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All images from Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) Devika Girish: So one of your strongest reactions to Us was not to overthink it—a plea to enjoy the film, take it at its face value and try not to read too much into its symbols and allegories. I disagreed with that response a little bit, only because I really enjoy overthinking films, and I enjoy speculating about world-building and Easter eggs. I’ve been going down all those Twitter threads delineating the various motifs in the film....

Grass “It’s a down year”: some version of this sentiment was expressed early and often at this year’s Berlinale, the festival’s 68th edition. The Berlinale’s competition boasted a handful of marquee names sure to arouse some interest on the part of festival-goers—new films by Wes Anderson (whose Isle of Dogs opened the festival), Steven Soderbergh (whose baffling Unsane screened “out of competition” despite being included in the selection), and Lav Diaz (who won the Golden Bear in 2016 with A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery)—yet it nevertheless failed to drum up much excitement, with more or less middling word-of-mouth on all but Christian Petzold’s typically excellent, time-out-of-joint gem, Transit....

Rotting in the Sun (Sebastián Silva, 2023) Rotting in the Sun, Chilean director Sebastián Silva’s misery-suffused new comedy, is ripe to the point of bursting. Sex, death, and abjection abound in the film, which makes room in its tortured vision for both earnest existential inquiry and literal shit-eating. Silva plays a skewed version of himself: a young, drug-addled wreck of a filmmaker oscillating between artistic frustration and serious thoughts of suicide....

You may not know the name Robin Campillo, but it’s possible that he’s partly responsible for some of your favorite French films of the last 15 years. Campillo has worked regularly as an editor with director Laurent Cantet since 1997, and has co-written four of his features: Time Out (01), Heading South (05), the Palme d’Or winner The Class (08), and the hugely underrated Foxfire (12). In his own right, Campillo also wrote and directed They Came Back (Les Revenants, 04), an extraordinary feature that was way ahead of the current undead boom, and offered a radically different take on what’s since become the only too commonplace question of reanimation....

Not being a gambling man, I tend to get a little lost with any film that depends for comprehension on your familiarity with particular card games. Most mainstream gambling movies try to make things at least a little easier for those of us who aren’t familiar with the intricacies and traps of Texas Hold ’Em, but still you can feel completely at sea if you don’t recognize the value of a certain hand....

In a favorable review of The Grand Budapest Hotel in The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy suggests that Anderson’s approach “may well seem off-putting and weird to the general public.” That seems not to be the case: Anderson’s film took $800,000 domestically in its opening weekend, screening at only four theaters, making it his most successful opening to date; it also earned £1.53 million on its U.K. opening. The great wager that Anderson makes and wins in The Grand Budapest Hotel is that a piece of film art can be extremely refined, artificed, and calibrated virtually to the point of being mechanical—yet can still accommodate emotional content, even if that content communicates itself on a rather indirect, rarefied level....

Embarking on his mammoth investigative documentary Shoah in 1975, Claude Lanzmann began by spending a week in Rome, interviewing an Austrian Jew named Benjamin Murmelstein. These interviews never appeared in Shoah, however, as Lanzmann has subsequently explained; they were too long and too complex, and would have required a degree of commentary that Shoah could not have accommodated. The Murmelstein sessions are now the basis of Lanzmann’s mesmerizing, three-and-a-half-hour The Last of the Unjust, and you can see why they merit a film of their own....

Critics on the Croisette are often expected by their outlets to file a roundup piece declaring that they’ve just seen “the best Cannes ever” or “the worst Cannes ever.” But there’s little newsworthiness in announcing that you’ve merely seen an okay Cannes. This year hasn’t been that bad, with not too much to complain about—but it’s been decidedly low on thrills. There was no champagne supernova like The Great Beauty, and no title that got everyone arguing, like Blue Is the Warmest Color....

Hail, Caesar! Films about filmmaking very often tell the same story with the same characters: creative types are highly temperamental and have volatile, complicated personal lives, and there’s one man in the center who’s responsible for keeping things together. They’re so uniform in this regard that a beginning filmmaker could probably write/direct a version of the genre as their very first feature and it would be credible—even though these narratives are supposed to draw on years of hard-won experience in the biz....

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty Jonas Mekas, the “godfather” of American avant-garde film, turned 90 this past Christmas Eve, and the occasion is being celebrated with major shows in London and Paris. In conjunction with a complete retrospective of film and video at the Pompidou Center comes this rich, beautifully produced box set of six DVDs, each with its own booklet of brilliant liner notes and images....

In André Novais Oliveira’s Long Way Home, screening March 31 and April 2 as part of New Directors/New Films, a group of dengue inspectors fans out through the neighborhood of Contagem on the outskirts of Brazil’s Minas Gerais state capital, Belo Horizonte. The new member of this group, Juliana (Grace Passô), has just moved from another peripheral city and must adapt to her new surroundings, which she does quickly, as if by camouflage, revealing little of herself....

When I met with Depardieu on the patio of The Mark Hotel in New York on an overcast morning in mid-September, he was markedly disinterested in talking about any of his movies, in town as he was for a talk at the French Institute Alliance Française to promote his slender new book, Innocent. The book is more scattershot manifesto than autobiography, its title a double meaning—its author both describes his personal philosophy, of which a doctrine of innocence is an essential element, and protests his own innocence before an imagined jury of the media, who have made tabloid fodder of him....

A Thousand Thoughts (Sam Green and Joe Bini, 2018). Photo by Waleed Shah. The film camera is built to capture the moment, yet what’s captured immediately becomes the past, material for retrospective use rather than synced with this instant. While there’s plenty of premeditation to Sam Green and Joe Bini’s A Thousand Thoughts, its very design as a “live documentary” makes this foundational tension of cinema actively experienced and felt....

Images from Red Moon Tide (Lois Patiño, 2020) Seven years after his award-winning debut Coast of Death (2013), Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño returns to the same location in northwest Galicia for his second feature Red Moon Tide, a belated follow-up and quasi-companion piece that expands on the mytho-historical undercurrents coursing beneath the former film’s eerily placid surfaces. Defined by jutting rock formations and swelling seasides, Costa da Morte is a region of both immense beauty and extreme brutality: named for the many shipwrecks that have occurred along its turbulent shoreline, it’s a setting especially conducive to folklore and storytelling....

“The ethereal opening of Victor Moreno’s The Hidden City takes us into an unknown world, but it also feels simply like the awakening of light in darkness,” I wrote in the January/February issue of Film Comment. “Deep below Madrid, these tunnels of all sorts keep the city running, whether it’s storm drains or subways or other underground systems—the behind-the-scenes to urban living. Traveling through the tunnels (sometimes through literal tracking shots), the film’s camera-eye also makes a journey from abstraction into the brutally concrete (the substance, and the drilling into said substance), as we get subterranean glimmers of light, night-vision peeks at rats and even a cat, and watch workers on somnambulant tours through the artificial night....

Whit Stillman’s newly released Love & Friendship, which dramatizes Austen’s circa 1794 epistolary novella Lady Susan, may be regarded as the sharpest take on Austen by a bona fide auteur. Typically nonjudgmental, it drolly depicts the flirt’s progress of the eponymous widow (Kate Beckinsale), a freeloader and expert in politesse, who attempts to snare rich dimwit Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) for the 16-year-old daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), she has wantonly neglected, and a younger heir, Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), for herself....

Unfortunately, he sold those English-language rights to the Weinstein Company who, in typical Weinstein fashion, declared that American audiences were morons who couldn’t follow the plot and so they’d have to cut 20 minutes from the film and add voiceover narration to the ending in order to render Bong’s film comprehensible to this nation of presumed mouth-breathers. Bong held out for seven months, but finally he took the choice the Weinsteins offered him, trading a wide release for artistic control....

The first sustained signs of financial stability for the Hong Kong film industry after its crash in the mid-Nineties was its sudden access to the Mainland Chinese market. Under the CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement) in 2003, Hong Kong movies were no longer classified as foreign films as long as they passed censorship requirements, and a massive new market was born. Suddenly, every Hong Kong distributor was shooting a period martial-arts movie with major stars on the Mainland....