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Read an exclusive excerpt from Dennis’s book here.

First up, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes critics and programmers Jordan Cronk, Inney Prakash, and Bedatri Datta Choudhury to discuss Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, the experimental Wavelengths shorts program, and more. Watch this space for more dispatches from TIFF 2022!

By the time he sent his 1971 collection “Hommage aux Années 40s” down the runway, Yves Saint Laurent had established himself as the great modernizer of 20th-century fashion. Gone was the wasp-waisted, haute-feminine silhouette popularized by Dior, replaced with a broad-shouldered, thin-hipped androgyny that normalized trousers for women and suggested the tuxedo jacket as the height of glamour. Saint Laurent was the first designer to prioritize the street as his archive, dressing the Youth Quake in Mondrian prints and safari jackets, reworking the sartorial DNA of cool kids like Paloma Picasso and Loulou de la Falaise into clothes that offered arguments, propositions, claims for the nature of chic and the idea of a modern woman....

I am easily distracted: of the three retrospective sidebars at the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, hands down the Joris Ivens proved irresistible (apologies to Andrzej Fidyk and Krzysztof Kieslowksi). But a double feature of Borinage (34) and The Spanish Earth (37) turned out to be uncannily prescient. The earlier film, made in response to the deplorable living conditions brought on by a 1932 Belgian miner’s strike, features remarkable footage of a confrontation between estranged labor and the authorities....

Even with its scaled-down numbers, roughly 150 features, reduced from last year’s 170, over 12 days is a lot to get a handle on. (The prices, on the other hand, skyrocketed almost 50 percent to $18, up from last year’s $12, a lot to gamble on an unknown quantity.) And its frustratingly scattered locations, from East 11th to East 72nd, Kips Bay to Chelsea West, certainly doesn’t make it any more manageable....

Maybe you’ve seen her: a girl-child in a heavily soiled nightdress, creepy-crawling on her belly through a garden of toadstools in the yard beside an old dark house. She is “the Sixties”—in all its promise and eventual deformity—coming into being, coming up from underneath. She was born Mary Kathryn Molumby in Bremerton, Washington, in 1946, but by 1964 she was Jill Banner, still only 17 and suddenly starring in Jack Hill’s comic-horror masterpiece Spider Baby....

Over Your Dead Body Today, any serious North American film festival is all about messages. (And that goes for the one on whose selection committee I have now served for two years, the New York Film Festival.) Whether or not the films at these festivals have any to impart, messages about mission and identity are unfailingly, and sometimes relentlessly, sent out through marketing campaigns that reinforce the festivals’ claims on your attention....

On the set of A Poem Is a Naked Person For years, fans of Les Blank traded rumors about A Poem Is a Naked Person, a documentary about musician Leon Russell that was finished in 1974 but never released. Shot over a two-year period, the film observes the musician at his studio compound outside Tulsa, Oklahoma; live in concert at New Orleans and Anaheim; and during recording sessions for his roots album Hank Wilson’s Back in Nashville....

Perhaps the single best scene witnessed at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival comes about two-thirds of the way into Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., when all the tension generated by the filmmaker converges in a 17-minute town meeting in which 26 characters have dialogue—shot, per Mungiu’s preferred aesthetic, in a single take. Balancing the personal and political concerns of his large ensemble, their character arcs and their archetypes, Mungiu’s set piece depicts a forum held at the cultural center of a Transylvanian village up in arms about the Sri Lankan migrant workers brought in to work at a local bakery....

Xavier Dolan is no stranger to the Cannes Film Festival: four of his five feature films have had their premieres here. But it’s his latest, Mommy, that seems to be stirring the sort of excitement often reserved for more mature auteurs. Dolan has made five movies in five years but this year he’s in competition for the very first time. While Mommy shares a bit of a title with his 2009 debut, I Killed My Mother, Dolan sees this new film as quite different....

All images from The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019) “I wanted to make something entertaining but with some bite,” Jim Jarmusch says of his zombie movie, The Dead Don’t Die, which opens the Cannes Film Festival today, and simultaneously on at least 500 screens in France. It arrives in the U.S. on June 14. Jarmusch tells me that he’s been working on it for over a year and is still too close to it to be able to say what it is, but that he feels that way about most of his movies....

Photo by Eugene Hernandez Fifty years ago here in Cannes, a group of filmmakers led by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut famously shut down the festival amid the May ’68 protests and strikes that were lighting up the country. Politics have defined Cannes 2018 as well. As this year’s edition reached its midpoint, activism dedicated to questioning the historical treatment of women at the festival has become central. The biggest public statement was made on Saturday, as 82 women, each representing one female-directed film that has screened here throughout the entire history of the competition, walked together on the red carpet (by contrast, 1,645 selections have been directed by men)....

Japan has a special meaning for Chris Marker. It’s the one place this eternal traveler—once of the physical world, now mainly of the mind, soul, and Net—has returned time and again, filming, pondering, and remembering experiences that in some cases he might never had. Marker’s ouevre is packed with films and videos made in Japan or referring to/imagining the archipelago’s culture and history. His earliest exploration, the 54 minute The Mystery Koumiko (65), was made during a trip to Tokyo for the 1964 Olympic Games....

Manny Farber Just about 10 years ago, Manny Farber and I were taking one last walk through a retrospective show of his paintings. He stopped to scrutinize a large board called Ingenious Zeus—vegetables, branches, and open art books splayed across a field of deep blue in an unsettled composition suggesting the eye of a hurricane. “I try to get myself out of it as much as possible so that the object takes on a kind of religious awe,” he remarked....

Barefoot in the Park Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here Even today, he still frets about the undue attention to his youthful beauty. For him it has been almost a straitjacket. “You want to be seen for what you can do… The ‘golden boy’ thing became a screen in front of everything else,” he told Playboy in 2007. By the time fame struck, he was a married father of two—a bit stunned by the fuss about his looks....

Les Idoles Yé-yé, a kitschy subgenre of French pop that flourished during the 1960s, has a definite look: cute women with short haircuts or long bangs, men in preppy clothes or motorcycle garb, short skirts, high boots, and the feeble presentation of innocence. Yet despite its dominance of radio, television, and magazines in France, yé-yé never fascinated the film world as much as other musical genres, though French actresses such as Anna Karina and Brigitte Bardot took up brief side careers as yé-yé girls....

Eye in the Sky starts with the epigraph “In war, truth is the first casualty.” A more pertinent homily would be “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” This incisive look at a joint United Kingdom/United States drone mission in Kenya, the most artful work yet from director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Rendition, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ender’s Game), dramatizes the sophistication and limits of high-tech warfare. Not even cutting-edge global communications and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle technology assures British Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) that Kenyan troops 4,200 miles away will wrest a clutch of al-Shabaab terrorists from a safe house in Nairobi....

The sixth movie in producer-star Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series is a marvel of American engineering. This exciting, semi-adult cartoon of espionage could have been laid out in an intricate schematic instead of a screenplay. Its savvy amalgamation of gimmickry, glamour, and athletics, on the one hand, and spy games played like mind games, on the other, generates tension and release for a super-swift 147 minutes. To maintain rooting interest, the film injects a shot of idealism every 20 minutes....