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Several never-before-seen films by Jerry Lewis will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in a 10-day series called “The Unknown Jerry: Home Movies and More from the Jerry Lewis Collection at the Library of Congress.” The highlight is the debut of six “home movies” directed by Lewis, ranging between 12 and 45 minutes, and starring a slew of Lewis’s Hollywood friends, including Dean Martin, the married couple of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, and Shelley Winters....

Completed in early 2011, Patrick Wang’s In the Family spent a year-and-a-half winding its way through festivals and selected theatrical screenings, regarded highly by the few who saw it. Wang’s debut feature (self-distributed and now self-released on home video) burrows into the lives of its tragedy-rocked characters with such unassuming patience and empathy that only later does one begin to fully digest the audacity of its formal choices and feel the impact of its personal-is-political urgency....

Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza, 2023) Miko Revereza’s Nowhere Near, which made its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, begins with a citation from author Roberto Bolaño: “I’d lost a country but won a dream.” These words, written by an artist whose homeland, Chile, was consumed by a military coup and subsequent dictatorship, resonate with Revereza’s filmic reveries on numerous levels. Born in Manila and raised in the U....

In his review of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words in the March-April issue, Julien Allen writes, “Despite a classical upbringing as a trumpeter and a reputation for lavish, Mahlerian romantic melodies such as “Deborah’s Theme” from Once Upon a Time in America, Ennio Morricone started his composing career as a member of one of the most radical 1960s avant-garde movements: the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. The furious sonorous innovation of his earliest film work, which catapulted him to notoriety, germinated in the musique concrète he practiced with Gruppo: the whistle in A Fistful of Dollars, screaming voices on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and electric bass guitar generally....

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) For the queer American cinephile, the films of the various European new waves and international art-house boom of the 1960s can be as alienating as those of classical Hollywood cinema. As radical as they may often have been in form, the majority of the era’s most venerated western male art-house filmmakers doubled down on masculinist heteronormativity, just with a self-aware intellectual edge: in purporting to tell more direct truths about the distinctions between men and women, such directors as Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Antonioni, and Fellini ended up making films that focused almost exclusively on the mysteries of traditional male-female relationships, but in the guise of deconstructive inquiries....

THE DISTRIBUTOR: C. MASON WELLS, KINO LORBER C. Mason Wells is the Director of Theatrical Sales at Kino Lorber; through their Kino Marquee initiative, discussed below, you can buy a digital ticket to stream the new release Bacurau through Film at Lincoln Center, where it had initially opened theatrically. Interview conducted by phone at 4:30pm, Wednesday, March 18. You guys had Beanpole out, and Bacurau opened March 6—what’s their status?...

It occurred to me in reading the results of your critics’ polls that comedies barely even register. This despite the fact that a great comedy may well be the hardest type of film to make. It just seems that there is a major prejudice to simply dismiss comedies. So I tried to populate my two lists with a number of comedies. But in doing so, I also came to the realization that the past decade was not a particularly good one for great comedies....

WALL·E (#1) Pixar once again brilliantly unifies technical and visual gusto with first-rate narrative craft.—David Beal, Orinda, CA WALL·E has compelling characters, an exciting story, a magnificent score (by Thomas Newman; please give him an Oscar already), beautiful imagery and it’s all done with a snarky sense of humor that is Pixar’s trademark. There’s an environmental message here as well, but other than annoying some talk radio gasbags, no reasonable people were bothered....

Brasilia, Contradictions of a New City “If you want to understand Brazil, watch Brasilia by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade,” Adirley Queirós, one of the country’s most fervent political filmmakers, told me in August at the Locarno Film Festival. Indeed, both Queirós, whose film There Was Once Brasilia won special mention in the festival’s Signs of Life section, and the Brazilian directing team Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, whose socially driven horror movie Good Manners took home the Special Jury Prize, referenced Andrade as an ever-vital figure for today’s Brazilian political cinema....

They called him the Red Duke, and for good reason. By birth, Luchino Visconti was a nobleman, a descendant of Charlemagne and the family that ruled Milan for centuries. As such, he favored silk shirts, Parisian ties, handmade shoes, and the scent of Hammam Bouquet. But Visconti was also homosexual and a Communist—simultaneously aristocrat and outlier, a beneficiary of tradition and a believer in radical change. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time, then Visconti went Fitzgerald one better: he lived a life that depended on an established social order, he believed in the necessity of disrupting that order, and then he rounded back to a deeply poetic appreciation of what was bound to be lost in the transition....

An intimate documentary about American-style boxing might seem like a departure for director Yung Chang, who won renown for his haunting documentary Up the Yangtze (08), about the epochal changes being wrought on rural China by the controversial Three Gorges Dam Project, as seen through the eyes of two young cruise-ship workers. China Heavyweight, Chang’s second feature, is a quieter, more contained, and deeply personal story, but it has just as much weight in its ability to tap into greater truths about China’s changing cultural climate and identity....

The big stateside breakthrough that Johnnie To’s American fans have been hoping for no longer seems possible. To is as talented an action director as Kathryn Bigelow or Michael Mann, yet he was unlucky enough to find his voice long after the American vogue for Hong Kong cinema had peaked and the art-house circuit had imploded. The releases of Election (05), Triad Election (06) and Exiled (06) produced negligible box-office returns, while some of To’s best films, like Sparrow (08), have gone entirely un-released in the U....

L’Amour fou is not about a shy, myopic young man named Yves Saint Laurent who, at the age of 21, inherited one of the defining roles in modern French culture—chief designer for the house of Dior. It is not about how he met and fell in love with Pierre Bergé, and how together they founded their own couture house in 1961; not about their historical innovations in prêt-à-porter; nothing to do with le smoking, safari chic, Mondrian dresses, ethnographic couture....

When Momo and her mother in A Letter to Momo move to the picturesque island of Shio to live with her grandparents, the city kid immediately comes off as a typically apathetic youth. Momo is unimpressed by natural beauty and unable to relate to her widowed mother’s enthusiasm about returning to her childhood home. But her behavior, in Hiroyuki Okiura’s new film, has an understandable source. She’s felt a numbing sense of guilt since the death of her father, their final moments together marred by a major fight....

In the opening moments of John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark), the ghosts of the insurgent Philippine Army look out across the century from behind the bars of Postigo Prison in Manila. Moments later, the voice of the late Howard Zinn tangentially comments on the image, providing the film its ideological husk through his plaintive reminder that “the soul of history is economic.” From 1903 to 1991, Clark Air Base Command (CABCOM) on Luzon Island in the Philippines served as a staging ground for successive American wars of foreign intervention....