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Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined on stage at the 61st New York Film Festival by World Records editor Jason Fox and NYFF61 filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette), and Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros) for a discussion about the ways in which filmmakers engage both documentary and narrative techniques to invite and challenge viewers’ trust in images. This panel expanded on the ideas in Trust Issues, a new audio series by World Records....

The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night, 1964 Fred Dalton Thompson Marie, 1985 Edward McDonald Goodfellas, 1990 John Malkovich Being John Malkovich, 1999 Fritz Lang Contempt, 1963 Samuel Fuller Pierrot le fou, 1965 Marshall McLuhan Annie Hall, 1977 Babe Ruth Speedy, 1928 Muhammad Ali The Greatest, 1977 Steve Coogan A Cock and Bull Story, 2005 Evel Knievel Viva Knievel!, 1977 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Airplane!, 1980 Howard Stern Private Parts, 1997 Tom Jones Mars Attacks!...

Paris Awakens Last night I was looking at the photos that Isabelle Weingarten took on the set of Paris Awakens (1991) five years ago, and I was struck by Jean-Pierre Léaud’s expression in every picture in which he appears. Not only can one palpably perceive his tension, but also his mouth is clenched as though he were perpetually bracing himself for the worst. I wish I could recall it more clearly....

Bang Bang “It was about revolt, rage and impotence.” That is how Andrea Tonacci, a key filmmaker in Brazil’s Marginal Cinema movement of the 1970s, once described his early work. Unlike Cinema Novo, which put Brazil on the international map in the 1960s by extolling its rural music and storytelling traditions (with folk figures such as the cangaceiros, or rural bandits), Cinema Marginal was a predominantly urban movement. It shared with Cinema Novo the general poverty of means, but it did not aspire to forge a national ethos....

The Quatermass Experiment Halloween, which traces its roots back to the Gaelic festival of Samhain, is preceded by the one week in the year when all natural order is inverted, and decent, upright film pubs and sites pretend to care even a little bit about horror movies. It’s a grudging concession. As much as we may try to domesticate horror, it remains a touchy, indigestible subject—is there any other genre for which the discourse that surrounds it involves a punctilious avoidance of discussing the thing itself?...

Jersey Boys “I’m hearing it sky-blue, you’re giving me brown.” This is producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) in the recording booth, addressing a group of session musicians who will eventually be known as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It also anticipates the case against Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s screen adaptation of the jukebox musical that opened on Broadway in 2005 and is still running today. The film, like the show, dramatizes Valli and friends’ journey from the mean streets of Belleville to the top of the charts, but any doubt that this is an Eastwood film should be vanquished by the drained, drab palette of the early scenes, which recall the juvenile delinquent milieu of his mentor Don Siegel’s black-and-white Crime in the Streets....

Köhler’s previous films—Bungalow (2002), Windows on Monday (2006), Sleeping Sickness (2011)—are among the signature achievements of the so-called Berlin School. In My Room uses a high-concept genre framework to both refine and deepen his exploration of such recurring themes as estrangement and belonging, mobility and stasis. The day before his film’s premiere, Köhler spoke to us about the appeal of castaway stories, the challenge of representing death on screen, and his love of the Pet Shop Boys....

Many years ago, I was dating a guy who loved movies and we were in the stage of our relationship when we were beginning to unveil semi-obscure tastes and oddball favorites to each other. “Have you seen The Honey Pot?” he asked. I hadn’t even heard of The Honey Pot. “It’s fantastic,” he said. “Joseph Mankiewicz wrote and directed it, Rex Harrison and Maggie Smith are in it, and it’s incredibly nasty and funny and elegant....

“Lord of the Rings, kiss my ass,” Lars von Trier said in a recent interview. In light of the domestic success of Danish films, his arrogance may seem justified. In Europe, only French audiences consume more locally made films than their Danish counterparts. Ever the man to challenge the status quo, Trier’s importance for Denmark’s filmmakers cannot be underestimated. He co-owns Zentropa with Peter Aalbæk Jensen (the closest thing Copenhagen has to a Harvey Weinstein) and thus helps produce a steady stream of new films—about one third of all domestic features in 2002....

All images from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller, 2019) Director Marielle Heller told the Los Angeles Times that when she pitched Tom Hanks to play children’s TV pioneer Fred Rogers, “I described how I saw the movie—that I didn’t want it to be a biopic…. It was really a character piece about manhood and what it is to be a good person.” The problem with the movie is that it’s neither....

Images from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Film (J.J. Abrams, 2019) When a voice in the trailer intoned, “No one’s ever really gone,” I didn’t think it was meant literally. J.J. Abrams’s mechanical, nonsensical Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker contains so many resurrections it’s a wonder Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t push back the release date from Christmas to Easter. (They had originally delayed it from Memorial Day to Christmas....

We’ve known since Deleuze that Moby-Dick, and more generally Melville’s oeuvre, is an object of fascination for the French. And for good reason: it’s to Herman Melville, third son of a Scottish fur trader and a patrician Dutch woman, that we owe one of the most beautiful descriptions of Americana—mixing a sense of grand spaces, impossible quests, and lost innocence with gusts of lyricism and razor-sharp descriptions of the harpooner’s life....

Melancholia Dostoevsky has never been far from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s mind. Crime and Punishment figures prominently in Diaz’s debut feature, The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (98), with the quietly impressive Raymond Bagatsing playing a version of Raskolnikov as a kidnapper afflicted by a seriously inflamed toothache. Like a persistent poltergeist, Dostoevskian themes have haunted almost every Diaz film since, from the Regal Films production Jesus Revolutionary (02), in which a Raskolnikov-like figure becomes a political fugitive in the near future (i....

Le Diable souffle It would be hard to find a more fascinating body of work than Edmond Gréville’s, filmed in both France and Great Britain and utterly foreign to the rules of cinema governing each of these two countries, as well as to the aesthetic revolutions that transformed them. Gréville’s oeuvre is as remote from neorealism and Ealing-style comedy as it is from “poetic realism,” a school prized by film historians despite its incoherence, since it was so often used to categorize directors who have very little in common....

Born in New York but partly raised in Argentina, the actor hereby adds to a growing list of artistic activity: publishing (through Perceval Press), photography, and of course soccer blogging. He attributes the germ of Jauja’s idea to imagining the aftermath of an unnerving personal story: a female friend of Alonso’s moved to live with a lover in the Philippines, only to be found shot dead years later. As the film’s story takes its own extraordinary (and mind-expanding) turns, Jauja opens more questions than it seeks to answer, and last May, at the Cannes Film Festival, I happily snuck in the chance to ask Mortensen two myself....

By the close of 1971, his third year as a filmmaker, Fassbinder had completed a dozen movies. He was so tireless, so determined to make all of life grist for his art, that within months of wrapping the miserable shoot of Whity (71) he had dramatized the experience in Beware of a Holy Whore (71). While his style saw several marked transformations—from the austerely theatrical to the floridly cinematic—his signature themes persisted....