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The Night Digger Genre stories have always been powerful ways to express humanity’s primal terror of the unknown, the watchful presences beyond the campfire. What happens when the rational confronts the irrational? Two very different films from the 1970s—The Night Digger (1971) and Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)—present hysteria-tinged and strangely personal stories that truck in the irrational, the superstitions and beliefs that hold us captive or hold us in thrall....

Read J. Hoberman’s article on Triumph of the Will in the January-February issue of Film Comment.

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Premiered in Venice and screened in last year’s New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose....

Two films in particular exemplified this trend, though in different ways. Forms of Forgetting, by the filmmaker Burak Çevik, turns conversations between two of the filmmaker’s friends about their memories of their relationship into a broader reflection on the link between remembrance and one’s sense of place, the city, and the nation. In Milisuthando, the artist Milisuthando Bongela combines archival footage, recollections, and interviews with friends and family to reflect on her childhood in the Transkei, which was an all-Black, segregationist South African state sanctioned by the apartheid regime....

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler, 2022) Since its release in 2018, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther has occupied an odd, some might say uncomfortable, position in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here is a film that dared to fold the hackneyed formal elements of the superhero genre—cacophonous action, self-aware humor, Easter eggs, cameos, dutiful setups for future sequels—into an earnest drama about Blackness, diaspora, and colonial violence. Audiences who might have expected typical, bland MCU triumphalism were instead presented with a complex portrayal of the friction between Africa and its diaspora; a critique of the theft of cultural artifacts by colonizing nations; and a striking, Afrofuturistic depiction of a technologically advanced African nation whose resources and science are sought-after around the world....

The Barkleys of Broadway This article originally appeared in the September-October 1979 issue of Film Comment. Confessional My interest in the cinema started when I saw Top Hat at the age of five; from then on I saw all the Astaire-Rogers movies as they came out. This, then, is a belated tribute to Fred and Ginger, without whom I might never have been where I am today (wherever that is)....

Upstream Highlights include the 1923 animated short Happy-Go-Luckies, memorable, among other things, for the sight of a man carrying a dachshund over his shoulder like a plank of wood; The Love Charm (28), a dewy South Seas romance shot in stunning two-strip Technicolor and marked by some expectedly unfortunate racial politics; the surreal 1920 educational whatsit Birth of a Hat (whose opening title card solemnly declares that “the origin of hats is unknown”); Won in a Cupboard (14), an early Keystone romp from pioneering writer-director-comedienne Mabel Normand; and Virginian Types (26), a meticulously hand-tinted two-minute sketch of rural Appalachian life....

In 1988, Volker Schlöndorff, the director of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and The Tin Drum, brought a camera crew into Billy Wilder’s Los Angeles office. The goal, as Schlöndorff put it, was to record “an improvised conversation between friends.” The special three-hour version of the resulting documentary, Billy, How Did You Do It?, was originally aired on the BBC soon afterward (against Wilder’s wishes). But it had not been publicly shown until Film Forum’s special screening in September, during its run of Schlöndorff’s cut of The Tin Drum....

Miami Blues The money came when Willeford, finally, created a franchise character—Miami PD detective Hoke Moseley—and starred him in a series of police procedural mystery novels: Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Moseley is a divorced father of two girls whose professional experience has equipped him with a pessimistic view of human affairs and a pragmatism which allowed him to negotiate the world as it is....

As fabulous as it should be and not a jot more or less, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra is a showbiz biopic about, in no particular order, gender, sex, power, professionalism, performance, denial, disavowal, spectatorship, and the closet. Adapted from Scott Thorson’s tell-all book about his affair with Liberace, the Vegas nightclub star known only by his surname, the movie marries the stringent style and purposeful intelligence of its director/cinematographer/editor with the world of a performer defined by his excess....

Few cinematographers have a filmography as wide-ranging and impressive as Caroline Champetier, whose collaborations—with Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lanzmann, Jacques Rivette, Arnaud Desplechin, and Leos Carax, among others—span four decades of French cinema. Annette, Carax’s long-awaited English-language follow-up to 2012’s Holy Motors, marks both the director and Champetier’s first feature-length musical. Written by Ron and Russell Mael of the pop-rock band Sparks, the film centers upon a celebrity couple in Los Angeles—stand-up comedian Henry (Adam Driver) and opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard)—whose passionate yet destructive relationship seals the fate of their gifted young daughter, Annette....

Known widely for his work in archival and observational nonfiction, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has, over the last decade, also established a substantial parallel career in fiction filmmaking. While his documentaries have largely focused on momentous occasions in Russian and Eastern European history, Loznitsa’s dramatic features (which include 2010’s My Joy and 2012’s In the Fog) have afforded him the opportunity to apply similar thematic concerns to more contemporary scenarios....

The Piano It’s easy to forget that for the French seaside city of Cannes, the film festival is basically a pop-up, one of many conventions that annually roll into town. Last month, Cannes hosted its first fest devoted to television, Canneseries, and next month, the annual music event, Midem, returns to the French Riviera. And though you may learn from locals that the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity draws attendees who spend more money, the film festival and its famous red carpet continue to bring the widest attention to this tony and tacky Cote d’Azur town, setting the stage for the coming year in international cinema....