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While Mercuriales is Virgil Vernier’s first fiction feature, he is a familiar presence on the European festival circuit for his work in documentary film, notably Simulation (06) and Police Station (09), a diptych on the French police co-directed with Ilan Klipper. Yet as the conversation below makes clear, his work cannot be easily pigeonholed. From his earliest self-produced shorts, Vernier has attempted to capture the state of France today by combining documentary and fiction in a way that evokes tales and figures as ancient as civilization....

Image Courtesy of Cinema Guild. The Girl and the Spider opens with the film’s only attempt at an establishing shot: a floor plan for an apartment, soon to materialize (if only in claustrophobic fragments) into a three-dimensional space. Then, a Kuleshovian string of images: a jackhammer drills into asphalt in close-up; the back of a construction worker’s head is framed crisply against a blurred background; a young woman, Mara (Henriette Confurius), fixes her melancholy blue eyes on something in the near distance....

Photo courtesy of Michael Almereyda. Michael Almereyda is preparing to go into production next year on a Nikola Tesla biopic, which will reunite him with Ethan Hawke, his Shakespearean co-conspirator from 2000’s Hamlet. This marks a significant creative transition period for the film, which Almereyda initially drafted after he dropped out of Harvard. “After countless revisions, the script is now like a house that’s been extensively rebuilt on the same lot, over the course of roughly 35 years,” Almereyda told Film Comment....

Solomon is McQueen’s appalled witness to savagery as well as his protagonist. He observes the murder of a fellow prisoner on the paddle-steamer and the separating of a slave from her children. He is all but hanged to death by Ford’s foreman Tibeats (Paul Dano). He stumbles upon a lynching in a clearing. He is implicated in the Caligula-esque depravity of Epps and his wife Mary (Sarah Paulson), who drag their slaves from their sleep to make them dance to Solomon’s fiddle and are locked in a sado-masochistic triangle with the teenage drudge Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o)....

Serge Daney, photo by Joanne Logue, New York, 1982 The Cinema House & the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981. By Serge Daney. Translated by Christine Pichini. Semiotext(e), 2022. Reading Serge Daney’s The Cinema House & the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years (1962-1981), Semiotext(e)’s newly published English translation of the late French film critic’s writings, it’s difficult not to lament the criminally long period of time that the paradigm-thwarting, mind-bending treasures found within have been kept from us....

Under a Blue Sun (Daniel Mann, 2024) Now four years into its run under the leadership of director Vanja Kaludjercic, the International Film Festival Rotterdam has firmly established its new MO. Following a pair of quietly inspired online iterations during the pandemic and last year’s somewhat scattershot return to in-person activities, the 53rd edition exemplified the strengths and tradeoffs that have come to define Kaludjercic’s regime compared to prior eras: namely the welcome expansion and diversification of the Tiger Competition for up-and-coming filmmakers, and a tightening (and in some cases, outright elimination) of some of the more unwieldy sections....

Photo courtesy of Peggy Johnson Peggy Johnson, is the Executive Director of The Loft Cinema, a nonprofit, member-supported independent arthouse on Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona, not far from the U of A. The Loft closed its doors on Sunday, March 15, and is now offering new films on transactional video-on-demand from distributors like Kino, Film Movement and Oscilloscope—check out their homepage. Interview conducted by text message, Tuesday, March 17 to Thursday, March 19....

In 1946, twenty-year-old Andrzej Wajda enrolled as a painting student in the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. At the time, Poland was a shattered nation: its borders had been dramatically re-drawn in the wake of the Second World War, its artistic output dammed, its buildings leveled, and an inconceivable one-fifth of its population—including many of its prewar cultural luminaries—murdered. The country was about to enter seven years of strict Stalinist rule, during which it would exist politically as little more than a Soviet satellite state....

It’s the peach pie that ultimately pushes things to the breaking point. Up until this juncture in Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s 2009 novel, we’ve watched as 13-year-old protagonist Henry Wheeler (Gattlin Griffith) negotiates a world dominated by his fragile, agoraphobic mom, Adele (Kate Winslet). We’ve witnessed their daily routines in the bucolic New Hampshire town of Holton Mills, how Henry does the heavy lifting for both of them while Adele withdraws from the world....

On the one hand New York, I Love You packs enough familiar faces, cosmopolitan elegance, and multi-cultural urbanity to keep audiences sated through the 10 interconnected segments comprising this mostly feel-good menagerie. With his coterie of stars, and a privy council of international helmers (among them Fatih Akin, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, and Mira Nair), Benbihy is nothing if not ambitious. A romantic utopian bent on rethinking the structures of film production, Benbihy talks about his project—to make neither an anthology, nor a collection of shorts, but rather a single unified “collective feature film”—as if he were the Charles Fourier of film producers....

The tribulations of cop psychology are familiar to audiences from decades of law-enforcement shows. Polisse’s band of simultaneously world-weary and gung-ho cops—members of the Parisian equivalent of the “Special Victims Unit” but focusing on crimes against children—pose the standard existential questions: how do you soldier on, day after day, when each child sheltered is merely a drop in the ocean, and you can’t take every homeless child home with you?...

Tahrir: Liberation Square begins and ends inside the revolution’s camp, pressed up close to the faces that occupied one of Cairo’s busiest marketplaces on January 25, 2011, and helped force Hosni Mubarak from the presidency he had held for 30 years. After three days of watching al Jazeera’s online coverage, Stefano Savona flew to Egypt as he had done each of the last 20 years, camera in hand. We see a few faces more frequently than others—Ahmed, Noha, and Elsayed, all bright-eyed and determined—but Tahrir follows the narrative of the revolution rather than personal stories, each minute bringing forth a different voice....

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts­ is an exacting and heartfelt examination of the Israeli military’s legal system under which Palestinians in the West Bank have lived since the occupation began in 1967. Thoughtful, thorough, and powerfully persuasive, the film is organized around Alexandrowicz’s tense one-on-one interviews with nine former Israeli military judges responsible for adjudicating in the West Bank, interspersed with documentary footage of the social unrest that has occurred there over the past 40-plus years....

Art should be both local and universal: though long accepted as a criterion for greatness, this axiom has become ambiguous. As praise, it may mask irrelevance and mediocrity, and, in the realm of globalized cinema and the international festival circuit, merely function as routine marketing copy. In this light, Three Monkeys seemingly inverts the general trend in the reception of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work. Hitherto an obscure figure to the mainstream Turkish audience, he has recently gained recognition in his homeland as a Turkish cinema pioneer....

Photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Twitter 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 previous entries here. Day 3—Wednesday, 21 August 2019 The production hit its first snag this afternoon....

The “worst day of your life” premise is a well-worn one (Falling Down, Groundhog Day), but seldom has it plumbed the depths of desperation and sadism the way Cheap Thrills does. After getting an eviction notice and losing his job, our Charlie Brown–esque protagonist Craig (Pat Healy) goes to a bar to drown his sorrows, where he runs into Vince (Ethan Embry), an old friend he hasn’t seen in several years....