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Have you heard the fantastic news? The latest Buddho-surrealist jungle story from Thai visionary Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes! What? You’d heard already? Oh. Well, okay . . . but you probably haven’t heard that it’s filled with loping monkey ghosts with eyes like cigarette embers in a pitch-black cave, have you? Drat! Then lemme tell you about the scene where an extraordinarily homely princess surrenders herself to the whiskered oral affections of a catfish beneath a waterfall… Damn, you’d heard that too?...

Joe Swanberg’s reputation in most of the critical community—as a hack and a pseudo-philosopher whose gaze is permanently affixed to his navel and to those of the friends who play versions of themselves in his films—unfortunately precedes him. That’s too bad, as Swanberg’s art encompasses much of what progressive-minded critics have praised in other filmmakers who make highly personal work, such as a staunch belief in collaboration and improvisation, and a flexible view of the boundaries between art and life....

A film festival can be a wild environment of free-ranging hustlers, wheelers, dealers, erstwhile filmmakers, publicists, and various two-legged creatures with phones apparently permanently attached to their faces. It can also be a gathering place for cinephiles and other mad people so crazed about cinema that they may fly halfway around the globe to catch the first possible viewing of a Sokurov, Apichatpong, or Ceylan. It can be a zone of nationalist zeal—the host country’s movie business and artists finally given a chance to be heard above the perpetual, worldwide din of Hollywood....

Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye, 2019) As if to remind us that the cinema has always been a self-reflexive medium, this year’s New York Film Festival has featured several films that foreground the artistic process itself: Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. In particular, Lou Ye’s Saturday Fiction and Justine Triet’s Sibyl weave the subject into their very heart and form....

Photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Twitter I was invited to follow the shoot of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in order to collect material for an upcoming book to be published by Fireflies Press. This included writing a daily diary of the production, from which the following passages are excerpted exclusively in Film Comment, in serialized form with a new entry every afternoon for the next week. Read the series here. Day 2—Tuesday, 20 August 2019 Dawn....

Part elegy and part update, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s documentary follows ranchers and their sea of sheep on a historic final run to summer pastures. Shot in long shots, the spirit-freeing vistas of Montana’s Beartooth Mountains reverberate with the echoes of decades of Westerns (and cigarette ads) even as the use of close miking offsets the grandeur of the landscape by eavesdropping on the ranchers’ mundane chatter and hollers....

Beset by personal demons, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail solo. It’s a difficult journey even for an experienced trekker, and early on it’s clear that Cheryl is a novice in way over her head: before she even sets off, she comically overstuffs her frame pack and struggles to get it on. It’s a lighthearted scene that nonetheless hints at the heavy psychological load she carries....

While the stark design bespeaks utilitarian concerns rather than voguish minimalism, a great deal of care is put into this particular public scrapbook. Curated by unabashed Francophile David Davidson, the “found” items on Toronto Film Review largely consist of Cahiers du cinéma and Positif articles from various eras, some translated, others summarized, and all lovingly prefaced. Come here to find Stéphane Delorme’s 2012 appreciation of Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret, or Eighties considerations of Steven Spielberg not readily available in English anywhere else....

The Birth of a Nation A handful of films won multiple awards over the weekend as the 2016 Sundance Film Festival came to a close. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation—the story of Nat Turner and the 1831 slave rebellion—capped its major launch at the festival with the festival’s two top awards, the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury and Audience Prizes. Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman’s Weiner, about the disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner, and Brian Oakes’s Jim: The James Foley Story, about the abducted American journalist who was murdered by ISIS two years ago in Syria, won the U....

To best understand the simple, timeless power of Frank Perry’s David and Lisa, it’s necessary to consider the pitfalls it avoids. Arriving in 1962, well into Hollywood’s postwar fascination with psychiatric disorders (expressed in Spellbound, The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve, and Psycho), the low-budget indie eschews surface gloss and star-powered heroics. Moreover, in its depiction of the evolving friendship between two young patients in a mental institution—David played by Keir Dullea and Lisa by Janet Margolin—it resists every invitation to bathos, refusing to ennoble the afflicted pair or present their association as curative....

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For today’s episode, critics Kelli Weston and Jessica Kiang join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to unpack three of the most highly anticipated premieres of the festival: Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic fable Megalopolis, Andrea Arnold’s magical realist Bird, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre anthology film, Kinds of Kindness. Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition....

The program was curated by Elena Rossi-Snook, the film specialist at the library, who chose four fascinating shorts that captured microhistories of labor organizing across different industries in the ’60s and ’70s. The films offered a window into the history of the American labor movement and also spoke to the worker struggles currently roiling the film industry.

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(P.S.: Listen to the end fo Scott’s under-the-radar picks from last year, with more than a few unexpected choices, and don’t miss his 2021 wrap for The Baffler, here.)

Check back in throughout the next week and half for regular updates from the snow-topped cinemas of Park City.