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The best thing to come of the painfully unfunny and wholly unnecessary remake of Arthur is that it may encourage some moviegoers to revisit—or discover—the Oscar-winning 1981 original, just to see what the fuss was about. The first (and only) feature directed by a promising young writer-director named Steve Gordon, who died the following year of a heart attack at age 44, the first Arthur was hardly a masterpiece, but it was a highly enjoyable comedy of manners done in a style that, even at the time, seemed quaintly old-fashioned....

Mysterious and soulful, Virgil Vernier’s debut fiction feature has its eyes on the night skies and its feet firmly planted on concrete. Somewhere in a Paris banlieue backcountry of brutalist housing projects, two young women, Lisa and Joane, strike up a friendship and wonder about their futures; we also get periodic glimpses of a young guy first seen learning the ropes in a building’s control room. Vernier maps out the women’s psychological landscape with close attention to the shared space of hanging out and the momentary pressure points when their ideas about the world bump up against reality....

There’s something about family doctors that feels comfortingly old-fashioned—the sense of responsibility and respectability, of doing good in a community. The general practitioners in Axelle Ropert’s bittersweet, warmly photographed second feature are even a family business: brothers Boris and Dimitri Pizarnik (Cédric Kahn and Laurent Stocker) see patients together and leave their office to make house calls in the 13th Arrondissement (an area containing Paris’s Chinatown). As the friendly pair treat ailing youngsters, who feel comfortable enough to tease them, Miss and the Doctors bustles along like other French portraits of teachers or social workers, with glimpses of the human comedy....

In Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan, Godard’s proverbial “girl and a gun” becomes “girl and a yurt.” The setup: antihero Asa, after a mandatory Kazakh military stint, returns to the home of his nomad brother-in-law, an outpost conveniently located in the utter void of the aptly named Hunger Steppe. Asa will not become a full-fledged shepherd until he has a wife, and the only potential candidate would be Tulpan, the girl in the yurt-next-door—if “next door” means “within a five-mile radius....

Philip’s nasty antics are immensely amusing, but does the portrayal amount to a glorification of his behavior and egocentrism? FILM COMMENT discussed the question of romanticizing the author, and other aspects of the film, with the director at Locarno. Listen Up Philip screens Oct. 9 and 10 in the 52nd New York Film Festival. To what extent do you relate to the characters of Listen Up Philip? The three characters through whom the scenes play out—Philip, Ashley, and Ike—are all equally autobiographical in some way....

Baudelaire’s two most recent nonfiction films—generous works of fierce intelligence sometimes belied by their serene visual textures and careful pacing—both revolve around unsimulated exchanges of letters. In the case of Baudelaire’s exchanges with the Japanese radical filmmaker Masao Adachi in The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (11), the mail in question was electronic. In the case of the prolonged correspondence he kept up with Maxim Gvinjia starting several years ago—the exchange that eventually became Letters to Max, his new film—their exchange left, against many odds, an actual physical trace....

The Woman in the Fifth Making his film debut at the tender age of 14, actor Ethan Hawke has had a career as prolific as it has been diverse, ranging from scruffy-faced heart-throb in Reality Bites, to philosophizing Wanderlust writer in Richard Linklater’s beloved Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, to scrappy rookie cop with steadfast morals in Training Day. A rare Hollywood Renaissance man, the actor also writes and directs, and for the stage has performed Chekhov and David Rabe—not to mention penning two novels....

Let the Fire Burn How did you choose this material? I had just finished film school and moved to D.C. the same year as a film school buddy, John Aldrich, who is associate producer on the film. We were talking documentary ideas, and I said, this thing from my childhood always bothered me and maybe has potential for a film. I read Michael Boyette’s book “Let It Burn!” (the quotation marks are part of the title) very early on, and then it was a matter of figuring out if there’s material, the things you need for a film....

Gifted with a game and grizzled cast, Cold in July shifts away from horror but remains true to their blood-spattering roots. Adapted from the novel by Joe R. Lansdale, it follows mild-mannered East Texas picture-framer Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall), who accidentally shoots and kills a home intruder. The dead thief’s father (Sam Shepard) seeks vengeance against Dane, but both men stumble into a larger mystery, necessitating the aid of P....

The Old Oak (Ken Loach, 2023) When I met them on the terrace of the Palais des Festivals at Cannes, director Ken Loach and his writing partner Paul Laverty—who together have been to Cannes 11 times and won two Palmes d’Or—informed me that of the roughly 150 journalists who sought to interview them about their Competition selection, The Old Oak, I was the first from America. Considering it’s their third consecutive film (after I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You) to be set in Northern England, it’s plausible that outsiders see their project as merely a localized one—though this entirely misses the point of what they do....

All images from Terminal Sud (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2019) Terminal Sud is a political ghost story: a slice of urgent French minimalism haunted by the specters of Algeria’s past. Following 2015’s Story of Judas, which retold the final days of Jesus of Nazareth from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, Algerian-French filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche returns with another bold experiment with history. Opening with the frisking of a busload of travelers at a military checkpoint, Terminal Sud appears to be set against the backdrop of the Algerian civil war, but the film’s modern, French setting and ambiguous dialogue make the context pointedly unspecific....

All images from Native Son (Rashid Johnson, 2019) Richard Wright’s Native Son was published in 1940, and while it was revelatory for some, it did cause some controversy. To the white American reader, Bigger Thomas felt like a boogeyman, a byproduct of what it means to grow within and under the weight of an oppressive white supremacist system. The novel was intended to be eye-opening, a means of lending a voice and interiority to those who had been ignored and left to rot under the boot of Jim Crow—out of sight, out of mind....

A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams; 2023) With A Woman Escapes, co-directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, three of the most exciting young filmmakers working today come together for an experiment in healing and communication. A true hybrid, the film—shot in a combination of 3D, 16mm, and 4K formats—traces an epistolary video correspondence among a trio of characters: Blake, Burak, and Audrey (the last being Bohdanowicz’s screen surrogate, played here, as in many of the director’s previous films, by Deragh Campbell)....

Les Coquillettes Shadowing three flighty femmes through the fêtes of the Locarno Film Festival, Sophie Letourneur’s Les Coquillettes has drawn critical comparisons to Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls. While somewhat accurate—like Dunham, Letourneur’s style and tone eschew likeability in favor of authenticity—the connection-by-default underscores the glaring rarity of the female voice on screen. Now 35 and a mother of two, the French writer-director and actress has done work that can be sorted according to her own stages of development....

Scanners “Why are you such a derelict, such a piece of human junk?” Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) demands of the bewildered man bound to the bed in his laboratory in David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981). It’s a rhetorical question: Ruth quickly explains to the piece of human junk in question, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), that he is a scanner. A telepathic “freak of nature,” Vale has been unwittingly recruited (by way of sedative-laced darts) to spearhead the fight against Darryl Revock (Michael Ironside), who is harnessing his own super brain for evil....

On the occasion of the release of The Wolf of Wall Street on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD by Paramount, FILM COMMENT spoke briefly with Schoonmaker via phone about the nitty-gritty of cutting. It seems to me that editing is one of the least understood aspects of filmmaking among us critics. We will say it is “sharp” or “good” or “crisp,” and leave it at that. What are the most common misapprehensions of your art?...

Bidegain has been a devoted writing partner to Audiard ever since (Rust and Bone, 12; Dheepan, 15) and continues to be drawn to hardboiled, noir fantasies. But his flexible approach to storytelling and instinct for the zeitgeist have landed him in directorial team-ups as diverse as Bertrand Bonello for the spellbinding fashion symphony Saint-Laurent (14); Joachim Lafosse for Our Children (12), the fictionalized account of a modern-day Medea story; and most recently, visual artist turned filmmaker Clément Cogitore, for the military psychodrama The Wakhan Front, the 2015 Critics’ Week highlight being released in the U....

Known for his contributions to the cinemas of Ulrich Seidl and Michael Glawogger, Austrian cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler is dedicated to unveiling the human soul through his lyrical and sensitive camerawork. With Glawogger, his departed comrade in arms, Thaler has traveled the world, crafting magnetic, pioneering documentaries that explore the struggles of the underprivileged in developing countries. Driven by ravishing, kinetic visuals, Glawogger’s films are inextricable from the places they depict, be it the simultaneously horrific and spellbinding Nigerian open-air slaughterhouse in Workingman’s Death (2006)—an engrossing look at 21st-century examples of manual labor—or the narrow, fluorescent-lit corridors of a brothel in Bangladesh, which hosts the second act of one of the most striking cinematic representations of prostitution, Whores’ Glory (2011)....

Araf: Somewhere In Between Araf translates as “limbo” or “purgatory” in English, and throughout the film there is imagery of lava, frozen earth, roads and bridges. Could you talk about this idea of limbo? Yes, the title, araf, means “limbo,” as you say. What is limbo for me? It is something between inferno and heaven, it is a place of suffering, waiting while suffering. Why? Because you have no idea where you will go, who is judging you, while individually you know your sins....