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On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish invited FC friends and critics Alissa Wilkinson (Vox), Sam Adams (Slate) and Kayla Myers (Indie Memphis Film Festival) to chat about the buzzy titles of Day Two, including Justice, Earth Mama, To Live and Die and Live, Mami Wata, Animalia, the documentary shorts program, and more. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here.

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Robert Bresson in 1955 In 1979, at the end of my first year at NYU’s graduate film school, my faculty adviser suggested that Paris was the place for me to pursue my filmmaking dreams. She told me she had friends there who could help me out, and within weeks my apartment was sublet and I was on my way to France. I wasn’t sure if it was filmmaking or criticism I’d pursue once there, but both plans were equally unrealizable, since I had neither work papers nor any knowledge of French....

While I agree with you that confrontations with Christianity do indeed seem to provoke embarrassment, at best, within the certain pockets you speak of, I think the move away from thinking of Bresson primarily in these terms had other, more salutary motives as well. Chief among them was boredom with the pietist hairshirt of the “transcendental” approach, which asks no questions it can’t answer by catechism. You say that it’s understandable as “a way of coping with [Bresson’s] utter strangeness within the context of film culture in the 60s and 70s,” and I agree....

Flying into Tehran, I began to feel that certain tingle one gets when gearing up to taste a kind of “forbidden fruit.” Even though I had met literally dozens of Iranians over the past few years, and considered several of them good friends, this was the country that had dubbed the U.S. the “Great Satan.” Anyway, false alarm. After a quick, smooth passage through customs and passport control, I was met by the smiling faces of friends from the Farabi Cinema Foundation—the organization that represents Iranian cinema internationally—and whisked off to my hotel....

The Lady from Shanghai You may never have seen Anders in anything other than Welles’s 1947 film, but once you’ve seen him there, you never forget him. As the constantly lurking, deliriously smirking George Grisby, law partner to Everett Sloane’s “world’s greatest criminal attorney,” Anders luxuriates in a role that Welles had tailored just for him. Everyone in The Lady from Shanghai has a proposition for Welles’s young Irishman Mike O’Hara; the proposition Grisby makes him is the one that turns the tables (on O’Hara, and the film’s narrative legibility) for good....

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023) “It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable . . . but it wasn’t strange.” So says the protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle, describing a past affair that failed to shake his conviction that he was meant to be alone. Despite the pulpy promises of its title, the horrors of Henry James’s 1903 novella are strictly metaphorical. The chilling twist of the story—which has been analyzed as one of the writer’s most personal works—is that its subject falls prey to his own conscientiousness....

Adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel, Luis Buñuel’s 1970 film follows its title character (Catherine Deneuve) on her trajectory from submissive biped to one-legged sadist as she turns the patriarchal tables on her aged guardian cum pseudo-husband Don Lope (Fernando Rey). Despite the distracting Spanish dubbing, Deneuve is porcelain perfection as the titillating Tristana, whether she’s submitting to the groping of her maidservant’s deaf son or diabolically conspiring with the winter draft to finish off Don Lope....

Cold War “Culture is our weapon,” a communist government functionary declares in Red Boogie, Karpo Godina’s ebullient, satirical 1982 film about a jazz-loving band in 1950s Slovenia on an enforced, morale-boosting tour of the provinces. When the movie screened at the Museum of Modern Art in October as part of a series devoted to Godina, the theme of music and traditional culture being coopted for totalitarian propaganda recalled Paweł Pawlikowski’s superb new film Cold War, which played in the 56th New York Film Festival earlier the same month....

Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, a critic-turned-filmmaker with a confessed debt to Guy Debord, operates at the intersection of the essay and fiction film—a dubious proposition, save for the fact that Assayas permits his actors necessary breathing room to develop their roles beyond the limits of generational placeholders. Actresses have given particularly marvelous performances in his films—Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (96) and Clean (04), Asia Argento in Boarding Gate (07), and now Summer Hours co-star Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, which opened in New York three weeks ago....

The Cannes Film Festival acknowledged a new generation and the future of film, both on stage and off, as its jury of filmmakers and actors presented prizes tonight in the Palais. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the acclaimed Turkish director, won the Palme d’Or tonight—the festival’s top prize—for his latest, Winter Sleep. He used his moment in the spotlight to salute his fellow citizens and raise awareness for those who have suffered back home....

In May 1968, Olivier Assayas was 13, just old enough to watch people a few years older than him take to the streets. When his generation came of age in the early Seventies, it accepted political radicalism as if it were an older sibling’s hand-me-down—which, in some sense, it was. “As early as the fall of ’68,” Assayas tells David Thompson in the March-April issue of FILM COMMENT, “leftists were already trying to restructure things and organize for the next revolution that was obviously coming up very soon ....

In the opening paragraph of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” Dr. John Watson explains that his friend Sherlock Holmes “has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs.” In the moving yet perilously fragile Mister Holmes, director Bill Condon and his incandescent star, Ian McKellen, pick up with Holmes in 1947, roughly three decades after his retreat to his Sussex apiary....