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Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s expansive Sugar is an immigrant story framed by American baseball’s farm system. It centers on Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Pérez Soto), an amateur carpenter from the Dominican Republic with a promising arm. The film opens on a U.S.-run, Dominican-based academy where Sugar learns regulation baseball and its English terminology. On weekends he leaves the rigid environment of the camp and returns to the vibrancy and looseness of his hometown, where kids play baseball on a dirt pitch, worlds from the academy’s manicured diamond....

The opening scene of Ryoo Seung-wan’s new spy-thriller The Berlin File is, for better and worse, an apt introduction to the film. A confusing arms deal involving North and South Korean, Russian, and Arab agents goes spectacularly awry, somehow entangling Israel and America in the process and sending North Korean super-spy Pyo Jong-Seung on the run, the victim of an elaborate plot that has framed him as a defector and left him wanted dead by all sides....

Three features into his career, 34-year-old director James Ponsoldt has built a little cottage industry of intimate portraits of alcoholics. Each time, he approaches the affliction from a new angle, the bottle playing a different role in the character’s life and the film’s arc. His previous film, Smashed (12), is a tender study of a woman’s alcoholism and recovery, and how both affect (and are affected by) her marriage. In The Spectacular Now, drinking helps a teenager, Sutter Keely, deflect pesky memories and postpone decisions about what to do after high school....

Eschewing binaries of strong/weak female characters, outspoken radicalism and political passivity, Haifaa Al Mansour’s debut feature presents a firm but understated social critique in the form of an endearing coming-of-age story. Adorable 11-year-old Wadjda (Waad Mohammed, natural and full of verve) leads a comfortable existence in a middle-class urban family but pushes back in small ways against the rules that hem her in. She listens to Western music, wears beat-up chucks and skinny jeans underneath her abaya, and befriends a neighborhood boy (Abdullrahman Algohani), with whom she wants to race bikes....

It’s 1982, deep into the Lebanese Civil War, and tensions are running high in the country. Beirut is in rubbles, a dusty war zone of wafting smoke, ringed with barbed wire and pitiless snipers, its buildings pocked by bullet holes; young men on motorbikes hold RPGs as they zip past burned-out husks of cars. This is the hostile setting conjured in the early scenes of Zaytoun—a film by director Eran Riklis and first-time screenwriter Nader Rizq that explores a budding friendship between an Israeli pilot downed behind enemy lines and the spirited Palestinian boy who warily agrees to help him....

Tilda Swinton in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria I was invited to follow the shoot of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in order to collect material for an upcoming book to be published by Fireflies Press. This included writing a daily diary of the production, from which the following passages are excerpted exclusively in Film Comment, in serialized form with a new entry every afternoon for the next week. Read the series here. Day 28—Wednesday, 25 September 2019 It’s coming down in buckets when we board the buses at 4am, and still going strong when we get to the location, a stretch of unused highway at an altitude of 7,500 feet....

The venerable tradition of Shakespeare-behind-bars is upheld by the equally venerable Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Shooting inside the walls of Rome’s high-security Rebibbia Prison, the Tavianis collaborate with a troupe of inmates on a production of Julius Caesar. Or do they? It’s not as simple as it sounds. The brothers, working closely with the institution’s theater director Fabio Cavalli, have scripted and staged the audition, casting, and rehearsal processes, and have their cameras rolling as a performance unfolds before a civilian audience....

Pinku veteran Koji Wakamatsu’s three-hour film feels a bit like a throwback, and not just because it drops us into the frenzy of Japan’s student protests in the Sixties. Fusing together documentary footage and tense dramatization, Wakamatsu has produced the kind of heterogeneous cinematic object that doesn’t usually get released in the U.S. unless it takes place in the Thai jungle. Part one of United Red Army marches along with a double-time primer on the decade’s student demonstrations and occupations, from protests against the ANPO treaty and university fees all the way up to the radicalization of the movement and its internal divisions at the turn of the Seventies....

Don’t miss our special Sundance episodes of The Film Comment Podcast starting with a preview episode available on Wednesday, and check back over the next week and a half for informed discussions of festival highlights and ahead-of-the-curve coverage from Utah from our correspondents. U.S. Dramatic Competition Radha Blank, The 40-Year-Old Version Cast: Radha Blank, Peter Y. Kim, Oswin Benjamin Esteban Arango, Blast Beat Cast: Diane Guerrero, Wilmer Valderrama, Daniel Dae Kim Angel Manuel Soto, Charm City Kings Cast: Teyonah Parris, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, William Catlett Adam Rehmeier, Dinner in America Cast: Kyle Gallner, Emily Skeggs, Lea Thompson Braden King, The Evening Hour Cast: Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Cosmo Jarvis, Lili Taylor Ekwa Msangi, Farewell Amor Cast: Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson Lee Isaac Chung, Minari Cast: Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung Channing Godfrey Peoples, Miss Juneteenth Cast: Nicole Beharie, Alexis Chikaeze, Lori Hayes Eliza Hittman, Never Rarely Sometimes Always Cast: Ryan Eggold, Théodore Pellerin, Sharon Van Etten Edson Oda, Nine Days Cast: Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgård, Tony Hale Max Barbakow, Palm Springs Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J....

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On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish found a quiet corner to chat with frequent FC contributors Jessica Kiang and Jordan Cronk about their hot takes from the first three days of the fest. They discuss Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky’s Wife, Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet, Michel Hazanavicius’s Coupez!, Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts, and read and listen to all of our Cannes coverage here....

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Links and Things Imageless Films, Part 5 at Anthology Film Archives Hugo Fregonese: Man on the Run at MoMA The Films of Beth and Scott B at MoMA Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf at Maysles Documentary Center Midlengths at Metrograph Three Films by Larry Gottheim at Maysles Documentary Center An Evening with Larry Gottheim at Spectacle Spectral Ground: Black Experimental Film at Monangambee.org Karen Lamassone at Anthology Film Archives

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