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Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise, 2019) In Thomas Heise’s Heimat Is a Space in Time, nearly 100 years of German history is traced through the words and testimony of the director’s family. Stretching from just before WWI to the present day, the film combines a wealth of archival materials—letters, photographs, drawings, official state documents, and other ephemera—with original black-and-white landscape footage shot at a variety of historically blighted locations across East and West Germany....

Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice, 2023) Víctor Erice’s fourth solo feature arrives a full 50 years after his exquisite, endlessly mysterious feature debut, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)—yet the musty opulence and archaic rhetoric of the opening sequence of his new film, Close Your Eyes, feel far more antiquated. An elderly, fabulously wealthy refugee from Franco’s Spain, now living in the French countryside with his sagacious and devoted Chinese butler, engages a compatriot to seek out his long-lost daughter for the purpose of beholding her gaze one final time....

Gagman Lee Myung-Se taught me how to watch movies. It was 1999 and I was capable of shooting off my opinion gun, dashing out lines about how “this movie sucked” or “that movie is an embarrassment.” I thought it was my job to spot what was wrong with a film and tell a director how to fix it. I figured that I’d seen a lot of movies and therefore I was the guy who could separate the wheat from the chaff....

Inferno Dario Argento, 1980 Bernie Richard Linklater, 2012 The Berlin File Ryu Seung-wan, 2013 Life of Pi Ang Lee, 2012 Hour of the Wolf Ingmar Bergman, 1968 My Best Fiend Werner Herzog, 1999 My Night at Maud’s Eric Rohmer, 1969 Sabata Gianfranco Parolini, 1969 The Sessions Ben Lewin, 2012 Hitchcock Sacha Gervasi, 2012

Carnival Of Souls (Herk Harney, 1962) It’s probably too soon to try and measure the psychological cost of COVID-19 where moviegoing is concerned—or the adaptive measures we’ve developed as compensation. Will it become a way of life, like wearing masks in public, waiting for the next variant? Will the baby steps we’re taking into theaters extend to bolder strides and full houses? The pandemic carved a void in an already altered cinematic landscape....

I Was at Home, But (Angela Shanelec, 2019) “Out of this man’s loneliness could come some kind of transcendence, and he could understand that this is a certain kind of death, and in confronting his loneliness he would become something more aware: a more aware creature.” James Gray’s Ad Astra hit theaters this weekend, spawning a small nebula of worthwhile reads: the above from Metrograph’s Edition, wherein Gray reflects on creator–critic and father–son relationships....

Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands in Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, 1971) The recent passing of much-loved Seymour Cassel has brought on a welcome wave of tributes. The actor was arguably most famous for his collaborations with John Cassavetes, though he appeared in hundreds of other productions for film and television. Criterion recently published their remembrances; but for more on Cassel and Cassavetes connection, check out Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold’s interview from 2008: “He said he was shooting a movie, and I said, ‘Can I watch?...

Buried amid all the Cannes hoopla was the news that Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film The Image Book would not be his final word on the many ideas, and images, and sounds, presented over the course of this rich and dense work. In fact, the movie will be followed by an exhibit—tentatively to be presented in galleries in Paris and elsewhere—which will be its own beast rather than an adaptation. “The film and the idea of [an exhibit] are two different things,” Fabrice Aragno, the DP of The Image Book and Goodbye to Language 3D, told Film Comment by e-mail....

In Edward Dmytryk’s 1959 CinemaScope Western, the mining town of Warlock is at the mercy of a band of rogue cowboys, until citizens engage the sharpshooting services of Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda), accompanied by right-hand man Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn). Adapted from the razor-sharp 1958 novel by Oakley Hall, Dmytryk’s film becomes a roiling panorama of competing drives and moral ambiguities, epitomized by Richard Widmark’s tormented Johnny Gannon. Warlock costars Dorothy Malone and DeForest Kelley, and was shot by Joe McDonald (My Darling Clementine, Pickup on South Street)....

Where ensembles are concerned, no formula can predict who will emerge and garner recognition. Status and credentials have little bearing, as one gleans from the triumphs of double-amputee-turned-double-Oscar-winner Harold Russell (The Best Years of Our Lives), or Somali-born Barkhad Abdi, who was driving a limo in Minneapolis not long before he was menacing Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. Nearly 20 years ago, in the case of Kasi Lemmons’s masterpiece of Southern Gothic, Eve’s Bayou, only those gifted with second sight could have foretold that the standout in a cast of Hollywood heavyweights and auspicious newcomers would be an actress with 500 hours of daytime soaps on her résumé....

Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983) The most instantly striking aspect of Barbra Streisand’s Yentl, a studio-financed hit that made back more than three times its budget, is its cultural specificity. Forthrightly Jewish, unabashedly feminist, and more than a little queer, this unorthodox musical, which Streisand directed, produced, co-wrote, and starred in, and for which she performed every one of its nine songs, is far from the kind of film you would see from today’s increasingly homogenized, risk-averse Hollywood....

The Departed (#1) “Scorsese’s first great film since Goodfellas. This relatively rare plot-driven endeavor preserves flashes of vintage Marty and makes for the most entertaining film of the year. His use of Irish-themed punkers The Dropkick Murphys during the belated opening title sequence attests to his ability to remain current—even in his sixties.”—Paul Iannone, Phoenix “Swings from thugs to snitches, crime syndicates to elaborate bureaucratic busts, from Rolling Stones bodega beatdowns to a diabolical deluge of do-ins in which demises are doled out on the down beat....

Tulsa (© Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong) “A collection of photographs that assail, lacerate, devastate.” The verbs chosen in a Detroit Free Press review of Larry Clark’s 1971 debut photobook Tulsa could easily apply to his first film—also called Tulsa—from three years earlier. Rediscovered in 2010 by the artist, the long lost 64-minute artifact brings to life the young drug-infused peers who he hung out with in his birthplace....

Reason (Anand Patwardhan, 2019) Preeminent Indian documentarian Anand Patwardhan introduced a recent screening of his latest film with a request that seemed rather unusual, especially in a world where news travels fast. “Please don’t post anything on social media,” he said to the dozens of people gathered on a Tuesday evening at the Pavilion in Fort Kochi, an intimate venue that hosts daily live events during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India....

Time is a formidable enemy in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and thus it’s appropriate that its scenes, shot in handheld cinemascope, are built around prolonged, pitilessly unblinking takes in which the camera doesn’t always follow the actors, or even wait for them to appear. In the late Eighties, during the waning months of the Ceausescu regime, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) has pledged to help her roommate, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), obtain an illegal abortion....

More than any other American sporting pastime, baseball is built on tension and anticipation. A pitcher’s careful windup, the long arc of a fly ball falling somewhere between the stands and the warning track, a ground ball spinning along the dirt towards the outfield—every action is reflexive, over before the pitcher’s back leg finds ground again. A great baseball movie captures the sight and sound of the ballpark, like that rubber band that slowly stretches and snaps in one direction to the other....