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Instead of a golden watch, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is giving Béla Tarr a complete retrospective for his retirement, along with a theatrical run of his magisterial final film, The Turin Horse. The bleak (and bleakly funny) maestro of modernist black-and-white ruin, Tarr turned the post-communist landscapes of Hungary into elemental playgrounds of loneliness and decay. His films are populated by smoke, fog, and rain as much as the weathered faces of his brooding, binge-drinking protagonists....

Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023) Like many of Christian Petzold’s films, Afire features a beautiful woman and a desirous man caught up in the flurries of fate. But where works like Transit (2018) and Undine (2020) call upon history to ensnare their lovers, Afire plants itself firmly in a burning present. The second in a planned trilogy of features about the elements (Undine was the first, with its ravishing tale of a water nymph and an industrial diver), the film places its young protagonists—two artists and two service workers—on the very brink of climate collapse, in a forest wrecked by wildfires....

Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, out this week on Blu-ray, is the best American movie of 2014. Gilroy constructs an exciting and enraging vision of contemporary life from the spectacle of TV-news freelancers scrambling through L.A. at night to record gory accidents and crimes. This film is incandescent verbally—Gilroy’s eloquently slangy script has been nominated for an Oscar—and visually—the great Robert Elswit did its electric cinematography. The movie boasts gutsy, imaginative performances from Jake Gyllenhaal as tyro videocam stringer Lou Bloom; Riz Ahmed as his naïve assistant Rick; and Rene Russo as veteran L....

Adapting a short-story collection by James Franco, Coppola preserves the episodic structure of the book, allowing her camera to move among the characters with a breezy sense of freedom: April (Emma Roberts), the intelligent yet vulnerable good-girl lured into an affair with her charismatic but creepy soccer coach, Mr. B. (played by Franco); Teddy (Jack Kilmer) who’s in trouble with the law and in love with April; Fred (Nat Wolffe), Teddy’s cocky, bad-influence sidekick; and Emily (Zoe Levin), the profoundly sad school slut who freely dispenses blow jobs in place of genuine connection....

Tell us about your transition from actor to writer. I grew up in Palos Verdes, a suburb of L.A. I was always interested in acting. When I was in high school, I started studying with real acting teachers, and when I graduated, I went to USC to study theater. I met George in an acting class and we became friends and have remained close ever since. While I was in school I got a sitcom, Spencer, and then just pursued acting for a long time....

With a gleaming bald head, deepening lines in his face, and a naturally authoritative voice, Simmons tends to be cast in roles that are either fearsome or fatherly. He’s played a neo-Nazi in the TV series Oz (1997-2003), a no-bullshit psychiatrist on Law & Order (1994-2010), a blind divorcee on the recent NBC series Growing Up Fisher (14), and, of course, the deadpan professor in the Farmer’s Insurance commercials. On the “nice guy” end of the spectrum Simmons is perhaps best known as the patient patriarch in Juno (2007)—in fact, he’s acted in every single one of Jason Reitman’s films, and it was Reitman who recommended him for the role of Terence Fletcher in Whiplash....

Some of that setup may feel familiar, but Bustamante’s formal choices in Ixcanul—especially in pacing, with a rhythm that builds from take to take—allows for the story to play out to its most affecting measure. From beginning to end, both María’s presence and distance is felt, as she struggles to assert herself and express her inner life. FILM COMMENT spoke with Bustamante by phone from Guatemala, the day of Ixcanul’s screening in Neighboring Scenes at the Film Society of the Lincoln Center....

Will-o’-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2022) The rare pandemic-era production to tap into something joyful and infectious, João Pedro Rodrigues’s Will-o’-the-Wisp parlays past injustices and present-day anxieties into a euphoric vision of the future. Beginning in 2069, the film tells the tale of an elderly Portuguese king named Alfredo (Joel Branco), who, on his deathbed, reminisces about the years he spent in his youth as a volunteer firefighter. Flashing back to COVID-19 times, a wide-eyed Alfredo (now played by Mauro Costa) is seen defying his parents and joining the local fire brigade, where he meets and falls for his instructor, Afonso (André Cabral), a young Black man carrying some culturally incurred trauma, though with an undeniable pep in his step....

The Globalisation Tapes Born in Texas, raised in New Mexico and Washington, D.C., Joshua Oppenheimer came to Indonesia through The Globalisation Tapes (03, co-directed with Christine Cynn), a film about unionization efforts in Sumatra. His experimentation with filmmaking was present already in two works made during his years as a Harvard undergraduate: the hybrid all-American tabloid apocalypse The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (98) and These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (96), for which Oppenheimer went undercover with American militia groups....

Images from Give Me Liberty (Kirill Mikhanovsky, 2019) Directed, co-written, and edited by Kirill Mikhanovsky, Give Me Liberty is one of the most exuberant, ingeniously made, and humane American independent films of a decade in which too many aspiring directors have become risk-adverse. Mikhanovsky and his Russian Jewish family emigrated to the United States and settled in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s. He did a degree in linguistics, but he was movie mad....

I read that you have a degree in business administration, and then you transitioned to journalism, and now you’re doing ethnography and filmmaking. Can you talk about how you’ve made those career switches? Michael Obert: I studied economics, and I was kind of a young shooting star in a management career, and I did that for five years. I had a huge salary, around 10,000 marks, a car, an apartment in Paris, and one day I woke up in the literal meaning of the word....

In his films, Naruse effectively examined the impact of modernity on working-class women in mid-20th-century Japan, especially in his frequent collaborations with the legendary actress Hideko Takamine—the character of Lady Hideko in The Handmaiden is named after her. While the setting for Park’s films is primarily the world of late modernity, both his and Naruse’s heroines are not passive observers of their circumstances, but are trying to be in control of their own destiny, staying true to their emotions and following their desires—from finding love to getting revenge—despite the odds....

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke with Östlund on an unseasonably warm October day about social—and filmic—conventions, the week before Force Majeure showed at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (which will host a retrospective of his work in January 2015). Your mother was a schoolteacher, and I think when you grow up in a house where someone is a schoolteacher, you grow up with a different understanding of human behavior....

The Wandering Soap Opera What was the process of finding the film? Apparently it was quite an adventure. I was in Chile, working on a TV series, and I went to the Cineteca Nacional [Chilean National Cinematheque]. And in the Cineteca they told me that somebody had deposited some negatives of what appeared to be La telenovela errante [The Wandering Soap Opera]. So I said, OK, that’s good, and I talked to Chamila Rodríguez, who is the producer of this film, and asked, what would you think if we try to finish this film?...

—Lucio V. MansillaAn Expedition to the Ranquel Indians Jauja Jauja, the latest film by Lisandro Alonso, was a surprise for many critics. That’s not because it’s so different from his four previous features, but because it demonstrates that his cinema has a much broader range of possibilities than many previously assumed, and obliges you to look at the entirety of his work, as you would the work of any filmmaker of grand aesthetic ambitions....

Life in Shadows Catalunya’s cultural dynamism and artistic legacy is in large part associated with its cosmopolitan image. The artistic heritage of Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, Gaudi’s modernist architecture, and Barcelona’s design tradition are only the most prominent reference points. Yet Catalan cinema hasn’t achieved strong recognition, whether it be on its home turf, within the rest of Spain, or internationally. It is confounded by its own characteristics: it’s atomized, dispersed, and, for the most part, lacking coherent movements and waves through which its filmmakers might establish some kind of a dialogue, not to mention a consolidated industrial model....

Prior to the New Directors/New Films opening-night screening of Under the Shadow, FILM COMMENT sat down with Anvari in Tribeca to discuss the genesis of his politically charged, spine-chilling debut and the development of his method as a first-time feature director. In Under the Shadow, the supernatural horror that erupts in the household also functions as a metaphor for the horrors of war happening outside. Did horror feel like the obvious choice of genre to depict those apocalyptic times?...

This alien object, which screens March 25 and 26 in New Directors / New Films, is the debut feature of Swiss-born twins Ramon and Silvan Zürcher. Silvan produced; Ramon wrote and directed. FILM COMMENT spoke with Ramon last week about Fluxus performance, the Berlin School, and what it was like having Béla Tarr as a teacher. Where did you grow up, and how did you get into filmmaking? I grew up in Switzerland, close to the capital Bern, between Bern and the countryside....