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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân, 2023) The comparisons to Apichatpong Weerasethakul are inevitable, as are the words “otherworldly,” “poetic,” and “slow.” All of these have been used to describe Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. While none of these descriptors are wrong, they nevertheless fail to grasp the film’s astonishing singularity. If we must begin with an analogue, let us consider Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), another drama of faith played out in a remote village, close to wind, rain, and fog....

Images from Daughters of the Sun (Maryam Shahriar, 2000) In a 2001 interview, Iranian director Maryam Shahriar spoke about the genesis of her 2000 film Daughters of the Sun, which won Best First Feature at the Montreal World Film Festival. After attending the University of California, Shahriar returned to Iran to care for her sick mother. She had decided cinema was what she wanted to do. But how? Iran’s filmmaking community is small; she already knew some of the players....

Images from Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) Maybe it’s hard to look past the gobs of viscera, but one rarely sees Clive Barker mentioned on any list of out-and-proud filmmakers of the last 30 years. An auteur of literally gut-wrenching cinema, the British horror and fantasy author and sometime movie director might not seem to check the boxes for our preferred standards of gay positivity, but shred through the pulp and gore and you’ll find the beating heart of a true queer auteur....

Images from Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007) Throughout Céline Sciamma’s meticulous Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we’re made fully conscious of three distinct yet interconnected points of view at once: those of the artist, the subject of the artist’s gaze (in classical—and in this case, outdated—parlance “the muse”), and our own, as the viewers of the finished artwork, which is, in this case, a film. Sciamma’s film feels at all times like a revelation not because there haven’t been movies to engage with these questions of perspective, but because when it comes to queer art, the conventions of looking—and the presumptions about who is looking—have rarely been questioned....

Unchained Melody: The Films of Meiko Kaji By Tom Mes Ghost in the Shell By Andrew Osmond Arrow Books Arrow Books is the new publishing imprint of Arrow Video, the UK-based, boutique home video label specializing in extras-rich box sets of restored horror, Japanese, and cult movie classics. They’ve begun with two cinema-related chapbooks squarely in their wheelhouse—Unchained Melody: The Films of Meiko Kaji, by Japanese cinema specialist Tom Mes, and Ghost in the Shell, by anime expert Andrew Osmond—followed by a third volume devoted to the Blair Witch franchise....

A Tale of Autumn In a representative scene from an Eric Rohmer film, a handsome high school philosophy teacher and a much younger woman—his former student and ex-lover—are sitting on the sculpted rock wall of a garden having a candid conversation about romantic love. He has one arm around her shoulder and both eyes fixed on her with unconcealed desire, a situation to which she, a radiantly beautiful frizzy-haired brunette with a sweater tied casually around her chest, doesn’t seem to object....

The latest in a long (if frequently dubious) line of contemporary films cataloguing The Way We Live Now, Bird People underscores its socially diagnostic intent from the very start. The camera lingers on the mad rush of Parisians as they stride through a large metro station, eyes and fingers frequently glued to the glowing screens of their portable electronic devices. Settling within a subway car, it makes us privy to the digital documents, snatches of music, and stray thoughts—sometimes uttered aloud, other times heard in voiceover—that circulate throughout the train’s interior as it glides toward its next destination....

Does James Franco suck dick? I mean, does he literally put dicks in his mouth and suck on them? A lot of people could care less, or claim to care less, for various reasons. Because celebrity sex lives are boring. Because James Franco is boring. Because we live in a fabulously enlightened post-gay wonderland (exemplified by James Franco). Because we know people whose dicks have actually been sucked by James Franco....

Rian Johnson’s Looper is the kind of sci-fi movie that does its best to let you comfortably forget that it’s a sci-fi film as you’re watching and (hopefully) enjoying it. It often seems that directors reach a fork in the road with sci-fi where one path dictates going dark, dank, and gritty, while underlining the “real,” and the other path has them flying their outrageous spandexy and glittery chrome life-in-the-future freak flag....

Jack Armstrong never met a lesbian he didn’t fuck. It began with his closeted ex-fiancée Fatima (Kerry Washington), who, on the eve of their wedding, tossed their marriage bed with girl-on-girl action. Skip ahead a couple years, and Jack (Anthony Mackie) is the vice president of Progeia, a pharmaceutical company on the verge of launching an AIDS vaccine. Shocked out of his complacency by the flamboyant suicide of a colleague, he decides to blow the whistle on his company when he stumbles over financial malfeasance, effectively blacklisting himself from corporate America....

“Why do you steal?” an angry chef demands of Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), the 12-year-old boy he finds stashing pilfered ski equipment in the restaurant’s storeroom. Disquietingly unfazed, Simon shrugs: “I don’t know. To buy things.” Mistaken for a greedy, thrill-seeking pre-adolescent, the boy is forced to elaborate: he has no parents, only a sister, and his profits are used to buy necessities. Scorn may give way to momentary solicitude, but Sister is by no means a tenderhearted morality tale....

The Oath is a film about two men associated with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden: Salim Hamdan, a driver for bin Laden, and Nasser al-Bahri, one of bin Laden’s bodyguards. Hamdan is the better-known figure to the moviegoing and newspaper-reading public in the U.S.: picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 and imprisoned in Guantánamo for almost six years, he was the plaintiff in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the 2006 Supreme Court case that decided that the Bush administration’s prosecution of “enemy combatants” by military commission violated the Geneva Conventions....

The feature-length debut of Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s puppetoon characters Horse, Cowboy, and Indian has a few surprisingly durable methods for getting laughs: 1) toy-soldier-style animal figurines doing people stuff; 2) hold-on-to-your-hats jerky stop-motion; and 3) scream-talking by most characters. Number three may eventually give you a headache, and the film occasionally feels like a pileup of gonzo shorts stitched together, but it’s engagingly loony while it (and the viewer) lasts....

Music is always an important aspect of Quentin Dupieux’s films, so it’s no mistake that he chose Philip Glass’s “Music with Changing Parts” for Reality: the piece suggests an apt metaphor for both what happens in the film and what it’s like to watch it. The characters are simplistic, easily recognizable figures drawn from a variety of genres—an aging auteur struggling to inject art into reality TV, a nutso movie producer, a Z-list diva, a precocious but lonely little girl—but through repetition, their problems and quirks snowball into dissonance and absurdity, blurring the line between what’s real and what isn’t....