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David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen on the set of Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022) Nearly four decades after Videodrome (1983) gave us the prophetic techno-futurist rallying cry, “Long Live the New Flesh,” David Cronenberg’s new feature offers another, more declarative mantra for our times: “Body Is Reality,” a phrase that flashes on a TV screen in Crimes of the Future as dystopian performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) conduct a stylized autopsy for an audience....

While Adorf, 85, was in Locarno last year to receive recognition for his daunting life’s work, Film Comment sat down with him to survey his extraordinary career. It wasn’t quite possible to cover everything, but goodness knows we tried. The Devil Strikes at Night Your career arc is such an incredible and strange one, I’m not sure where to begin. Could you start by telling me a little about how you started out?...

But Mangold is far from the only director to spiff up a blockbuster with name-checks, and the results can be Dada-esque. Signs and The Last Picture Show “You know, it’s funny, I see a bunch of stuff from Signs in here that I must have ripped off. I also did a thing with a dolly shot where it seems like it stops and the shot is done, then it’s not....

In her second feature and solo debut, Wohlatz burrows even deeper into the spaces between cultures, languages, and identities. The Future Perfect is a semi-fictional film about the real life of its lead actress Xiaobin, a young Chinese immigrant newly arrived in Buenos Aires. As Xiaobin painstakingly learns Spanish to adapt to her new milieu, her coming-into-language becomes a coming-of-age of sorts. It’s an opportunity for her to rearticulate her identity and escape the social class she was part of in China, to rebel against her insular parents who refuse to integrate into Argentine culture, and to explore romance with an Indian immigrant, Vijay, with whom she shares nothing except broken Spanish....

These videos never made their way into a film, because a few years and short-lived careers later, Maya became a globally successful rapper with the cult single “Paper Planes,” and would go on to be nominated for both a Grammy and an Oscar in 2009. But her documentarian impulse to shed light on the issues of her homeland never left, thoroughly permeating her music, her art, and her public image....

Playing with vocabularies of documentary, travelogue, essay and song, Sky Hopinka’s short videos lead us on nomadic journeys through physical, emotional, and mythical dimensions of the American landscape. A tribal member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga, Hopinka was born in Ferndale, Washington, and has travelled widely, shooting in indigenous lands and along roads that bisect them. He describes his videos as “ethnopoetic,” a term that indicates his nuanced critique of anthropological modes of representation and his creative advocacy of indigenous cultures past and present....

Before the rise of Hollywood, the arguments supporting the U.S. government’s laissez-faire stance regarding copyright violations were essentially the same as the reasons now given for stricter regulation: it’s good for business. Even when America was still just a colony, American publishers reprinted manuscripts without paying any royalties to their European authors or publishers. Nearly all of today’s largest publishing houses built their legacies on this practice. Belated government intervention came in 1891 at the insistence of American authors who were tired of the same thing happening to their works abroad....

John Lynch and Jacqueline McKenzie in Angel Baby (Michael Rymer, 1995) At first, the color palette of Michael Rymer’s Angel Baby is warm and bright, almost liquidy, as if the world is swirling into tie-dye patterns, whirling around like the wheel on Wheel of Fortune, a show with enormous significance to the two main characters, Harry (John Lynch) and Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie). The colors turn a bustling city into an inviting oasis of play....

Images from Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (Martin Scorsese, 2019) Around the time of the release of Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Bob Dylan suffered through a press conference, where he (seemingly) wriggled out of answering questions. At one point, he’s asked if he considers himself a songwriter or a poet, and he drawls, “I think of myself as a song and dance man, you know....

The world may never have experienced the blessed cinema of Terence Davies if not for an advertisement for the BFI Production Board he heard on BBC Radio in the mid-’70s. As he tells it, Davies, a twentysomething movie lover enrolled in drama school, then sent a short script to BFI on a whim. Davies had left school at age 15 before entering into a stifling office job, and had been fulfilling his creative desires acting with amateur theater companies, first in his hometown of Liverpool and then Coventry....

Watching “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” the centerpiece episode of the Coen Brothers’ tricky and terrifying anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, many of us were mesmerized by the shuffling manner and timid masculinity of the character Billy Knapp. Making generous promises of romance and financial protection to Zoe Kazan’s no-nonsense Alice Longabaugh, who’s on the Oregon Trail seeking what sounds like a rather dubious marriage prospect, Billy is the perfect thwarted romantic partner....

All images from Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011) That mixture of pleasure and shame specific to the queer experience is evident on screen from the opening images of Pariah. Writer-director Dee Rees acknowledges from the very first shots that the act of looking is as essential to sexual identity as just being, and that because of this the object of our affectionate gaze can produce as much anxiety as arousal. While this coming-of-age story proves to be a relatively chaste portrayal of teenage estrangement and confusion, befitting its alienated protagonist, Rees begins the film at a club with a mostly black lesbian clientele, with shadow-enveloped images of a semi-nude stripper sliding athletically up and down a pole to Khia’s undeniable “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)....

Amos Vogel, 1962. © The Estate of Amos Vogel Even though I worked for Amos, my thoughts about him are personal, not professional. I’ll leave it to others to place him in a historical context. I came to New York from a movie-mad city—Montreal—where we watched everything and argued constantly. The New Wave directors would visit often and felt appreciated in a Francophone city that didn’t have to be convinced....

Roman Holiday In the 1930s and earlier it seems Paris held a fairy-tale grip on the American moviemaking imagination, from The Last Flight to Ninotchka, with Ernst Lubitsch joking that “Paris, Paramount” was better than the real thing. In the 1940s, Good Neighbor Latin America held sway in musicals like Down Argentine Way and You Were Never Lovelier, and the Sixties made way for Swinging London. But in the 1950s, there was one primary place to send your characters, should they need a dose of sun, of great food and wine, and of scenery made much more beautiful by the patina of age: Rome, and by extension all of Italy....

“I am the victim—the happy victim—of my environment.”—Jean Renoir while promoting The Crime of Monsieur Lange in 1936 Richard Linklater’s first feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (88), is the travelogue of a young man, played by Linklater, riding the rails, hitching, and driving through the southwestern United States. The unnamed protagonist flounders about pleasantly in Austin, visits a friend in Missoula, and hoofs around San Francisco by his lonesome (chatting up strangers, though the conversations can’t be heard, covered by city noise, or waves crashing against rocks at a lighthouse by the bay)....

Based on sensational 18th-century events, A Royal Affair tells the juicy tale of beautiful 15-year-old Caroline Matilda, who travels to the royal Danish court to meet her new husband King Christian VII and begin her reign as queen. King Christian (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) turns out to be a tittering nincompoop whose incompetence as a ruler is rivaled only by his emotional fragility and petty petulance. Several magnitudes more sophisticated than the king, Queen Caroline (Alicia Vikander) is an avid reader with a passion for Enlightenment-inspired populist political tracts, Voltaire, and Rousseau, but she is nonetheless stifled in an age when women lacked power....