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About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2024) Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) is biding his time. The protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s engrossing drama About Dry Grasses is a school teacher who has been waiting for a transfer from a remote Anatolian village to Istanbul for four years. The village of İncesu only has two seasons, Samet says, “winter and summer.” For the vast majority of the film, which is more than three hours long, it’s winter—a seemingly endless one, with an unmelting layer of snow that acts as a mirror for the gray sky....

This past summer, Lars von Trier announced a crowdsourced project entitled Gesamt that would use digital video submitted from amateur filmmakers around the globe. The ground rules were simple: the submissions should interpret or respond to at least one of six works of art provided on the project’s website gesamt.org, and should run no longer than five minutes; no copyrighted material allowed. The artworks were a mischievously varied lot: an unidentified painting of topless Tahitian women by Gauguin; the final, orgasmic chapter of Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses; an excerpt from Strindberg’s 1887 play The Father, in which a scheming women drives her husband mad; a spectacular song-and-dance performance of “Ol’ Man River” by Sammy Davis Jr....

Readers’ Poll: Readers are invited to stand up and be counted too! All entries will be automatically entered in our contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection. We will print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on the website. Send your ranked list of the year’s 20 best films (plus any rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll [at] filmlinc....

Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade, Germany Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, USA Elle, Paul Verhoeven, France/Germany Cemetery of Splendor, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Malaysia Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt, USA Paterson, Jim Jarmusch, USA Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan, USA Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France Things to Come, Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Germany No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos, France/Netherlands/Greece/UK Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong Sangsoo, South Korea Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman, Ireland/Netherlands/France/USA...

Which is a long way of saying that the two boldest and most exciting films of this year’s Cannes competition also met, unsurprisingly, with violent press reactions—but rest assured that you haven’t heard the last of them. Holy Motors One is Holy Motors, the first feature-length film in more than a decade from French cinema’s one-time enfant terrible, Leos Carax, who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s with two strikingly original tales of l’amour fou, Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang, that established him, along with Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix, as one of the progenitors of a new, advertising-and-video-influenced aesthetic dubbed “cinema du look....

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022) I first attended Cannes in 1993, the year of The Piano and Farewell My Concubine. That would make this 75th festival my 30th May here—if last year’s hadn’t happened in July, and if the previous year’s festival hadn’t been an apocryphal phantom edition. In the early ’90s, you could still run into some of those venerable journos who would grumble about how much better Cannes used to be, and how easy it once was to get an interview with Fellini or John Ford just by wandering up to them in the Carlton lobby....

Few off-screen romantic battles match the triangle of love-hate between Roberto Rossellini, Anna Magnani, and Ingrid Bergman, but Italian filmmaker Francesco Patierno’s documentary Bergman & Magnani: The War of the Volcanoes is very possibly the first film to meticulously track the charged events of 1950, when Rossellini cast his new amore Bergman in Stromboli just as his ex-lover Magnani was filming Vulcano under William (Kismet) Dieterle’s direction on a neighboring Aeolian island....

The early 1980s was a fertile period for soundtracks, ushering in a new breed of composers with backgrounds in electronic music, pop, progressive rock, new wave and post-punk. Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police (and son of a CIA agent) is one such composer, although he wasn’t the first. Vangelis Papathanassiou of the band Aphrodite’s Child began composing for film as early as the 1960s, although he didn’t break into the mainstream until 1982 with his soundtrack for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner....

Everything about the success of the Fast and Furious series is counterintuitive and unconventional. That’s what makes it low-down delightful. In do-or-die fights, the moviemakers let you see their heroes sweat: these movies celebrate exertion. In hyperbolic chase and demolition scenes, inspired stunt people and digital craftsmen bring audiences to the edge of reality—and then, in the best analog tradition, compel them to suspend disbelief. At the high point of Furious 7, the auto-maniac heroes, intent on rescuing a computer genius in distress, back a string of supercars straight off the rear of a cargo plane, then glide on parachutes into the Caucasus Mountains....

Why Reese Witherspoon would choose to play an obsessive, hyper-focused cop in Anne Fletcher’s action comedy Hot Pursuit is even more puzzling than why she would decide to produce the movie. The role releases nothing new in her; at times she seems to be competing in a high-speed recitation contest of the Texas law-enforcement handbook. Hot Pursuit is the third film from Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard production company after Gone Girl and Wild....

James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour is the rare literary film that feels spontaneous and packs a wallop. It’s full of wordplay—emphasis on both syllables. What Ponsoldt does with it goes beyond witty to potent and affecting. Donald Margulies’ beautifully rhythmic script centers on five days of interviews in March 1996 with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), the novelist who was then becoming famous as the exemplar of post-post-modernism....

The Lincoln Cycle (1917), a series of linked two-reelers (originally 10; two are lost), toggles between Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and his boyhood in Indiana. It darts back now and then to frontier Kentucky, where his forefathers lived and he was born. With sentiment and nimble artistry, the cycle celebrates a leader who dreams of winning battles via “love and service” but who goes to war when the need is real and the cause just....

The Dream and the Radio (Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk, 2022) Of all the festivals forced to go virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is the only major international film event that’s now canceled all in-person activities two years in a row. What’s more, these virtual editions have been IFFR’s first under new director Vanja Kaludjercic, who, while dealing with this radical change in format, in short order has remedied many of the problems that had recently plagued the festival....

As both an actor and a director, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is an original. Her unique gift is an ability to blend humor and pathos, shifting from one to the other, full out, within a single gesture or sentence. In her second feature, Actresses (an instantly forgettable title that doesn’t begin to encompass what the film is about), she stars as a 40-year-old woman in crisis: her biological clock is issuing wake-up calls at the same time that she is in rehearsals for Turgenev’s A Month in the Country as Natalia Petrovna, a killer role with which she can’t come to grips....

Poster courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Poster courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Poster courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Zine courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Poster courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Poster courtesy of Doc Films at the University of Chicago Membership card courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Membership card courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Fritz Lang at the University of California at Berkeley Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Tom Luddy at Pacific Film Archives, courtesy of the University of California at Berkeley Photograph of screening courtesy of the University Wisconsin-Madison Archives Photograph of posters courtesy of the University Wisconsin-Madison Archives

“I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did.” —Stanley Kubrick to Michel Ciment In the years since Stanley Kubrick’s death, his films have come to seem ever more anomalous....

Letters from the Big Man Not coincidentally, some of the best films in this year’s festival were by veterans of the Nineties. Gregg Araki was back with his irrepressible but finely calibrated gender-bending new-age horror-satire Kaboom (which has already come and gone from your local indie theater) as was Christopher Munch with Letters from the Big Man, which is about the tender encounter between a gorgeous blonde National Forestry Service consultant (Lily Rabe) and Sasquatch (Isaac C....