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Credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera To borrow the aghast tagline for another psychologically fraught movie of the early ’60s: how could they ever make an opera of Marnie? Aside from the ever downward spiral of Bernard Herrmann’s whirlpool of a score and its mega-melodramatic climax, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 anti-romantic Freudian drama of repressed neuroses is one of the director’s most tightly wound affairs, moving to the minute, internal rhythms of its shrinking violet title character, played by Tippi Hedren....

In late November, the Criterion Collection unveiled a major overhaul of its website, placing online digital distribution at its center. The driving force behind the change was Criterion’s new business partner, The Auteurs, an emerging media company that launched its own site back in February 2008 to coincide with the Berlin Film Festival. The Auteurs site combines a film library with a social networking platform (already serving some 25,000 members) and an online journal called The Notebook....

The most celebrated instance of film critics picking up cameras en masse remains the French New Wave. Why have so few followed in their footsteps? While the lion’s share of video essays floating around the Internet are artless—albeit fun—mash-ups, there are a few bright spots, one of which is the video magazine The Seventh Art. Based in Toronto, the editorial staff produces a monthly issue of video essays and longform interviews with directors....

Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986) By the 1980s, jazz had lived several lives: as popular music, as avant-garde music, and finally as African-American classical music. This latter stage conferred a precarious status that simultaneously honored and cast in amber an artistic heritage whose greatest practitioners were devoted to moving the music forward, not waxing nostalgic. Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight (1986), about a weary, alcoholic Black musician attempting to give his career a second wind in Paris, would seem in danger of contributing to this mythologization with its period setting, meticulously constructed and overtly artificial sets, and wistful adherence to the cliché of self-destructiveness as entwined with genius....

It Felt Like Love I start watching Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love via a link the publicist sent me. The film is in Sundance’s NEXT section, which I always focus on, but I couldn’t make the film fit into my moviegoing schedule. But the Vimeo playback is doing that stopping and starting thing which is driving me nuts. And now I have to pause, take a break, and head off to be on a radio show....

Mary Twala Mlongo in This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) Last Saturday, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s third feature, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, won a Special Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it was screened in the World Dramatic Competition. Like Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, Mosese’s film had seemed like an odd (but welcome) selection for Park City: cryptic and singular in shape, dazzling in its play with light and landscape, and rigorously specific to its setting in the highlands of Lesotho, This Is Not a Burial felt worlds apart from the breezier and more traditional fare that makes up most of the festival’s narrative feature lineup....

SXSW is a festival that really came to prominence because of films yours: low-budget, no stars, dealing with romance. Yet your film sticks out this year because it’s one of the few narrative features here that doesn’t have any stars in it. It’s set in L.A., but it isn’t dealing with the type of L.A. we usually see. How do you feel like you have navigated this festival and gotten attention for yourself?...

The Curse of Frankenstein Fall is my favorite season (isn’t it everyone’s?) and the horror films of Hammer Studios are among the most autumnal ever made. Every time characters walk outside or ride in a carriage, on their way to investigate, to rescue, flee or pursue—no one is ever just out for a walk or a drive in a Hammer movie—the wheels send dead leaves flying and half-bare branches curl toward the road like fingers....

King Creole In the opening number of 1958’s King Creole, directed by the great Michael Curtiz, Elvis Presley lounges on a balcony in New Orleans, singing a call-and-response song with the people hawking wares below. At one point, still singing, he picks up a comb, but before he runs it through his hair he casually flicks his fingers along it to clean it off. It’s a tiny moment, not dwelled upon, but it almost single-handedly grounds the film in reality....

The relationship between filmmaker and audience is a subject that gets little if any attention. I’m not talking about box-office reports, self-righteous critical crusades against pretentiousness and elitism, or theories of spectatorship. I’m talking about filmmakers and how they measure their audience, what role the viewing public plays in their decision-making process. There’s the old auteurist model of Hitchcock and Hawks, forever obsessed with the paying customers and what they could and could not abide, how to lead them in this or that direction....

Classe Tous Risques (Claude Sautet, I had a very special, very personal, very privileged relationship with Claude Sautet. I felt a shock when I discovered his Classe Tous Risques (60), and it was on this film that I wrote my first review. It was a short article, as the editor had requested, and doubtless superficial—I was young—but laudatory. It ended with this sentence: “I’ve heard them say that Classe Tous Risques is a ‘B’ movie, but better ‘B’ like Boetticher than ‘A’ like Allegret....

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For the second half of the episode, we’ll be talking about the Tamil filmmaker Vetri Maaran with R. Emmet Sweeney, who wrote about the director’s bloody portraits of South India in our new November-December issue. Our special guest host for the episode is FC assistant editor Devika Girish.

The event was co-hosted by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish. This week’s episode is an excerpt from her moderating shift, featuring a conversation with A.I. scholar Andrea Rizzoli and critic Kevin B. Lee, the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts, about the history of artificial intelligence and its limitations and possibilities vis-à-vis art. Check out last week’s episode for another excerpt from “A Long of Dreaming About the Future of Intelligence,” featuring Stanford University scholar Shane Denson on the brave new world of “post-cinema....

This thought was the catalyst for an ongoing conversation about the questions Tom Cruise’s world-dominating blockbuster raises—about nationalistic movies, star power, and the responsibilities of criticism and cinephilia. So this week, Devika and her fellow Co-Deputy Editor Clinton Krute invited two ideal interlocutors to join the conversation and help pick apart the Top Gun phenomenon: editor and critic Blair McClendon, who grew up in San Diego and can actually distinguish between various fighter jets, and Ed Halter, whose brilliant review of the sequel appeared in 4Columns....