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Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019) by Jonathan Romney “Ad Astra uses science fiction for very intimate, personal purposes—and what’s distinctive about this gripping, sometimes preposterous film is the way that Gray sticks his neck out to balance the demands of intimacy and wham-bam spectacle.” Monos (Alejandro Landes, 2019) by Devika Girish “Any answer to how these adolescents got here is constantly deferred or denied, and the action teeters uneasily between menace and mirth: moments of violence turn out to be displays of joy and affection, the distinctions blurred by war’s ravages on unformed, pubescent minds....

A group of generic twentysomethings (slut, virgin, jock, brain, and stoner all present) hit the road for a weekend getaway of frolicking and fun. Destination: why, a creepy backwoods cabin where things rapidly go awry, of course. Heard this one before? Well, so have the writer-producer Joss Whedon and the director and co-writer Drew Goddard, the masterminds behind The Cabin in the Woods. So many times, in fact, that they’ve decided to turn the dead-tired concept on its ear (then rip it off and feed it to us)....

Following the tried-and-true Internet formula of taking something you might do anyway (keep a movie log) and making the resulting data easily quantifiable, sortable, and “social,” Letterboxd is the best new way for cinephiles to get into online arguments with their friends. In addition to creating IMDb-style lists (e.g., the emergent “Bad people yelling at each other” genre), users can publicly log, rate, and review what they’ve seen. Au hasard Balthazar and other art- and rep-house fare get more attention and higher ratings than The Godfather or Requiem for a Dream....

Admired in art-world precincts for nearly a decade, the German-born, Queens-based duo Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger, aka eteam, traffic in transience. But the English translation of their domain name—“a home of my own”—is the truest compass to where the heart of their work lies. Straddling some hazy intersection of relational aesthetics, and Web and land art, eteam coordinates performative happenings and conceptual transactions between the earthly plane and the realms of the interweb, all wryly reconstructed in hypnotic video work....

In 1927, Esfir Shub was asked to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a movie. After World War I, film stock was scarce—for a while during Vladimir Lenin’s rule, every request for 100 meters of film (about 2 or 3 minutes) required his personal approval. Shub and other Soviet directors had limited resources, so she experimented with editing archival footage, and the result was The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty—generally viewed as the first found-footage film and the blueprint for so many Soviet and Russian filmmakers who would follow her, including Eisenstein, who theorized her work and brought those techniques into filmmakers’ consciousness globally....

SXSW used to be a small music and film festival, and over the past 25 years it’s evolved into this huge thing with a ton of branding—I was just at the Land O’Lakes pop-up earlier today. How do you feel being here? Well, it’s the first time I’ve shown a film at SXSW, so I don’t have a benchmark to compare it to. But when you come with a film, you don’t have that much time....

The Postman Always Rings Twice The sign that greets John Garfield’s hard-boiled hobo at the start of The Postman Always Rings Twice portentously reads “Man Wanted.” That marker might well have met him at the studio gate in 1938 when he blew in like a gust of wind from the East. The New York-born star arrived in Hollywood at age 25, bearing the chip on his shoulder that would become his trademark, the result of a meager tenement upbringing and gang affiliation that taught him, in his own words, “all the meanness, all the toughness it’s possible for kids to acquire....

One might raise an eyebrow at the appearance of Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) in TCM’s survey of slapstick this September. While it became a staple of cable after its theatrical release, this David Zucker–Jim Abrahams–Jerry Zucker (aka “ZAZ”) production is rarely considered a classic alongside Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Nor is it even ZAZ’s signature feature, which is still Airplane! (1980), a spoof of the Airport franchise and the 1957 film Zero Hour!...

The Sundowners One of the great shocks of my young life came the day I was rummaging through my grandparents’ vinyl collection and discovered, in back of Robert Goulet’s Greatest Hits and the cringe-worthy Allan Sherman parody records, a Caribbean folk album recorded by Robert Mitchum! Entitled Calypso—is like so…, its cover features the sleepy-eyed noir icon lounging in a tropical bar with a bottle of rum and an admiring brunette—Max Cady in Margaritaville....

James Mason and Dorothy Dandridge in The Decks Ran Red (Andrew L. Stone, 1958) Page one of the October 12, 1905 edition of The New York Times features the headline “Mutineers Kill Five, Including the Captain,” preceding a description of the deadly events aboard the SS Berwind: “the decks of the schoner [sic] crimson with blood.” Bodies not left on deck had been foisted overboard, including that of its Captain Rummill, and “three negroes,” led by one Henry Scott, had been detained....

Ow Yohei Suzuki’s Ow (Maru) is the first Japanese film in decades—say, since Oshima’s Death by Hanging—to give Japan’s political, cultural, and economic inertia a good kicking. Equal parts black comedy, sci-fi mystery, investigative reportage, and mindfuck, it starts as docudrama with captions identifying the members of a supremely ordinary suburban family, turns into a satire of bungled police procedurals, and then gradually morphs into a sex-pol depth-charge, all to a backbeat from Samuel Beckett’s novels....

On this episode, we discuss Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (and her Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?), Matt Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Thomas Heise’s Heimat Is a Space in Time, and (why not?) Legally Blonde. Also, a special treat: If you listened to the last episode, you’ll recall our own Michael Koresky promising some new music for the podcast. He came through with a dramatic performance of Michel Legrand’s “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?...

Last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish welcomed the director and star for a Film Comment Live talk about their new movie, the narrative and cinematic balancing act of depicting a mind in flux, the film’s imaginative use of music, and much more.

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Links & Things: NYFF58 Redux schedule The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter, Anders Edström, 2020) Simone Barbes or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980) Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998) Muhammad Ali, The Greatest (William Klein, 1974) Steve’s interview with William Klein at Hyperallergic Mode en France (William Klein, 1985) Maydays (Grands soirs et petits matins) (William Klein, 1978) Lenny Cooke (Josh and Benny Sadie, 2013) Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) Slow Machine (Paul Felten and Joe Denardo) Raymond Pettibon series at Spectacle Theater Slow Machine co-director Joe Denardo’s band Growing Small Axe anthology (Steve McQueen, 2020) Burning an Illusion (Menelik Shabazz, 1981) Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

For our first podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, The Human Surge 3, Laberint Sequences, God Is a Woman, and The Mother of All Lies. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2023!

“What shall we hang, the holly or each other?” That quip from Henry II in The Lion in Winter could serve as an epigraph for the meeting of the New York Film Critics Circle in 1968. Anthony Harvey’s film version of an unsuccessful play about Henry’s un-cozy family reunion had tied, on the seventh ballot for Best Picture, with John Cassavetes’ Faces. According to Tom O’Neil’s book Movie Awards, each film had 11 votes, with one lost soul casting a vote for Oliver!...