living and the dead.” The living and the dead mingle freely in a film that establishes a kind of dream-like intermediate realm, what you might call a “temporary autonomous zone,” between life and death, present and past, history and myth....

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter A literature teacher of mine used to insist that the only travel stories worth telling concerned one-way journeys; voyagers with return tickets had nothing of interest to recount. There’s ample support for this view in the conclusion of Interstellar, which made the odyssey to another galaxy and back seem about as momentous as a trip to your nearest laundry. Then again, there’s also plenty to refute it in the history of war cinema, especially post-Vietnam films, in which what so often fascinates us is the fact that the person coming home is never quite the person who originally left....

Road House (Doug Liman, 2024) “Nobody ever wins a fight,” proclaimed Patrick Swayze’s NYU-schooled philosopher-turned-bouncer, Dalton, in Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 meathead masterpiece Road House. But with all due respect to a man who’s used to doing things his way (or the highway), sometimes it’s simply irresistible to throw a couple of heavyweights in the ring and see what happens. So choose your fighter: in one corner, an impoverished Indian pit brawler trying to survive his city’s mean streets long enough to avenge his mother’s murder by corrupt cops; in the other, a disgraced ex-UFC star sublimating his guilty conscience—and subsidizing his frequent ER visits—by working security for a raucous biker bar in the Florida Keys....

Larry Clark’s photographs and films dwell on the twilight of adolescence and the dawning of adulthood, often featuring violent collisions between seductive, impersonal cultural forces and the young lives of his subjects that they threaten to uproot. The setting here is Marfa, Texas (pop. 2,000), a border town whose vast desert skies have inspired generations of wandering artists and whose Border Patrol keeps an oppressively close watch over Adam (Adam Mediano), a half-white half-Hispanic teenager, and his single mother, a collector of birds....

Post-traumatic cinema is in the air (and in this magazine—see Chris Petit’s article “Cinema’s Afterlife”). Dutch director Esther Rots’s debut feature provides for a most bracing and literal PTC treatment. Marieke (Rifka Lodeizen) suffers a double whammy: after the end of a relationship she’s sexually asssaulted by a stranger. She retreats from her flat in Amsterdam to a starkly isolated and dilapidated country house to convalesce. Home improvement becomes the operative metaphor for self-help, but the state of absolute decay that permeates the new abode suggests that mental health won’t come easy....

In interviews, Huang has speculated that the concept of “disorder” might vary according to ethnicity. Is there a form of chaos that is distinctly Chinese? Apparently yes, and his film both documents and embodies it. Grainy black-and-white footage, captured by amateur on-the-scene videographers, has been spliced together to create a nonstop portrait of a metropolis gone berserk—a city symphony from hell. Disorder begins with an image of a geyser unleashed from a broken hydrant....

Don’t get mad, get even—or, better yet, get your own secret police. That’s what a frustrated informer does in The Color of the Chameleon, a deadpan Cold War satire from Bulgaria. In Emil Christov’s directorial debut, a peek behind the Iron Curtain turns into a darkly funny trip through the looking glass. The state recruits a young misfit named Batko (codename: Marzipan) to spy on a deviant literary club. When he files an obsessive report that’s intergalactic in scope and earns only his handler’s scorn, he concocts a fake espionage department for his own nebulous investigations and blackmail plots....

Daniel Cockburn’s film ends with an odd disclaimer: “This movie does not necessarily represent the views or ideas of John Searle.” Searle, as a handful of you may know, is an American philosopher who postulated, among many other things, the Chinese Room thought experiment. To vastly oversimplify: Alan Turing’s “Turing Test,” another, earlier “experiment,” answered the question “Can machines think?” with an affirmative. In You Are Here, Searle’s rejection of Turing’s argument is enacted on screen: a solitary man sits in a room....

Almost 30 years ago, I spent the weekend visiting friends on Long Island’s North Shore. Also present at this impromptu house party was a professor of film at the Sorbonne, previously unknown to me. At one point, our hostess deputized me—as I was then an executive in the budding home video industry—and M. le Professeur for obvious reasons to run into town and make some appropriate movie selections from the local video store....

On Saturday, Chen, who’s worked with Edward Yang, won the Golden Horse for Best Actress (beating out Gong Li). FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca spoke with Hsiang in August shortly after the European premiere of Exit in the Locarno film festival. This seems like a very unlikely subject for a male director. Can you talk a little bit about how you developed this project? A few summers ago, I was on a bus....

Our Body (Claire Simon, 2023) At last month’s Berlinale, Claire Simon’s Our Body won no awards—by default, since it played in the noncompetitive Forum section—but it did emerge as a clear favorite of most attendees, flooring audiences with its three-hour immersion in the workings of a public gynecological clinic in Paris. Starting with a teenager (her back to the camera, her head ensconced in a hoodie) seeking an abortion, Simon documents patients at various points of life, seeking care for fertility issues, pregnancy, gender transition, endometriosis, and cancer....

Like Miguel Gomes’s six-hour comprehensive portrait of Portugal also showing in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang draws attention to cinema’s duty to document life, by capturing Turkey in all its harsh reality. Taking its title from the wild horses that gallop on the endless prairies of North America, the film takes place in a Black Sea town and tells the story of five sisters—from youngest to oldest: Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma, and Sonay—who move carefree with their long hair and liberated bodies on their way to becoming women....

You begin your documentary by describing the run-up to the chess sequence in The Seventh Seal, virtually shot by shot. It’s evident how immediate Bergman’s film remains for you. Absolutely. That was the first Bergman film I saw but also the very first film that shocked me so much that I was blown away with admiration. Before, I didn’t go to the cinema to see good films. It was just entertainment....

At least since Il Divo (08), and including his novel, Sorrentino’s work centers on the sentimental journeys of characters defined by a sense that “the world just happens along”—people constantly aware of the weight of their past, not haunted by it but nagged with incessant thoughts of what-could-have-been, and challenged, if amused, by the hubbub of spectacle around them. FILM COMMENT spoke with Sorrentino during a recent visit to New York in advance of his new film’s release on November 15....