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It’s a hook—an Italian director shooting naturalistically among the cowpies and prayer huddles of rural Texas—that’s potent enough for a third go-around by Roberto Minervini. Stop the Pounding Heart completes his “Texas trilogy,” all three burring the line between fiction and real life, and featuring locals in recurring roles. Viewers on guard for the sin of condescension will have their expectations dashed. Minervini has clearly earned his performers’ trust, and refrains from editorializing....

One night at a party, Charlie Banks (Jesse Eisenberg), son of a Manhattan bookstore owner, watches neighborhood tough Mick Leary (Jason Ritter) administer a brutal beat-down. He secretly snitches, then recants, and eventually heads off to college upstate, along with childhood chum and inveterate slummer Danny (Christopher Marquette). When Mick suddenly turns up—and lingers, and thumbs through The Great Gatsby, and beds the girl Charlie has a crush on—our hero’s education in class consciousness and conflicted loyalties begins....

Traditionally, couples receive gifts of coral or jade for enduring 35 years of marriage, but in You’re Next, the Davisons, parents of three sons and one daughter, are instead presented with a night of sheer terror, after which they may never experience another day of wedded bliss. The family—plus the children’s significant others—has assembled for a celebratory weekend at their country home, but before they can even finish their first (drama-filled) meal together, they become the prey of animal-masked murderers armed with crossbows....

Kin-dza-dza! A distress call originates from a remote land. The senders implore the intervention of a more politically stable and technologically advanced state, to assist, enlighten, or liberate them. That widespread trope in science fiction—perhaps the most common inciting event is an interplanetary Mayday—takes on allegorical dimensions when tales of deprived citizens crying for help come from behind the Iron Curtain. The Strange Lands series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center spotlights a number of sci-fi relics of the Cold War, many involving populations (or disadvantaged sectors of the populace) reaching out through risky or deceptive means to those with power to aid them....

Photo by Rebecca Murga Twenty years ago, Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos made The Last Broadcast, a notorious digital-video feature following a group of public access TV hosts into the forest in search of the Jersey Devil. Often compared to The Blair Witch Project, released one year later, also a pioneer in the found-footage genre, the movie set the stage for Weiler’s career of technologically one-upping his peers. While much of the storytelling rooted in VR and other new technologies has been more marketing bark than bite, Weiler has often used tech in his work while at the same time critiquing its emotional capabilities....

Buffalo ’66 Throw a brick out a window and you’ll hit twenty actors getting ready to direct, invariably citing Cassavetes. After one try, most get it out of their system; others—Forrest Whitaker, Sean Penn, John Turturro—have acquitted themselves honorably while remaining more valuable in front of the camera; recently, only Tom Noonan and Ben Stiller have demonstrated real filmmaking talent. Now I’m adding Vincent Gallo to the list of actors I hope make a habit of directing without giving up acting....

Jane Fonda and Anthony Perkins in Tall Story (Joshua Logan, 1960) In the November 1960 issue of Pageant magazine, a bright-eyed Jane Fonda looks over her shoulder, her blonde hair pinned up in a small bouffant, her lips full and puckered. She’s 22 in this spread, fresh off her first screen role in Joshua Logan’s Tall Story, in which she plays a co-ed shamelessly in pursuit of a husband. Encouraged by Lee Strasberg, her coach at the Actors Studio since 1958, Fonda hungrily pursued a career as an actress in a time when changing sexual mores were trickling into the subtext of popular American cinema....

The Set-Up Like so many of the characters he played, Robert Ryan is the man you think you understand until he reveals a hidden side within. Capsule bios present him with some variation on the words “American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains”—every part of which is the truth but not the whole truth. Ryan was American-born, but Old World in heritage and disposition. His grandparents emigrated from Tipperary, and like Eugene O’Neill, the playwright whose work he so eloquently limned, Ryan was more brooding and philosophical than his unassailably buoyant contemporaries....

Bakushi (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan) A documentary about Japanese bondage masters and their models: artists of Eros at work, lustily creating pornography. While it’s wonderful to hear them describing, with candor and rare modesty, their passion, it’s something else again to watch the bondage sessions through Hiroki’s knowing, empathetic eyes: eroduction as high melodrama.—Olaf Möller Beauty in Trouble (Jan Hrebejk, Czech Republic) A smart situation comedy that contrasts old and new Czecho-no-Slovakias....

Film Comment was joined by Apichatpong at the exhibition on its final day to discuss how this unique project came to be, the influences behind the look and feel of the hotel, and how dreams function as a very particular and personal form of cinema.

Our latest episode covers Cannes 2023 as it crosses its midpoint, with critics Lovia Gyarkye, Abby Sun, and Kelli Weston joining FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish to discuss some of the festival’s buzziest films, including Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Todd Haynes’s May December, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition....

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Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish wanted to dig a little deeper into Mark’s comments, and into the technically and philosophically challenging ins and outs of film preservation and restoration, so they invited two experts to join the podcast and guide them through the subject: critic and media conservator Ina Archer and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder and director of the Film Heritage Foundation. Both also provide details on some exciting projects they’re engaged in: Ina talks about preserving Robert Goodwin’s independent blaxploitation flick Black Chariot and Jessie Maple’s 1981 drama Will, while Shivendra breaks down the restorations of two major works by Indian filmmaker Govindan Aravindan, Kummatty and Thamp̄....

The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

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