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If Lee’s best-known films—Poetry (2010), Secret Sunshine (2007), Oasis (2002)—have tested the possibilities of melodramatic form, Burning finds this former novelist bending the contours of the thriller. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the film accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty. Speaking through a translator as the festival drew to a close last week, Lee answered a few questions about the film’s inspirations and themes....

For Film Comment I spoke with Kawase at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which presented at the EYE Filmmuseum a program of Kawase’s documentaries: Embracing (1992), Katatsumori (1994), and Birth/Mother (2006). Embracing How did you first come to documentary filmmaking? I was actually a basketball player, till about the age of 18, but as soon as I got introduced to cinema I knew immediately that I had to have it in my life....

Ema (Pablo Larraín, 2019) The title character of Pablo Larraín’s Ema has a passion for reggaeton and dance, and a penchant for going into the streets with a flamethrower to burn stuff. She’s also the bereft mother of an adopted child whom she and her husband, Gaston (Gael Garcia Bernal), have given up after a violent incident. Ema is, in a word, complex, and Larrain’s portrait of her and her fellow dancers—fussily directed by Gaston—obeys her centrifugal force, spinning out scenes from a life of freedoms and frustrations....

The Song of Songs (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) It is easy to get lost in blissful nostalgia at Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy. It is easy to dream yourself into history when you can glance away from the long-dead stars of the century-old—and still astonishing—Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), take in the Renaissance facades of the palazzos that encircle the Piazza Maggiore, and spy pinpricks of ancient starlight poking through the projector beam above your head....

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) Frederick Wiseman has a new film on the way, this time set in his hometown of Boston. In an interview with Please Kill Me, Wiseman states: “I’m just finishing up a film on Boston City Hall. The editing is done, so I don’t mind mentioning it. I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.” Though he doesn’t reveal much else about the film, the interview is still replete with insights into Wiseman’s working method: “I never start with a theme or a point of view....

Feeling like the best thing that came out of the movies in 2012 was Michael Haneke’s fake, cat-fart-powered Twitter account? Was Frankenweenie the most rewarding experience you had in a theater in 2012? Or do you believe in the power of film again after Django Unchained revealed how many not-so-secret racists are in your extended family? Whatever the past 12 months of cinema held for you, all those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain ....

Northern Lights opens, vérité-style, on Henry Martinson, a real-life 94-year-old former homesteader and union man from Sacred Heart, Minnesota. Rummaging around at home, he comes across a diary belonging to an old friend. He decides to type it up, eager to recount a period “almost forgotten by most folks,” as his voiceover puts it. From this documentary-like portrait of Henry, the film moves on to a fictionalized embedded narrative about Ray Sorenson (Robert Behling), a soft-spoken young farmer in early-20th-century North Dakota (and the man who left behind the journal)....

“With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” The closing line of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter is the moment of truth for Leslie Crosbie, the bored wife of a rubber plant manager in Singapore, who shoots her lover and pleads self-defense. For the scheming Leslie, every utterance is calculated, each pained admission or feint of weakness a study in duplicity—especially once the titular letter to the dead man emerges that throws her testimony into doubt....

In the opening moments of Bright Star, a blade pushes through the surface of some coarse material. For a second, the prospect of a Campion-esque act of violence hovers—the kind that hacks into her film’s romantic fantasies, proving lethal to women and hardly less toxic to men. For a second, you might see the ice skates slicing the legs off Frannie’s mother in In the Cut, or the blade of the axe sweeping down on Ada’s finger in The Piano....

The enduring appeal of vampire stories has, I think, something to do with their strange dual function as erotic fantasies and wistful memento mori. The vampire has been imagined on screen alternately as a dominating, threatening sexual presence (Plan 9’s Vampira, Jean Rollin’s curvaceous bloodsuckers and their virginal victims, Twilight’s hormonal undead teens) and as a melancholy symbol of the cost of eternal life (the disembodied shadows and ghostly doppelgängers of Dreyer’s Vampyr, the unaging 12-year-old who passes from guardian to guardian in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Herzog’s elegiac re-imagining of the same)....

Sharing quite a bit of DNA with the home-invasion thriller The Desperate Hours—both the first version from 1955 starring Humphrey Bogart and the 1990 remake helmed by Michael Cimino and starring Mickey Rourke—Stefan Ruzowitsky’s Deadfall takes a tried-and-true premise (a bad man with a gun drops in uninvited for dinner; add some family discord and simmer to a boil), supplies some solid talent with decent name recognition, and delivers a satisfying thriller....

Director Jaume Collet-Serra has taken the weaponized Neeson and deployed him in two sleek wrong-man thrillers that reintroduce vulnerability into his character (Collet-Serra and Neeson will collaborate a third time for Run All Night, set to be released in February 2015). In Unknown (11) Neeson was an amnesiac scientist whose identity is stolen as part of a conspiracy plot, and he spends most of the film stumbling around Berlin piecing the remnants of his life together....

A friend once maintained that Michael Bay would be an excellent, and equally successful, porn director. Mind you, this wasn’t meant as an insult; after all, Bay’s quite adept at visually lingering on a single bead of sweat, and his films are full of swaggering low angles and extreme close-ups of intense facial expressions. Try watching Bad Boys II again and take a drink every time a woman’s bare ass is visible....

Entrancingly beautiful and calculated to confound, Carlos Reygadas’s first feature since Silent Light (07), is as beguiling a cinematic object as one is likely to encounter this year. Met with boos following its premiere at Cannes last year (although it went on to win the Best Director prize), Post Tenebras Lux represents Reygadas’s attempt to make a personal work in which autobiographical content is lyrically transfigured and elevated to cosmic heights....