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When important filmmakers write novels, the results don’t necessarily set the world alight—ask David Cronenberg or Paolo Sorrentino. A surer approach, for any director with the ambition, is to write novels purely for the screen, using the language of film; and while the idea of a “novelistic” film might be unfashionable, such attempts open to the charge of being literary rather than properly cinematic, some succeed beautifully. My favorite cine-novel in Cannes this year, although it was a work of lightness rather than necessarily depth, was Christophe Honoré’s blithe, tender Sorry Angel; my least favorite, a work of lugubrious pomposity and prolixity, mundanely morbid under the guise of satanic provocation, was Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, an edifice creaking under the weight of its self-conscious metaphoric architecture....

We might begin with Todd Field’s Nick Nightingale because, luckily or unluckily, Field’s been hustled out of movies prematurely of late. Disappearing summarily from The Haunting was surely a blessing in disguise, deliverance on the cutting room floor. But in Eyes Wide Shut he’s a fellow—like so many characters in Stanley Kubrick movies—we might expect to see more of before the final fade. Nick Nightingale, old med-school chum of our protagonist Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), is playing piano at the Upper East Side pre-Christmas party in Eyes Wide Shut’s first major sequence....

With its never-ending string of awards, nominations, and general acclaim, last year’s Sundance darling Beasts of the Southern Wild is still buzzing more loudly than any film that screened during the fest’s 2013 edition. While sales may have been exceptionally healthy—27 titles snapped up so far, many boasting hefty price tags—there wasn’t anything that commanded the same level of attention (warranted or otherwise). Which isn’t to say there weren’t any diamonds in the rough....

William Friedkin on the set of The Exorcist (1973) “Most films should really be watched with your emotions, rather than with your intelligence,” William Friedkin, who died August 7 at 87, told the students of New York Film Academy in 2016. “Most of the films that interest me move me on an emotional level, or they don’t, and that’s how I watch them. I’m not looking to filmmakers or guys who work in the movie business for philosophy, or ideology, or psychology....

Is he Clouseau or Columbo? The bumbling rural police detective in Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin appears to have only the most tenuous grasp of the grisly mystery uncovered in his sleepy farm community: human body parts are turning up inside the corpses of massacred cows. Monsieur le Commandant—sporting a cartoon mustache, clad in granddad windbreaker, constantly and ineffectually announcing his presence—is played by a nonprofessional equipped with a neck-straining assortment of tics that waylay every other line he utters....

The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez, 2023) The debut feature from Felipe Gálvez, The Settlers is a bracing retelling of a crucial moment in Chilean history, couched in the cinematic language of the nihilistic 1960s westerns of Sergio Leone and Monte Hellman. Though Gálvez looked at films like The Searchers (1956) for inspiration, there’s even a touch (to my eye) of the ur–acid western El topo (1970), by Gálvez’s countryman Alejandro Jodorowsky, in the glimmers of phantasmagoria that punctuate the hard-nosed realism of The Settlers....

More recently, Clark has kept a low profile—though a spat with art collector Peter Brant did crack Page Six in 2013—but this is about to change. Clark’s Marfa Girl opens in New York on March 27, his first feature to appear in theaters since 2005’s Wassup Rockers, and its follow-up is waiting in the wings. This would be the Paris-set The Smell of Us, which recently screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects, and now awaits a sufficiently dauntless American distributor....

Their cross-country adventures in the house-car showcase Gondry’s best comic instincts, and beautifully illustrate how true companionship in those awkward years feels. In the spirit of this tactile road movie, the following interview was conducted en route to an Upper West Side record store, where Gondry almost immediately wanted to leave: “I have so much stuff, it depresses me. I need to move, I have too much stuff.” Microbe & Gasoline had its U....

Baker has spent the last decade-plus illuminating a variety of subcultures and minority groups which usually receive little onscreen representation beyond shopworn character types. His breakthrough film, Take Out (04), follows a Chinese immigrant over 24 hours as he attempts to pay off a smuggling debt by making an ever-increasing number of food deliveries. Prince of Broadway (08) similarly tracks the day-to-day grind of a New York street hustler who’s forced to balance personal and professional commitments when his infant son is unexpectedly left in his care....

In William Thackeray’s novel, Bullingdon’s abdication is more prolonged. The public beating by Barry takes place in a hunting field, not in closed quarters. Bullingdon handwrites his denunciation days later, leaving the epistle on his bedroom table, where it’s discovered long after he’s fled. Kubrick’s liberties with the source material pay off handsomely. The sheer horror of a chamber concert gone to hell is an ideal venue for bedlam. The violinists slowly dropping their bows....

He’s a Woman, She’s a Man Here’s how bad it is: back in 2012, the Hong Kong International Film Festival honored Peter Chan, choosing him as their Filmmaker in Focus. They were set to screen a bunch of his movies, including his massive 1994 hit, He’s a Woman, She’s a Man. The only problem was, no one had a print. There was nothing usable in the Hong Kong Film Archive....

“Miike’s criteria for selecting projects is often based on the people he gets to work with,” Mes says. “And there have been a number of producers that he’s enjoyed working with so much that he’s continued to accept even off-the-wall or really low-budget projects.” Miike is the man who can’t say no, and that’s led him to some pretty weird places. Like Yasukuni, the shrine for Japan’s war dead....

I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end. —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer Benh Zeitlin has a thing for water. As a child, he recalls, he was always more interested in sea lore and stories set at the bottom of the ocean than those that took place on dry land or in the furthest reaches of the galaxy....

James Marsh was an unexpected choice to direct a mainstream movie about the tumultuous relationship between the language scholar Jane Wilde and the physically disabled theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, before, during, and after their 26-year marriage. Little in the English filmmaker’s résumé suggested his affinity for an academia-based romantic drama with an overcoming-impossible-odds theme. He has explored Northern and Southern American Gothic with the docudramas Wisconsin Death Trip (99) and The Team (05), respectively; made exemplary philosophical documentaries in Man on Wire (08) and Project Nim (11); and fused noir and Brit realism in Red Riding: 1980 (09) and Shadow Dancer (12)....

You can’t say you weren’t warned. A flamboyantly eccentric musical that both fulfils and obliterates the brief of its genre, Annette opens with a pre-show announcement admonishing the audience to silence themselves: “We now ask for your complete attention. If you want to sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo, or fart, please do it in your head, only in your head. You are now kindly requested to keep silent and to hold your breath until the very end of the show....