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“I did not try to make a movie just to piss people off. I’m picking movies to make that are like, ‘I’ve never seen anyone doing that as a movie.’ . . . I wanted to make something that [didn’t] just feel like light entertainment.” —Craig Zobel, director of Compliance Compliance is somewhat novel for showing what can happen to good people who don’t know what it’s like to get into trouble, and who therefore have no ability to discern when someone’s only pretending to be an authority....

Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined on this episode by FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish and Jessica Green, programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society, to discuss Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra’s All the Dead Ones, Ferrara’s Siberia, Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli, and Bastian Günther’s One of These Days.

First up, critics and frequent FC contributors Jordan Cronk and Jessica Kiang join FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish to open the proceedings with some lively discussion of early festival films—including Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry, Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, Marie Amachoukeli’s Ama Gloria, and Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case—before previewing this year’s lineup. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition....

In the four episodes available to critics so far, Irma Vep engages with its multiple sources, its medium, and the lives of its creators in increasingly surprising and thought-provoking ways. On this week’s podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loayza to dig into the series’ endless rabbit holes and riffs on the history of serials, cinema, and, err, “content.” Links & Things Irma Vep (1996) on the Criterion Channel Irma Vep (2022) on HBO Max Adam Nayman on Irma Vep (2022) in The Ringer Lucy Sante on Les vampires and Louis Feuillade in The Criterion Collection

Check back throughout the week for regular updates from the Sundance Film Festival.

Today, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Robert Daniels (rogerebert.com), Guy Lodge (Variety), and FC contributor Madeline Whittle to discuss their recent viewing, touching on two of the festival’s buzziest films—Nathan Silver’s star-studded Between the Temples and Jane Schoenbrun’s suburban horror film I Saw the TV Glow—along with It’s What’s Inside, Love Me, and Brief History of a Family. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here....

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The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng, 2023) Introduction In the year 2000, Juliette Binoche opened a chocolaterie. It was a fictional chocolate shop, set in a fictional French village in 1959, and Binoche was playing a fictional chocolatier, Vianne Rocher (sadly no relation to the Ferrero family, who are Italian—though I agree, that would have been funny). “Opening a chocolaterie, just in time for Lent—the woman is brazen!” scolded Alfred Molina’s town mayor in the film, Chocolat....

Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay About midway through Molly Bernstein’s Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, the eponymous magician-historian describes the art of sleight of hand as “the artifice of the gambler.” Later on, his friend David Mamet comments on the similarities between illusionism and dramaturgy in their capacity to manipulate audiences. It’s only fitting that a documentary about Jay, who now more than ever resembles cinema’s great trickster Orson Welles, would function as a reminder of the link between movies and magic....

Tom Noonan’s 1995 film The Wife is a finely concentrated, subtle, perturbing, strangely humane, and nearly perfect American comedy. It’s the kind of film I always hoped Woody Allen would eventually make, shedding the limitations of middlebrow deference and propriety: the habitual inferiority complex of someone who doesn’t feel he really belongs at the grown-ups’ table long after he’s earned a seat there. But The Wife has no such compunctions about the lively vulgarities lurking inside cerebral sanctuaries—no one here is going to use phony WASPy euphemisms when “fuck” is plainly called for....

Black Tuesday (Hugo Fregonese, 1954) Every year, the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy reveals and rediscovers the vitality of older films in critical relation to the present. In its 36th edition, the 2022 crop featured among its diverse offerings a program dedicated to the actor Peter Lorre—including highlights The Face Behind the Mask (1941) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), both directed by Robert Florey—as well as an overview of Yugoslav cinema, pre-Nazi German musical comedies, and a retrospective of Japanese genre auteur Kenji Misumi....

I’ve seen it argued that an obsession with film preservation is unhealthy, that our energy is better spent on seeking out and funding new talent. Aside from the obvious problem with that idea — film love is not and should never be a zero-sum game between Old and New — this also assumes there is little left to be found on a voyage into the past, as if we’ve identified the greats and can safely move on....

Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 Muriel Alain Resnais, 1963 Gertrud Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964 Andrei Rublev Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 Rebecca Alfred Hitchcock, 1940 Faust F.W. Murnau, 1926 Marnie Alfred Hitchcock, 1964 Scarface Howard Hawks, 1932 Fantômas Louis Feuillade, 1913 Charley Varrick Don Siegel, 1973 Cluny Brown Ernst Lubitsch, 1946 Rosetta Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 1999 Gloria John Cassavetes, 1980...

Manoel de Oliveira (103) Gebo and the Shadow, 2012 Leni Riefenstahl (101) Underwater Impressions, 2003 Kaneto Shindo (98) Postcard, 2010 Mario Monicelli (91) The Roses of the Desert, 2006 Alain Resnais (89) You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, 2012 Jonas Mekas (89) Outtakes From the Life of a Happy Man, 2012 Joris Ivens (89) A Tale of the Wind, 1988 Miklos Jansco (88) So Much for Justice!, 2010 Claude Lanzmann (87) La Dernière des injustes, 2013...

Founded in the wake of the 1968 riots and shutdown of the festival, the Directors’ Fortnight was created to offer an alternative. Although a number of directors who started as Fortnight regulars later “graduated” to the Competition (Michael Haneke, Atom Egoyan), the section has always worked best when it shows works that would never stand a chance of being seen in the Competition—works that were simply too political, too experimental, or simply too offbeat....

The Right Stuff I was writing the screenplay for The Right Stuff. In his book, Tom Wolfe kept talking about a certain quality… a quality that could never be mentioned: “There was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated and rational age one might think he lived in… Perhaps because it could not be talked about, the subject began to take on superstitious, even mystical outlines....