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TÁR (Todd Field, 2022) For attendees, every film festival is a jumbled mental mess of notes written on top of each other, about things that happen on screens and off screens, inside theaters and out in the world. For example, I will never entirely be able to think about seeing Andrew Dominik’s Blonde at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival without the accompanying knowledge that, right around the time Ana de Armas’s Marilyn Monroe was talking to her unborn baby (only for the fetus to talk right back), some swine was stealing my bike....

Lorenza Mazzetti. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive I first encountered the pioneering work of filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti in 2008, when I moved to London from Portugal. To familiarize myself with British cinema, I decided to watch the great New Wave directors, such as Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, who, along with Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, had co-founded the Free Cinema movement in the mid-1950s. Pairing shoestring budgets with a fearlessly experimental approach, Free Cinema filmmakers rejected the moral and logistical conventions of commercial cinema and instead focused their attention on the complex social world of postwar England, primarily through the documentary form....

A Countess from Hong Kong Acting is the Bermuda Triangle of film commentary, written and spoken. There are so many ways of getting around or over or past actually talking about acting in the movies that we take them for granted. Acting is brushed off with generalities (regular reviewing), displaced by descriptions of actors’ physiques and mannerisms and physical alterations per character (criticism of the more elevated variety), devalued or nullified by fixations on form and patterning (essentialist critics and bloggers), banned from consideration by moral edict (politically grounded film commentary), or simply ignored altogether and reconfigured as moving figures in a field (film theory circa 1980)....

Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2022) I heard the same phrase uttered again and again, in different conversations about different films, at this year’s Berlinale: “Oh, you know, it’s a little pandemic movie.” The atmosphere of this year’s festival was distinctly unlike that of the in-person edition in February 2020, and not only because of the masks, half-capacity seating, and reduced industry attendance. Back then, on the eve of what we did not yet realize would be a protracted global shutdown, those same discussions were dominated (in my experience, at least) by considerations of the epic scale, extended production timelines, and towering ambition of two of that festival’s most talked-about works: Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s sprawling DAU project and Anders Edström and C....

On this point, history has more or less borne Truffaut out. If, of the New Wave critics, Bazin was the great theorist, Truffaut now seems like the great enthusiast. He was a prototypical cinephile, for whom lists of venerated titles held an almost mystical power to inspire and evoke. Some of his best reviews are saturated with superfluous praise; perhaps no great critic has generated so much impassioned hot air....

It’s hard to think of another film, much less one addressing socioeconomic strife, that is quite like Miguel Gomes’s The Arabian Nights, comprising three separate volumes that embrace sprawl and variety in style and substance. For (limited) example: dockworkers vent about labor losses documentary-style in Volume One: The Restless One; an alfresco court hosts an absurd chain of grievances and idiocies in Volume Two: The Desolate One; and bird fans engage in song competitions in Volume Three: The Enchanted One....

All images from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019) John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum carries the usual disclaimer, “American Humane monitored the animal action. No animals were harmed.” That’s especially good to know for a series triggered by its hero’s rage over the killing of a dog. Let’s hope someone is looking out for the humans. In the killer chiropractic choreography of a John Wick movie, bodies are folded, spindled, and mutilated....

Whereas it isn’t necessarily considered great entertainment to observe a painter at the canvas, or a writer behind the typewriter, the art of cooking makes for a strangely transfixing spectacle, as the unstoppable proliferation of food-themed TV programming indicates—a craze movies inevitably tap into as well. Marcos Jorge’s Estômago (“stomach” in Portuguese), in which one man’s culinary skills serve to embellish his ill-fated existence, is one of the most arresting foodie films to come along in some time....

This issue of Film Comment marks the publication of a story on something close to my heart. Indeed, it’s a subject that sheds a little too much light on how I cultivated my movie passion—and by extension how I wound up sitting here writing this editorial. That subject is: movie novelizations. There, I’ve said it. Now begins not a sentimental journey but a mortifying tale of misspent youth, a shame-filled confession of what I was up to while Kent Jones was rereading Manny Farber’s Negative Space for the 12th time....

Under the third and final mandate of former Quinzane head Olivier Père, Locarno confirmed its position on the festival circuit as a place for fine discoveries: the most cogent offerings from Sundance, Asian gems (People’s Park) and platitudes (multi-awarded fib When Night Falls), as well as Old Europe fare that fell through Cannes’ glamorous meshes. While the gates of this ethnically cleansed country remain firmly closed, the festival showcases independent filmmakers from developing countries every year in a sidebar called, with unintentional irony, Open Doors....

Patema Inverted In an attempt to go off the Miyazaki grid of talent, I attended the two anime films screening at this year’s New York International Children’s Film Festival, Patema Inverted and Giovanni’s Island. Patema Inverted is a romantic sci-fi feature whose prologue aired as a streaming Web series. As Yamaguchi Yasuo wrote on Nippon.com, while animated TV series have declined in popularity, theatrical adaptations of these shows have surged, from Pokemon to Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion....

R100 Very dark indeed is the featureless existence that the protagonist of R100 by Hitoshi Matsumoto leads in quiet desperation, so much so that he decides to give his life a masochistic twist by enrolling in a peculiar S&M club. As part of his membership, Takafumi Katayama (Nao Ohmori) gets a year of unannounced visits by dominatrices who will satisfy his sexual urges. A subservient salesman in the interior-design department of a big store, Takafumi spends his days advising customers on how to keep up appearances and make their isolation cozier....

Songwriter (Alan Rudolph, 1984) A rough and rowdy, shit-kicking, brothers-in-arms comedy, Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter follows, or ambles after, the dreams and schemes of Doc Jenkins, played by an upbeat Willie Nelson as a thinly veiled version of himself. Doc, a massively successful songwriter and performer, has been used and abused by the music industry and finds himself down on his luck. With help from his former singing partner Blackie Buck (Kris Kristofferson, also playing a thinly veiled version of himself, down to the alliteration) he seeks revenge on the corporate gangsters who got rich exploiting his significant talents....

Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020) The face and body of Lee Kang-sheng make up one of cinema’s great timepieces. All screen actors with long careers have features and physiques that we can watch as they develop over time, some changing more than others, some doing their utmost—sometimes tragically, sometimes absurdly—to resist change altogether. But the history of Lee Kang-sheng’s physical being has been written large since his first appearance in a Tsai Ming-liang work, 1989 TV film All the Corners of the World, and that history has essentially been the key theme of a filmmaker who has said that without Lee’s presence on screen, he would find it hard to make films at all....

It’s giving nothing away to reveal that I, Daniel Blake ultimately involves the testament of an everyman. The film ends with a heartfelt letter from its hero: “I’m not a client, a customer or a service user… I’m not a National Insurance number or a blip on a screen. I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen—nothing more, nothing less.” Ken Loach’s latest, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is one of the most important films of 2016; there couldn’t be a more timely moment for a film about the value of citizenship, and to issue a protest against the increasingly powerful dehumanizing forces of what you might call “client culture,” the corporate logic that reduces human lives to economic statistics or blips on screens....

In film, it’s simply not true that you can never go home again. Sometimes it’s the only sane thing to do—but you have to go home to the right place, and in the right way. One of the most likable, but also one of the most frustrating of contemporary filmmakers, Michel Gondry certainly went home again when he made his 2013 film Mood Indigo. This followed a long American sojourn that included the impersonal superhero spoof The Green Hornet (11), and represented a homecoming in several ways: Mood Indigo was a thoroughly French film, based on a much-loved French novel widely considered quintessentially unfilmable, Boris Vian’s poetic, playful L’Écume des jours....

Happy Birthday, Agnès Varda, who turned 90 this week. Her capacity for adventure, curiosity and self-reinvention continues undimmed—as witness last year’s Faces Places, a travelogue film of encounters with French working people and their environments, made in collaboration with an artist from another generation, photographer JR. Although she has never stopped being active in both fiction and documentary spheres, Varda’s latter-day renaissance began, for all intents and purposes, with her 2000 docu-essay The Gleaners and I....

The English word “rehearsal” doesn’t have the same ambivalent connotations as the French répétition. In English, you hone a dramatic text to work toward a definitive performance, while the French stresses the reiteration rather than its eventual goal. That dimension of répétition is always evident in those films of Jacques Rivette (among them Out 1, Gang of Four, Va Savoir) that center on rehearsals for a play: Rivette is less interested in the single finished performance than in theater as a constant process of transformation and adjustment....

“Don’t fuck my brain,” demands a soldier in the heat of an telephone argument with his girlfriend in Beata Bubenec’s Flight of a Bullet, a nonfiction film that in many ways threatens to do exactly that. Unfolding over the course of a single take, the action begins with a man being taken prisoner by the pro-Ukrainian partisans of the Aidar Volunteer Battalion, with whom Bubenec lived while shooting, and driven back to their headquarters for a tense interrogation....