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If you’re obsessed with cinema, Harry Dean Stanton probably has something to do with it. The man’s genetic material, thanks to his appearance in over 200 films, is woven deep into a half-century of movie history. Twenty years ago, first-time director Sophie Huber met Stanton in a bar in West Hollywood. Her documentary is equal parts existential lament and intimate revelation. Often Stanton’s responses to her questions act as conversation stoppers....

To fully appreciate the pleasures of Pascal Chaumeil’s debut feature, Heartbreaker, it helps to know—and love—Dirty Dancing. The addictive 1987 hit guides every “step” of the prospective lovebirds’ evolution in Chaumeil’s film: the discovery, the groundwork, the bonding moment, the physical connection, the eventual coming clean—elements common to romantic comedies. And like Dirty Dancing’s Johnny Castle, whose job was to charm and dance with older ladies at a summer resort, Alex (Romain Duris), the scruffy yet irresistible antihero of Heartbreaker, converts his magnetism into cash....

The Late Mathias Pascal The french studio Films Albatros was formed by Russian immigrants after the 1917 Revolution. Studio head Alexander Kamenka championed Jacques Feyder in particular, and this five-film box set contains two warm, sensitive, character-driven Feyder films: the melodrama Gribiche (25) and the comedy The New Gentlemen (29). It also contains three films starring the commanding Ivan Mosjoukine, whose pale face and enormous eyes easily suggest a man haunted by past loves....

The Tuba Thieves (Alison O’Daniel, 2023). Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Derek Howard. On the second day of Sundance, the value of open captioning at film festivals was demonstrated when a caption device given to juror Marlee Matlin, who is Deaf, failed during a screening of Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams. Variety’s report of the incident states that some filmmakers “declined the request to provide open captions onscreen, citing the costs and time associated with making another print....

The Romance of Digestion Now before we can discuss the humor of Robert Benchley, the first order of business is establishing who, or what, is a Robert Benchley. But before we do that, we should start with a brief précis on humor, because good manners dictate a movement from part to whole, and everyone knows you can take the humor out of the Benchley, but you can’t rout a Benchley from his humor....

The Innocents Deborah Kerr may have frolicked in the surf with Burt Lancaster and donned a nun’s habit more than once, but for many, her name prompts a vision of the actress in a large, gothic house, clad in a hoopskirt, tending the children of her employer. Indeed, Kerr is to governesses what John Wayne is to cowboys and Edward G. Robinson to gangsters. She played the tutor-caregiver in three of her essential films—The King and I, The Innocents, and The Chalk Garden—and mentored troubled adolescents in Tea and Sympathy and Bonjour Tristesse....

Go Tell It on the Mountain “The rise and fall of one’s reputation . . . What can you do about it?” James Baldwin, then 61, said to The New York Times just before the release of Stan Lathan’s film adaptation of his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. “Any real artist will never be judged in the time of his time; whatever judgment is delivered in the time of his time cannot be trusted....

The “movies” are a bit more familiar now, but we’re definitely feeling deprived of moviegoing, the community that cinemas provide, and, well, just plain getting out of the house and seeing people. So we’ve begun our Film Comment Podcast at Home series, gathering together (remotely!) to talk about the movies we’re watching at home. While we can’t do anything about the stir-craziness, or the dread, we can at least share movies and keep each other company....

For more on this year’s Berlinale, including dispatches from Jonathan Romney and Erika Balsom, subscribe to the Film Comment Letter on filmcomment.com

Our esteemed participants included Wesley Morris of The New York Times; Eric Hynes, critic, reporter, and FILM COMMENT columnist; Michael Koresky, staff writer of The Criterion Collection and co-editor-in-chief of Reverse Shot; Aliza Ma, programmer, critic, and author of the FILM COMMENT September/October cover story on The Assassin; FC Senior Editor Nicolas Rapold; and FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca. Listen/Subscribe:

To explore Faye’s legacy and lasting influence on African women’s cinema today, NYAFF brought together the filmmakers Nuotama Bodomo, Jessica Beshir, Akosua Adoma Owusu, and Johanna Makabi for a roundtable led by the scholar and critic Yasmina Price. Film Comment is thrilled to share the conversation on today’s episode in collaboration with the festival. Find out more about the NYAFF30 lineup here.

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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 lecture and Q&A with Shane Denson, a Stanford University scholar who explores the terrain of “post-cinema”—the brave new world of digital images untethered to classical notions of time, space, and reality. Check back next week for another episode from “A Long of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence,” featuring A....

Camp 14: Total Control Zone Lords of Salem had its moments, but for bone-chilling horror it was hard to beat the inhumanities recounted in Camp 14: Total Control Zone (see also: The Act of Killing). Speaking in hushed tones, in a sparsely furnished house, North Korea refugee Shin Dong-Huyk recounts his hellish upbringing in a prison camp, where he was born. Two other escapees—neatly dressed former members of the camp’s security apparatus—and smuggled footage shot within the camp push the film into the realm of unprecedented access; the men’s accounts of their life-and-death control over prisoners are chilling....

Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (50), Europe ’51 (52), and Journey to Italy (54) are three of the most emotionally devastating films you will ever see: anguished cries into a postwar void that seem to question the very point of existence. Together they form a loose trilogy of spiritual quests in the modern world—attempts to find purpose and a sense of place in the face of an increasingly dehumanizing society. All starring Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s mistress-turned-wife, the films extend the psychic turmoil her characters experienced in Gaslight and Notorious, revealing an inner malaise—a very different kind of horror....

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Enjoy what you can, endure what you must. For some of us, the fact that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s rapturous animist tale Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or proved so elating and vindicating, that we could almost forgive Frémaux and his associates for including Ken Loach’s Route Irish. A last-minute addition announced fewer than 48 hours before the festival began, Loach’s festering sore of a movie, about private security contractors in Iraq, blunts and numbs....

Beyond the Hills is not a film that’s easy to like, nor does it try to be. Set in a strict monastery whose stern equilibrium is tragically disturbed when one of the nuns welcomes a friend in distress, and unfolding, accordingly, at an ascetically deliberate pace in a string of long takes, not unlike a penitent rosary, it is a film with which few if any would expect to feel immediate kinship....