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Deep in the middle of nowhere, ensconced in a forest, a family—blind mother, elderly father, twentysomething son and daughter (the latter prone to seizures), and a toddler—eke out a primitive existence chopping down trees. One day, a mysterious stranger arrives and disrupts the balance of things. The dialogue is terse, and everyone speaks French with an inexplicably foreign accent, amplifying the sense of estrangement. The ultimate extremity of otherness, the film reminds us, is often found close to home....

Open Book is also a work of performance and video rooted in the specifically cinematic device of the photographic close-up. It transforms that proximal viewpoint from a privileged position into an unfortunate one. In the pursuit of an uncomfortable intimacy, Acconci used the language of cinema in a uniquely antagonistic way which echoed and extended the goal of his performances, in which his body was a site of artistic expression put into subversive contexts....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Puiu after the world premiere of Sieranevada at Cannes, six years after his saturnine self-starring time-bomb of a film Aurora (10) and over a decade after Lazarescu first planted a flag there for a rebirth in Romanian cinema. The action takes place nearly entirely within one apartment, and so I was a little puzzled when I read somewhere that the time frame is supposed to be a few days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings....

Both the deceptively breezy Claire’s Camera and the morally inquisitive The Day After continue to pursue the filmmaker’s pet themes of desire and duplicity through comedic variations in tone and structure. In Claire’s Camera, which was shot on the streets of Cannes during the 2016 edition, a precocious film sales assistant (Kim Minhee) befriends a wayward music teacher (Isabelle Huppert, star of Hong’s 2012 film In Another Country) after getting fired by her boss for sketchy reasons that only become clear later....

This film is not just a guy in a hotel room, like a subpoena deposition. I really like the image you start out with, for example: a ribbon of light through the darkness. What is that exactly? That’s a tunnel emerging into Hong Kong. At the beginning, you don’t see where it’s going, and then when we arrive in Hong Kong, you get the skyline. It’s also psychological—it feels like I’ve been in a tunnel for the past year....

When the Chilean-born Danish cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro teamed up with Lars von Trier for Melancholia (2011), he not only shouldered the responsibility of delivering a sublime vision of the Apocalypse, but also of becoming a driving force in the expansion of an oeuvre whose existential depth and formal risk-taking never cease to propel cinema toward new configurations of modernity. Pushing boundaries on both technical and narrative levels, von Trier’s latest films shot by Claro—Melancholia, Nymphomaniac (2013), and The House That Jack Built (2018)—present an exhilarating combination of naturalism with excursions into alternative realms of reality and experience....

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, 2023) I had been aware of Raven Jackson’s debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, from its early developmental stages through the completion of its screenplay. [Full disclosure: Jackson worked on the script in a lab at Indie Memphis, where I am employed.] But when the credits rolled after I finally saw the finished film last January at the Sundance Film Festival, I felt like I had encountered something entirely new....

Of course, the seamless final film doesn’t reflect any of these woes, and that is to a large extent due to the work of editor Sandra Adair, ACE, who has collaborated with Richard Linklater since Dazed and Confused (93). Adair’s approach to editing could be easily mislabeled as a “light touch”; rather, she finds the rhythm in leisurely scenes, naturalistic performances, and thoughtful conversation by emphasizing the actors’ body language and physicality, getting to the heart of each scene’s emotional core....

The Trouble with Being Born (Sandra Wollner, 2020) Among the prizewinners in the inaugural Encounters section at the Berlinale were the latest film from Cristi Puiu, Malmkrog; an eight-hour seasonal portrait of a Japanese farmer, Works and Days; and Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble with Being Born, which ably holds its own. In Wollner’s second feature, a lifelike android (“Ellie”) lives with a middle-aged man in an isolated house, and as the deeply disturbing nature of their relationship emerges, the film pivots unpredictably into the world of a lonely elderly woman....

Although his professional debut feature—the independently produced sensory assault Tetsuo the Iron Man (89)—turned 25 years old last year, Tsukamoto’s career has been defined ever since by its minimalist, cyberpunk aesthetic. One reason for this may be that, with only a couple of exceptions, he has remained defiantly independent of studio and corporate association throughout his career, perhaps the only filmmaker working in Japan to have done so, yet he also been able to tap into the international sales and distribution market, and see his films repeatedly screened at major film festivals....

Mister Universo seems very much like a movie structured around characters who are presumably playing versions of their actual selves. I saw some familiar faces here—the mother from La Pivellina, for example—and from that film I know that you’ve been around circus people for some time. How did you assemble your cast here, and enter into their world? First of all, I have to say that you’ve explained our style of working perfectly....

MARD (1985) The ultimate Manmohan Desai dshoom dshoom actioner, Mard was a superhit, becoming the top-grossing movie of 1985 and getting a 70mm Tamil-language remake by Superstar Rajinikanth the following year. But where Rajinikanth failed (gasp!) with his remake, Amitabh Bachchan takes home all the macho trophies. Director Manmohan Desai makes movies where the Brits are evil, the working class are king, rich girls ride around in convertibles with bodyguards wearing complicated S&M gear, no one can find a top hat that fits, and he’s never met an emotional beat that didn’t call for a 360-degree camera spin, a couple of zooms, and quick cutting between five different angles....

Her second feature, By the Time It Gets Dark, is a more overtly political film, taking place against the backdrop of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre. But instead of explicitly discussing the event, a thorny topic still subject to strict government censorship, the film examines the intangible forces of time, memory, and cinema, all of which blur the line between reality and fiction. Rarely mentioning the event, the film follows the everyday lives of characters that include a filmmaker, a pop star, and an unemployed woman constantly changing jobs, without explaining their connection to one another....

Most existences on earth are marginal; the majority of people live on the edges of some kind of war. That the woman and man at the center of Miss Bala swing into each other’s orbit is itself no great coincidence. She’s Laura (Stephanie Sigman), the cheerful 23-year-old daughter of a Tijuana clothing merchant, and he’s Lino (Noe Hernandez), a taciturn, hard-eyed, soft-voiced drug trafficker about whose past we glean almost nothing....

Set in a quasi-modern Madrid, which feels strangely cloistered in its narrow streets, diminutive parks, and quiet apartment blocks, The Apostate recalls Buñuel’s cinema in its deadpan approach to perversion and senseless desire, its dearth of delineation between reality and reverie, and its curious mixture of irreverence and almost fetishistic fascination with the rites and institutional mysteries of Catholicism. With the exception of Hong Sangsoo, I cannot think of another filmmaker since Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki in their early work who is so devoted to nurturing such beguilingly low-key, highly stylized comedy....

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda, 1977) 2. An essay by Tim Grierson questions how much we really know about our new living room overlords. Sparked by a Netflix tweet claiming that Bird Box received over 45 million views in its first seven days, Grierson re-contextualizes the meaning of “viewership” for our subscription-model era. 3. Further downstream, so to speak, the just-launched Telescope, founded by festival programmer Justine Barda, is a new service that aims to aggregate foreign releases as they become available online....