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“I think everyone has two birthdays, the day of his physical birth and the beginning of his conscious life.” With these words, Lisa Berndle, the heroine of Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, is reborn as a votary of romantic love. Beginning when Lisa is a shy and scrawny 14-year-old (convincingly played by a 30-year old-Joan Fontaine), the story of that consuming passion comes to us in the form of a letter, sent to the object of her obsession, a musician who has also, without remembering, been her one-night lover....

Both of these episodes prompted the formation of two of French cinema’s most influential actress-director couples: Vadim turned Bardot into an enduring symbol of female emancipation, while Godard made Karina into the face of the country’s most radical and revered cinematic revolution. In the seven and a half films they made together (Karina counts the 1967 short film Anticipation as half a film), Godard filmed his spouse from all angles, delineating her feline beauty with the precision of a portrait painter....

You ground every film’s cinematography in a main concept, which was the sadness of the New York winter for Inside Llewyn Davis. What was your underlying macro concept for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and your micro concept for each of its visually and narratively distinct six chapters? I didn’t have a main concept for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs because of its episodic nature. Our first question was precisely whether we should have an aesthetic difference between each chapter—a very big concern that we only resolved at the end, during the color grade....

Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, 2022) At the beginning of Cyril Schäublin’s sophomore feature, Unrest, a woman suggests that a territory, instead of defining its inhabitants, is simply “a place where people live together at any moment.” The film takes its cue from this seemingly throwaway comment, celebrating human togetherness over geographic coincidence. Unrest takes place in the 1870s in the small Swiss village of Saint-Imier, where the primary industry is watchmaking....

But by anyone’s standards, the Queen of Action is Angela Mao, famous in the West for her brief role as Bruce Lee’s sister in Enter the Dragon. Trained in hapkido, wushu, and taekwondo, Mao made almost 40 flicks before retiring in the early Eighties, but her true legacy lies in the 11 movies she made for Golden Harvest with Sammo Hung from 1971 to 1977. And now Shout! Factory has sent six of them storming onto DVD in one butt-kicking box set....

Maurice Pialat’s second feature, We Won’t Grow Old Together, became an unlikely commercial success upon its release. Far from viewer-friendly, it tells the story of the endless breakups and makeups of a highly unstable yet apparently indissoluble couple. It’s a sort of love story told in inverted terms, depicting the protracted end of a five-year affair, with its arbitrary disagreements, sudden mood shifts, moments of irrational anger, and displays of stinging contempt, presented with a genuine, unmeasured violence....

Dorothy Arzner For those who’ve heard it, the name Dorothy Arzner emblazons in the dark like neon; no other light touches her. She’s an emblem of both invisibility and presence: her name is invoked either when someone is making a point about the lack of female directors in Golden Age Hollywood, or conversely as evidence that they did indeed exist. Arzner’s achievements cannot be overestimated, but she remains undervalued in the culture at large....

All images from The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) The word “queer” is at once too big, too meaningful, and too vague to do all the work it needs to do. The way that “Q” perches at the end of “LGBTQ” like a squiggly little tail speaks to its general precariousness; it somehow risks overtaking the whole and being forgotten all together. Yet at the present moment, the term feels fully integrated into the overall discourse, richly inclusive, straddling academia and popular culture; the “Gay and Lesbian” Anthologies and Volumes of the ’90s have become the “Queer” Readers of the 21st century....

Bernardo Bertolucci is an unlikely director to venture into documentary. In his features, the real world is usually kept at a considerable distance from the hermetic, interior spaces in which his stories take place. The outside reality of May 1968 in The Dreamers (03) or the Japanese invasion of China in The Last Emperor (87) is little more than oblique suggestion, and often the drama of Bertolucci’s films is how little this outer world penetrates the delirious and decadent ones within....

In Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, three German expats sit in a Jerusalem café quoting Faust and discussing the trial of the SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. One of them posits—to great consternation—that the problem of evil is less complicated than even Faust makes it out to be. “Eichmann is no Mephisto,” says Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa). She’s distinguishing between evil as a mythologized, even seductive quality, and the thing she will argue it to be: an almost forgetful trait, defined by an inability, on the part of an individual swept up in the inverted logic of fascism, to make moral decisions with any real autonomy....

Reviewing a Hong Sang-soo film can feel akin to an exercise in cut-and-paste criticism, as the South Korean director so habitually repeats himself from film to film that analysis boils down to rehashing familiar concerns and plot points and then parsing minute shifts in tone and perspective. That situation, alas, doesn’t radically change with In Another Country, which distinguishes itself from its 12 feature-length predecessors by featuring a European female protagonist in the form of the mesmerizing Isabelle Huppert....

The premise of Jack and Diane is ripped straight from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: as young Diane finds her budding sexuality aroused by new girlfriend, Jack, her desire manifests itself in the form of a dream werewolf that appears only to the two of them. But where Buffy found ample narrative meat in finding vivid expression for any given teenage demon, Jack and Diane treats its horror interludes as part of a greater kitchen-sink logic....

Reprising roles from their sitcom Klovn (often compared—by Americans, anyway—to the pseudo-autobiographical Curb Your Enthusiasm), Danish comedians Frank Hvam and Caspar Christensen star as caricatures of themselves named Frank and Caspar in this raunchy romp co-written with director Mikkel Nørgaard. Frank’s girlfriend is pregnant, but since she doesn’t deem him dad material, it’s shape-up or break-up—until he kidnaps her 12-year-old nephew Bo in a misguided effort to prove his nurturing potential....

There’s a moment in Still Alice when Julianne Moore, looking at herself in the mirror, slathers her face with cream. Piles it on, not to cleanse or beautify, but to erase. To us it still looks beautiful, but to this woman who’s a professor and celebrated linguist, losing words and hence her identity to Alzheimer’s, it’s the face of a stranger, or perhaps a face she’s no longer able to sustain....