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A 1953 Technicolor remake of the 1942 Son of Fury, Delmer Daves’ one and only swashbuckler is notable for its storybook charm and visual fluidity, not exactly hallmarks of the genre. The director makes Cornel Wilde somewhat viable in the role of Jean-Paul, who, after years of indentured servitude and the denial of his aristocratic birthright by a devious uncle (George Macready, a little more animated than usual), joins a wily Scottish adventurer (the great Finlay Currie) in a search for ancient treasure....

NO LAND’S SONG In the West, discussions of women in Iran often dwell on the requirement that they wear the hijab. As the documentary No Land’s Song shows, the control of women’s bodies under that country’s religious regime extends beyond the body to the voice. Female singers in Iran are forbidden from performing solo in public unless it is for an all-female audience. In light of these state-enforced restrictions, many women don’t pursue careers in music, and the work of singers from before the 1979 Islamic revolution—and their social impact—is rapidly being forgotten....

Sister, What Grows Where Land Is Sick? (Franciska Eliassen, 2022) When the program for 75th Locarno Film Festival was announced, most reports noted the promising number of high-profile and veteran names in the lineup, including Aleksandr Sokurov, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Abbas Fahdel, Patricia Mazuy, and João Pedro Rodrigues. Compared to a 2021 edition comprising mostly unknowns, this roll call inspired a sigh of relief among critics and cinephiles still coming to terms with the festival’s new leadership under Giona A....

Ropert’s film (French title: Tirez la langue, mademoiselle) patiently accumulates enigmatic detail and builds through brief scenes to become a deeply moving story of love and solitude in a neon-lit Paris, yielding subtle surprises ranging from adolescent patients diagnosing their doctors to declarations of love in hospital waiting rooms. With its vivid nocturnal photography and Ropert’s wry, slightly heightened dialogue, the movie provides the basic but essential pleasure of a Hollywood classic from the Golden Age, erasing time while you watch but keeping its grip long after you have returned to the light of day....

Images from Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello, 2019) Of all the cinematic sub-genres to be reanimated and recontextualized for modern audiences in recent years, the zombie film has arguably grown the most predictable, and the most tired. For his own stab at the subject, Bertrand Bonello has done something straightforward but stimulating: the French director’s eighth feature, Zombi Child, traces the history of zombie lore from its roots in voodoo to a fictionalized present day in which its lingering influence continues to manifest in unexpected ways....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Bulle Ogier in August at the Locarno Film Festival, where she received a Golden Leopard for Lifetime Achievement. We talked shortly after a screening of Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle toujours (06), the second of two essential collaborations between Ogier and the Portuguese filmmaker. Prompted by this film, in which Ogier appears almost as an empyrean ghost haunting the cinema—a specter of gestures familiar and iconic—I couldn’t help but proceed by starting at the beginning of her film career, in 1968....

The Smell of Us It’s interesting to look at Marfa Girl and The Smell of Us side by side. The Smell of Us is maybe the most stylistically radical thing that you’ve ever done, while Marfa Girl certainly does have that improvisatory quality about it but still sticks to the basic tenets of psychological realism. The Smell of Us is something else again, in terms of characters being where they logically should not actually be, or these jagged little scenes that pop up where you leave it to a viewer to connect them to the rest of the story, or not....

Which is Strickland’s way of setting up an S&M dynamic that isn’t what it seems—and the demands and pressures of which cause a universally relatable rift in boss and drudge’s codependent relationship. Likely to be the year’s most significant antidote to the airbrushed (by Hallmark) perversity promised by Fifty Shades of Gray, Strickland’s third feature is another instant classic written and directed by the Budapest-based English filmmaker. FILM COMMENT spoke to Strickland this week in Manhattan, where he will introduce the magazine’s double-feature sneak-preview of The Duke of Burgundy with the 1986 movie Mano Destra at the Film Society of Lincoln Center....

I interviewed Minervini at Cannes about The Other Side, which opens on May 20, after kicking off this year’s Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. See our May/June issue for Nick Pinkerton’s feature on the filmmaker’s work. By the end of this film, it’s as if you’re saying that freedom is a kind of religion, at least for the people in the final section of the film....

Modlins began with a few bags of detritus discovered on a Madrid street containing home videos and other personal objects belonging to an expatriate American family. Its patriarch, Elmer Modlin, was a never-had-been actor whose greatest claim to fame was appearing in the Satanist party scene at the end of Rosemary’s Baby. Using the scattered information available, Oksman filled in the gaps to tell a tale of a cloistered, smotheringly mythomaniacal family unit, creating in the process a piece of poetic conjecture which is one of the more persistently eerie pieces of work that I’ve seen in recent memory....

Roja There have been movie musicals about psychotherapy and cannibalism, yet a musical about terrorism sounds like a South Park episode. But since the Nineties, Tamil director Mani Ratnam has included Kashmiri separatism, military gang rape, and suicide bombings in some of the most moving, powerful, and toe-tapping musicals in Indian cinema. These aren’t dour social realist films scored to a funeral dirge, nor are they laughable, over-the-top explosions of bad taste....

1998: They meet on a phone-sex number of the old-school landline type, a carnal technology as obsolete as the hanky code. You never know with these things. Negotiating anonymous sex with a stranger is risky imaginative business, and sometimes the vision you’ve constructed of a hot, well-built jerk-off buddy turns out to be an egregious condo-dwelling muscle queen hopped up on meth. But on a good night you walk across town, ring the buzzer, climb the stairs, and are greeted by just the right guy....

In the Aisles (Thomas Stuber, 2018) To look closely at the overlooked, and to part the scrim of familiarity that makes us dismiss everyday things as banal, is one of art’s noblest purposes. Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles (2018) trains its patient gaze on what you might expect to be a mind-numbing job in a soul-killing environment—stacking shelves in a huge, Costco-like wholesale market—and reveals grace, dignity, and submerged but powerful currents of emotion....

Of Men and War At this point in time, some 125 years after the birth of cinema, and more than half a century since Allen Funt ushered in the reality TV era, it’s no secret that the camera can be manipulative and parasitic of those it captures. Ethical, barbaric dubiousness is even embedded in that most common word for the camera’s activity: captures. Some, like filmmaker (and friend) Robert Greene, go so far as to say that such aggression is inherent to the process of creating nonfiction....

The film’s protagonist Bia (Valentina Herszage) is a teenage girl who fits the description of the increasingly long list of female casualties. That level of identification fuels her macabre interest in these sexually violent crimes; she stalks the victims on Facebook, walks at night through the same barren fields where the attacks often take place, and, in one of the film’s most indelible moments, kisses a bloodied victim left for dead who is still fighting for her life....

“Our approach was trying not to solidify any one moment and trying to create situations that felt unpredictable,” Joaquin Phoenix said at Cannes when You Were Never Really Here had its world premiere there last spring. Starring Phoenix as a killer for hire, Lynne Ramsay’s first feature release since We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) had been much anticipated before arriving at the weary tail end of the festival....

Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) This weekend saw the passing of the iconic Anna Karina. Karina is best known as “the face of the French New Wave,” starring in many of Godard’s most famous films—foremost as the intoxicating centerpiece of Vivre sa vie—though her storied career also includes work with Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She wrote songs, novels, and films, and directed Living Together in 1973 and Victoria in 2008....

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown is currently available for free on Pornhub until the end of March. The film, featured in our 2018 list of Best Undistributed Films, traces the black lesbian strip club scene of early-2000s Los Angeles through interviews, archival materials, and handheld footage. Weinraub, equally famous for her work as CEO of the street-wear fashion brand Hood By Air, told FC in an interview that her collaboration with Pornhub began during a trip to Milan, while visiting Hood By Air’s Italian distributor....