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A lavish Nineties “period piece” that indulges in the aesthetics of baroque excess, melodrama, and music video, Laurence Anyways spans the decade that follows the tumultuous, episodic relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and his long-term lover Frederique (Suzanne Clément) as he completes the transition from man to woman. Following I Killed My Mother (09) and Heartbeats (10), the film boasts a running time just shy of three hours, and a boost beyond his famously modest budgets ($8 million instead of $800,000 for his debut)....

In February 2018, the Italian artist and filmmaker Angela Ricci Lucchi passed away following over 40 years of politically charged moving image work with her longtime partner and collaborator Yervant Gianikian. With their radical use of archival imagery—concerning oft-overlooked instances of 20th-century violence—the duo were pioneers of a form of essayistic, montage-based filmmaking that subjected found materials to an assortment of rephotography and extra-sensory effects. As evident in such landmark works as From the Pole to the Equator (1987), comprised of repurposed footage of colonial expansion originally shot by the Italian filmmaker Luca Comerio, or a series of “scented films” that paired the couple’s frequently troubling imagery with a variety of soothing fragrances, the pair skillfully worked to interrogate all aspects of the medium....

All About Lily Chou-Chou Let Me Take You Down by Jack Jones is a 1992 true crime book about Mark David Chapman. Chapters two, three, and four are a moment-by-moment account of the 48 hours Chapman spent in New York City before he walked up to John Lennon on December 8, 1980 and shot him five times in the back. Recounting every move Chapman makes, from sitting in the wrong section of a restaurant, to a trip to a record store, to banal chitchat with other fans, it’s like a Haruki Murakami story where every single mundane detail is weighted with import because we know they’re all building toward something big....

Papirosen Getting ribbed for one’s tweets is part of what it means now to write and live (at least part of one’s life) on the Web. So after tweeting that I was about to leave my home base in Los Angeles to attend BAFICI, Buenos Aires’ annual mega-walpurgisnacht of independent world cinema, and added that it was, to borrow a favorite boxing term, “pound for pound my favorite festival,” some good-natured smack followed in its wake, especially from colleagues and friends working for other festivals....

This frankly alarming state of affairs has been ripe for acerbic satire, and 30-year-old independent director Yohei Suzuki stepped up to the challenge with his brilliant 2014 debut feature, Ow (Japanese title: Maru). When Tetsuo, a jobless man living with his parents, finds a spherical object hovering in the corner of his room, he freezes like a statue. His girlfriend, his recently unemployed father, and city policemen are also rendered immobile upon setting their eyes on the enigma....

Black Mother (Khalik Allah, 2018) Adrian Curry, our very own maestro of movie posters, has put together this touching tribute to the late Bruno Ganz. In that strange, heartwarming way particular to actors, Ganz will soon return—to the screen, at least—later this year in Terrence Malick’s Radegund. The National Library of Jamaica has announced plans to open a new digital Reggae Film Archive. Over 200 films collected by the Reggae Film Festival are to be donated, along with contributions from Reggae Films UK archivist, Peter Gittins....

Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962) In the dark, all cities look much the same, especially around the edges where they start to unravel. Picture a patch of waste land: gravel and weeds, litter scuffling in the wind, murky water glinting in the dim light, and some furtive figures in the shadows, up to no good. Where are we? What city is this? It could be Seoul or Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Prague, the grimy outskirts of Paris or the grimy outskirts of Tokyo....

The thematic ambition and complexity of Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History is simply astonishing. The comprehensive thematic orientation of the film is political: it examines how cumulative political catastrophes in recent Philippine history have created a society where the gap between rich and poor has created terrible suffering for the poor and moral corruption for the wealthy. Diaz’s second thematic dimension is psychological: the narrative is organized to show how political and economic dislocations have invaded family life, which is itself made dysfunctional by the traumatic breaking up of families under economic pressure....

That someone so short, fat, and physically unattractive could make his mark as a manager, dealmaker, and producer—and most importantly, as a non-stop party-thrower—typifies the era. Carr created a space where old and new Hollywood, rock stars, and TV “personalities” could mingle with porn stars and male hustlers while munching lavish buffets, snorting mountains of cocaine, and paying court to “Guests of Honor” such as Rudolf Nureyev, Truman Capote, and Elton John....

For these kids—as for the street punks of A Brighter Summer Day—music is one of the few bright spots in their lives. Babylon delivers the goods in that department, featuring a soundtrack laden with the heavy reggae and dub that Blue and his friends blast out of their massive portable sound-system. These cavernous, dusty jams—tracks by artists like British producer Dennis Bovell, soul man Johnny Clarke, and roots godhead Yabby You—provide a sanctuary and a spiritual refuge for these youth in revolt....

Amos Vogel, 2003. © Paul Cronin It has been enormously gratifying to us, Amos’s sons, to hear about the many events—not only all around New York but also elsewhere (Vienna, Berlin, Zagreb, Pamplona)—honoring him in his centenary year. That even today, nearly half a century after the publication of his book Film as a Subversive Art (recently republished in a beautiful new edition by FilmDesk Books), and almost 75 years after the formation of Cinema 16, the film society he founded with our mother, Marcia, his views about film and film curation continue to be relevant to so many is a source of great pride to us....

Early Works A recent series at Anthology Film Archives paid tribute to critic, film programmer, festival juror, professor, and cinéaste extraordinaire Amos Vogel, who passed away last April at 91. Founder of Cinema 16, co-founder of the New York Film Festival, and longtime contributor to Film Comment, Vogel is still best known for his hugely influential, woefully out-of-print 1974 book Film As a Subversive Art, which provided the rubric for Anthology’s programs....

“Dick Jokes from Sherman Oaks,” Wayne White Even in the bottomless pit of the information age, it’s entirely possible for filmmakers to play upon preconceptions about something unfamiliar in order to bolster their arguments and opinions. Case in point: Beauty Is Embarrassing, a competent SXSW-premiered documentary that overstates the accomplishments of the artist Wayne White while also attributing his obscurity to imaginary forces—tactics that take advantage of an assumed ignorance of contemporary art and the politics of the art world....

Aside from opulent, fetishistic detail, heritage films are about “the rules,” be it the way a Regency-era heroine is expected to hold a spoon while a-courting or the hand-wringing caused by Oxbridge athletes’ religious beliefs. As the latter example suggests, the most interesting examples of heritage film and its cousin, the costume drama, are those that explore what happens when the rules are challenged, either by circumstance or will. One of the most intriguing aspects of the original Upstairs, Downstairs was the nascent middle-class status of Sarah and Thomas, who were not good enough to use the front door of Eaton Place but were also somehow above going through the servants’ entrance....