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Readers’ Poll: Readers are invited to stand up and be counted too! All entries will be automatically entered in our contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection. We will print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on the website. Send your ranked list of the year’s 20 best films (plus any rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll [at] filmlinc....

Our Children Joachim Lafosse, Belgium/Luxembourg/France/Switzerland Memories Look at Me Song Fang, China First Cousin Once Removed Alan Berliner, U.S. When Night Falls Ying Liang, South Korea/China Bwakaw Jun Robles Lana, Philippines Gebo and the Shadow Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France differently, Molussia Nicolas Rey, France* Perret in France and Algeria Heinz Emigholz, Germany The Extravagant Shadows David Gatten, U.S.* Three Sisters Wang Bing, France/Hong Kong Don’t see your favorite films here?...

Sometimes a director who displays an allusive, poetic talent in his or her early films develops a hunger for “hotter” forms of moviemaking and more “powerful” subject matter. As a result, the work coarsens, and garners more public acceptance and widespread critical acclaim. The most spectacular example was Lina Wertmüller, who went from the sensitive neorealism of her first film, The Lizards, to the tragicomic barbarism of Seven Beauties a dozen years later—and for that film became the first woman ever nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards....

Supervixens Wearing a leer as bent as a country road and a pair of spiffy saddle shoes, the Kentucky-born Napier (1936-2011) brutally stabs, beats, and electrocutes the frighteningly vulgar Eubank in her bathtub (don’t worry, she’s resurrected halfway through the film). By the time the actor is done, Meyer has both made clear his fealty to Psycho and set the stage for Kubrick/Nicholson’s iconic “Here’s Johnny!” Shining attack. The careers and legacies of Napier and Meyer are forever interwoven, something that irritated the actor for a time, though he finally embraced it....

But what is criticism? Bordwell suggests that criticism is primarily concerned with evaluation and appreciation. In his reading, if academics tend to withhold evaluation, critics withhold causal arguments and focus on the particular effects that give a particular film its qualities. Making reference to Manny Farber, both Kent Jones and Chris Fujiwara in their contributions to PNC contest Bordwell’s claim that criticism is necessarily concerned with evaluation. They claim that the function of criticism is not primarily about checking off likes or dislikes or creating a hierarchy of tastes but, as Fujiwara puts it, “to respond to what is open, troubling, or self-contradictory in a film, to show why things in it that may not even be immediately noticeable are deeply interesting, to reinvent it....

Every special effect is an idea, and Scanners packs some gnarly hypotheses. The notorious exploding head sequence, originally planned as the opening scene and an object of consternation for the MPAA, is both an outrageous demonstration of telepathic power run amok and the crystallization of a rigorous thematic. A tale of telepaths at war with each other and the corporate machine that engineered them, Scanners consolidates the ruling problematic of the Cronenberg project from the sex slugs of Shivers to the financial abstractions of Cosmopolis: what are the effects of signals on an organism?...

—John Lukacs, Winston Churchill’s Evolving Views of Russia, 1917-1953, Reconsidered The Grand Budapest Hotel We are midway through that Bataan death march known as “awards season,” which begins with a disproportionate number of prestige pictures flooding the market at the end of year. Because most of these will be period pieces, many based on True Stories, an undue amount of movie chat in turn has lately been devoted to the ethics of representing history on screen....

Petrov’s Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2021) Following a nearly 20-month house arrest on trumped-up embezzlement charges, embattled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov has reemerged with a horrifying portrait of modern Russia from an artist who knows a thing or two about the government’s deleterious hold on his country’s collective psyche. Based on a novel by Alexey Salnikov, Petrov’s Flu—Serebrennikov’s eighth feature—follows the title character, a mechanic and moonlighting comic book artist played by Semyon Serzin, on a nocturnal journey through the dark heart of Moscow in which memories from his past and visions of his future collide in a slipstream of present-day anxieties....

Pedro Almodóvar and his fellow jurors at a press conference The perpetual tug-of-war between art and commerce was evident on the opening day of the 70th Cannes Film Festival, which was dominated by talk of streaming platforms and director’s cuts. In the weeks leading up to the event, a debate was ignited when two films owned by digital distributor Netflix (Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories) were programmed in the prestigious competition section, despite the fact that they won’t have wide theatrical distribution....

Matewan John Sayles’s Matewan, an intricately scripted and historically nuanced drama about the insurrection of coal miners in 1920 West Virginia, might have been the best U.S. film to premiere at Cannes in 1987. (Something Wild and Raising Arizona, booked into out-of-competition midnight screenings, were even more vivid and daring, but each had already entered commercial release back home.) But to savor this ambitious convergence of labor politics, racial legacies, and multiethnic tensions, or marvel at Haskell Wexler’s textured resourcefulness in filming gunfights in pitch-black woodlands, festivalgoers that year had to plumb the Directors’ Fortnight section....

Production still from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) Directed by Fritz Lang, Metropolis premiered in 1927 to reviews like H.G. Wells’ that harped on the proto–science fiction film’s “sillier” nature. The genre in general does demand a featherlight suspension of disbelief. However, this story written at the height of futurism — about a teacher who becomes a beacon of hope for the proletariat before her likeness is stolen and etched into a “man-machine” for the nefarious purpose of controlling the working class — has influenced nearly 100 years of genre film, including some of the most important contributions to science fiction, from Logan’s Run (1976) and Blade Runner (1982) to Brazil (1985)....

As a filmmaker and a composer, John Carpenter is superbly efficient, insisting that he recorded nearly all of his own scores simply because he was “fast and cheap.” Without any formal musical training (save for a few childhood violin lessons), Carpenter has always collaborated with other musicians, generating entire soundtracks out of quick improvisations. Last month, Sacred Bones Records released the second volume of Lost Themes, Carpenter’s original recordings with his son, Cody Carpenter, on keyboards and godson Daniel Davies (son of The Kinks’ Dave Davies) on guitar....

Next month at the Japan Society, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto will introduce Yoji Yamada’s Nagasaki: Memories of My Son (15), a film that he agreed to score in 2014, before he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. When Sakamoto returned from his unprecedented year-long sabbatical in 2015, he completed two very different projects: Yamada’s Japanese Academy Award–winning film and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (15), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe....