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The movie-brat generation established the tradition of directors using short films as calling cards—most famously, George Lucas with Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967), which he expanded into THX 1138 (1971), and Steven Spielberg with Amblin’ (1968), which helped win him a deal at Universal’s TV division (and later supplied the name to his production company). But in the case of Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein, their 14-minute short The Strange Ones (from 2011) has the impact of a stand-alone work of art, while the 81-minute feature, which made the festival circuit last year and is just now being released, feels more like the show-off calling card....

Justice is Done (André Cayatte, 1950) “The things you get fired for when you’re young are the same things that you get the lifetime achievement award for later on,” Francis Ford Coppola pointed out to the audience of Lyon’s Lumière Film Festival, where he was the guest of honor this year and given a retrospective alongside a motley crew of honorees comprised of Lina Wertmüller, Donald Sutherland, Marina Vlady, Marco Bellocchio, Daniel Auteuil, Frances McDormand, Bong Joon-ho, and Gael García Bernal....

Schlussakkord (Final Chord) (Douglas Sirk, 1936) Two days before this year’s Nitrate Picture Show, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton dropped by the Dryden Theatre—housed within the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York—as part of an international tour for his new essay film, The Afterlight. Composed entirely of movie fragments featuring actors and actresses who are no longer alive, The Afterlight exists only as a single, polyester-based 35mm print that progressively scratches, burns, or otherwise deteriorates with each screening—until it is no longer exhibitable, at which point, the film will cease to exist....

Published last year, Jonas Mekas: I Seem to Live. The New York Diaries, vol. 1, 1950-1969 picks up where Mekas’s revelatory memoir, I Had Nowhere to Go (1944–1955) left off. Starting in the ’50s, this volume spans the formative years of the artist’s career: his and his brother Adolfas’s arrival in New York, their first experiments with film, the founding of Film Culture magazine, the start of Mekas’s weekly column in The Village Voice, and more....

Mimosas Amid the palm trees and minarets, within walking distance from the grand Koutoubia Mosque, the 2016 Marrakech International Film Festival balanced exclusivity with access. The free daytime screenings at the festival (held in December) were widely attended, with long lines leading up to the theater entrances. In the evening the red carpet shone with local royalty as well as stars and creators from films like Anna Rose Holmer’s tense The Fits to Oliver Laxe’s esoteric Mimosas....

The Purge Suitably, a film about the threat of danger within the “safety” of one’s lodgings was selected to establish the mood on opening night. The Purge, James DeMonaco’s hotly anticipated (at least by me) home-invasion thriller, envisions a not-so-distant future (2022) in which all laws are lifted one night a year in order to keep crime, homelessness, and unemployment rates low. Some choose to cleanse themselves of evil thoughts and desires by transforming into cold-blooded murderers, and others, like the Sandins—father, mother, teenage daughter, and tween son—prefer to lockdown for a quiet evening in, which should be a secure enough option considering that Dad (Ethan Hawke) is responsible for selling most of the home-security systems in their deceptively friendly suburban neighborhood....

The Merchant of Venice The history of film is a history of loss, of studio archives dumped into the Pacific and nitrate prints melted down for silver. That is why the Museum of Modern Art’s festival of film preservation, To Save and Project, feels like a yearly miracle. Now in its 13th edition, it celebrates the work of film archives the world over, and though the fest has slimmed down from previous years, it still offers a cornucopia of heretofore unknown pleasures that range from silent German monster movies and Clara Bow comedies all the way to experimental documentaries and Canadian pulp pastiches....

Taxi Driver This year was the 15th anniversary of the Tribeca Film Festival. Yes, time flies. It has flown even faster for the talent on stage at the Beacon Theatre after one of the festival’s galas, the 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver, which took place just two days short of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Better that no one was aware: the coincidence might have inspired a critic as keen for a fresh angle as I am right now to pose the question, “Is Travis Bickle our Hamlet?...

Lead item: Belgian horror and giallo fetishists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the couple behind Amer and the mind-melting The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are striking out in a new direction. Their next project will be Laissez bronzer les cadavres (roughly translated as “Let the corpses get suntanned”). It’s an adaptation of a 1971 novel by cult Seventies neo-polar writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose Nada became an underrated 1974 film by Claude Chabrol, and whose 1981 novel The Prone Gunman has just been adapted by Taken director Pierre Morel with Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, and Mark Rylance under the rather uninspiring truncated title The Gunman....

Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses is a heady affair, especially when seen in our aesthetically and politically conservative times. It imparts the thrill of witnessing the hedonism and lawlessness—both sexual and artistic—of a bygone culture. You also feel an almost tragic surge of melancholia watching it: where and when, you wonder, will cinema ever get quite this wild again? According to various online sources, Stanley Kubrick acknowledged Matsumoto’s film as an inspiration for A Clockwork Orange, although I haven’t found any concrete evidence for where or when he might have done so—and it’s hard to see exactly what he might have taken from Funeral Parade of Roses, other than a heavy use of wide-angle lenses and a general celebration of in-your-face provocation....

Images from Give Me Liberty (Kirill Mikhanovsky, 2019) Kirill Mikhanovsky’s Give Me Liberty is relentless and altogether exhausting—but it’s also a joyous, tender blast, and was rightly one of the hits of this year’s Cannes, where it featured in Directors’ Fortnight after premiering in Sundance. It now plays as the centerpiece of BAMcinemaFest on Monday, June 17, before its release later this year. Variety’s review in Sundance compared the film in part to the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, and while you’re likely to have more of an unalloyed good time with Mikhanovsky than with the Safdies’ exhilarating but often discomforting drama, the comparison holds....

Not the most momentous but, in a comically sour way, perhaps the most painful reminiscence in Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog comes in a story she tells about being hospitalized after breaking her back as a child. While she was lying immobile in hospital, attendants would read to her from a story about a grey rabbit. Anderson was 12, and immediately before her accident, had been reading A Tale of Two Cities and Crime and Punishment: consequently, she says, “The grey rabbit stories were kind of a slow torture....

It can come across as the most dismissive thing a critic might say. You enjoyed a director’s first film, and you’ll be really interested to see what they do next. But in the case of Ricky D’Ambrose’s hour-long Notes on an Appearance, it’s possibly the most appropriate comment. Having been struck by the film when I first saw it in Berlin in February, I’m certainly intrigued to see where this young writer-director goes from here, because I can’t quite imagine where that might be—nor can I quite pin down what it is that makes Notes so alluring....

Workforce (David Zonana, 2020) It may be pure coincidence that David Zonana’s drama Workforce happens to resemble the one foreign-language film that the entire world is talking about right now: some canny distributor somewhere is bound to try pitching the film as the Mexican Parasite. But then themes of privilege, territory, and revenge are bound to be to the fore in the world’s current economic and political climate, and Zonana happens to have found a way to dramatize them in a way that’s superficially not dissimilar to Bong Joon Ho, if only in terms of starting point....

The meaning of the word “Wormwood,” in Errol Morris’s new film and TV mini-series of that name, functions not unlike “Rosebud.” It’s the thing—rather, one of the many things—that Morris keeps us wondering about through the course of his narrative, but which in itself proves ultimately unimportant, or at least, not the main mystery he’s concerned with. The word “Wormwood” is a piece of misdirection, in a film that’s very much concerned with the dark art of misdirection, but when the word finally recurs in a devastating sting of a payoff, we can see what Morris had in mind all along....

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) You may have heard about the Virgin Mary dildo. The ascetic world of a 17th-century convent doesn’t allow for much in the way of props, but Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta makes abundant use of what’s available. “We don’t always understand the instruments God uses,” the Abbess (Charlotte Rampling) intones gravely. Some of the younger nuns have some pretty inventive ideas, all the same. Among them are the Benedetta (Virginie Efira), a forthright daughter of a wealthy family, and Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), a peasant who runs to the convent to escape her abusive father....

The eldest child in the shaggily maintained household of The Wonders is named Gelsomina. The reference to Fellini’s La Strada might be confirmed by the photo of Giulietta Masina’s character pasted into a production sketch on the Italian film’s website. There you can also learn that this story’s cluttered farmhouse previously belonged not to beekeepers but to five wild horses, who slept in the barn and ate in the garden....

Throughout his work, Wajda was no stranger to allegory, so often a necessity, as he sought to evade the censors. What today seems like a blunt device was in Wajda’s hands a powerful tool—a way to smuggle in secret portents. In Kanal, which details the deaths of resistance soldiers during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the city’s waste canals—actually a studio set constructed to maximize claustrophobia and dramatic black-and-white chiaroscuro—evoke the Inferno....

There’s a sumptuous quality to your film, and a formalist quality too. Sometimes the plot falls away and the film becomes about vision and the play of light, the layered use of light, as in the 20-minute sequence in Rita’s house. In almost every shot there’s a sharp differentiation between background and foreground space, through lighting and focus, and the cinematography is reminiscent of approaches more common to black-and-white film than color....