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Those bound by four walls may spurn the word zoom after enduring months of their computer’s surveilling stare. But for filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who spent the early days of the pandemic in a home at the intersection of four wooded paths, the zoom lens became a means to conjure connection. Contra Rear Window, where to peer at one’s neighbors unseen feels probing and incursive, Rohrwacher’s new short Four Roads finds the filmmaker roving the Tuscan landscape with a 16mm camera containing expired film, reaching out to her neighbors in their shared seclusion....

The French (William Klein, 1981) Opens in Metrograph’s virtual cinema on August 13 Midway through William Klein’s sprawling yet incisive portrait of the 1981 French Open, the filmmaker cuts and loops a phrase from an interview with soon-to-be champion Björn Borg: “I’m not a machine. I’m like everybody else.” This flash of artifice in a film that otherwise adheres to the cinéma vérité rulebook highlights Klein’s real interest here: the essential humanity, the everyday strangeness, of these apparently superhuman athletes....

We’re nearing the halfway mark of Film Comment Selects, our annual roundup—hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center—of festival finds, sneak previews, genre discoveries, and overlooked classics. Over the next week, we’ll be offering up a trio of striking new horror movies, from slow-burn psychological studies to gonzo, old-school creature features; a rare chance to see Jane Campion’s acclaimed Sundance miniseries Top of the Lake on the big screen in its six-hour entirety; a sneak peek at We Are the Best!...

Araby (original title: Arábia) is no more set in Arabia than Liverpool is set in Liverpool or Brazil in Brazil; it is, however, set in Brazil. In its opening moments, this second feature by João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa (The Hidden Tiger, 2014) could fool you into thinking that we’re somewhere in the U.S.: the camera follows a teenage boy as he cycles along a winding road to the sound of Texan songwriter Townes Van Zandt’s late ’60s ballad “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” a classic expression of the tension between love and wanderlust: “There’s lots of things along the road I’d dearly like to see....

Opened in 1998, the Manakamana cable-car system in Chitwan, Nepal, rises to a top station at 1,302 meters, near the site of the temple of the Hindu goddess Bhagwati. The ride commands some of the most spectacular aerial views in the world. At least, I assume it does. We only see a certain portion of the landscape in Manakamana, the documentary by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, and what we do glimpse is framed by the back window of a cable car....

Patrick Dewaere in Série noire (Alain Corneau, 1979) In 1982, French actor Patrick Dewaere took his own life at the age of 35, his final years colored by professional success, drug abuse, and deep depression. With his death, Dewaere—who would have been 73 on January 26—left behind a legacy of unparalleled precision and sensitivity as a performer that still awaits proper recognition in the U.S. His career began as part of his family’s acting troupe, the “petits Maurin,” before he changed his name (after discovering the identity of his birth father) and struck out on his own at the age of 17....

You cut the section of the take that you want to use, then attach it with glue to another piece of film—and you’re editing. You put two opposing actions together and you’re intercutting—what Griffith called the switchback. The technology of editing is simple. Unlike the mechanics of camera movement or the technology of celluloid or lenses, there haven’t been that many changes in the history of editing. There have been five phases....

The Forbidden Room screens September 28 and 29 in The New York Film Festival and opens October 7 at Film Forum. And newly added to the NYFF slate is another surprise Maddin and Johnson had up their sleeves, recently premiered as an installation in the Wavelengths section at the Toronto International Film Festival: Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton—an authorized, gonzo making-of film about the Afghanistan war movie Hyena Road by fellow Canadian director Paul Gross, complete with melancholic maundering voiceover, lasers, and everything....

Aleksei German’s posthumously finished Hard to Be a God is like stepping into a panoramic Bruegel painting and putting your foot right into a shit-stained corpse… in a good way. The luxuriantly detailed, nearly three-hour film adapts the 1964 Strugatsky Brothers novel about scientists in the future who journey to another planet that’s literally stuck in the Dark Ages, and then live there undercover. But German (who died in February 2013) retains so little of the science-fiction frame that his black-and-white film becomes the closest thing medieval times may get to a verité documentary portrait—warts, mud, guts, and all....

Last year, Marco Müller invited me to join a jury at the Venice Film Festival. Our job was to discern the very first “Persol 3-D Award for the Best 3-D Stereoscopic Film of the Year”—or, more precisely, the best 3-D film shown in Italy between January and September. We passed over a couple of fine animated features (at that point, Avatar was still a dark, threatening mass on the horizon) to give the award to a Venice premiere: Joe Dante’s The Hole, a modestly budgeted horror film that displays an effortless mastery of the third dimension....

Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-1974) In 1962, when he was 18, the American filmmaker Peter Hutton enlisted in the merchant marines. He spent the next 15 years—during which he’d later say he was “hit with a heavy case of wanderlust”—intermittently coming home and shipping back out, and the 20 silent, nonnarrative movies he made between 1970 and 2013 all seem to come from a state of transience, of exploratory travel, of dropping in and passing through....

A coming-of-age story distinguished by more than its determined yet solitary protagonist, the beautifully constructed film is by turns deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Despite the offbeat premise, its setting and characters speaks directly to a desire for, as screenwriter Saela Davis put it, “just telling a normal story about normal people.” Last week FILM COMMENT spoke with the director and her co-writers Davis and Lisa Kjerulff, who together are part of the production collective Yes, Ma’am!...

Read Michael Koresky’s essay on Hereditary in the May-June issue of Film Comment. Hereditary incorporates typical horror elements, but overall it’s a tough experience. Were you surprised by the overall positive response to your film at Sundance and South by Southwest? I’m still kind of shocked by it. I was making an alienating film whose primary aim was to upset the audience in a very deep way. So I am surprised and gratified....

I wanted to start by talking about the moment when the young boy named Chan lights a match. That leads into the torch-carrying scene—when Ewen Bremner’s character carries the torch and passes it along. You get a real sense of the train’s entire tail section working together. It’s a moving evocation of the class struggle that’s at the heart of the film. Exactly. I don’t know if it’s a saying here in America, but in Korea they say, “One small flame can burn a whole field....

On the positive side, many film writers have been singing paeans or erecting tributes to the same miraculous year of Hollywood product that my students and I vigorously unpacked. Alissa Wilkinson at Vox praised 1999 as “uncommonly good” for movies, and also got her own lesson-plan going, urging U.S. studios to learn by contrast how they might try a little harder in 2019. The Washington Post briefly glanced away from the national mushroom cloud and installed 1999 in its Hall of Fame for the best movie years of all time....

Six years ago, Dominga Sotomayor’s Thursday Till Sunday won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam, and the 33-year-old Chilean filmmaker followed that success by becoming the first female director to receive the Leopard for Best Direction at Locarno with her second feature film. Too Late to Die Young—which has its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival—is at once a coming-of-age story, an ensemble film, and a historical piece, yet it defies concrete definition....

Such sentiments came through loud and clear in my conversation with Greengrass about 22 July, his docudrama about the 2011 bombings and mass murders in Norway by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik and the aftermath. The film tracks the day of Breivik’s gun massacre at a Labour Party youth retreat on Utoya Island and his bombing of the seat of government in Oslo but mostly consists of the ensuing period of recovery and court trials....

The anxieties the filmmaker displays on screen as the barely fictionalized version of himself dissipate completely in person. Ultra-chill and self-aware in an interview with FILM COMMENT, Nance offered poignant thoughts on art and love that only deepen the appeal of this sensuous and sensitive feature. Despite being so personal and subjective, your film captures a universal human experience that at times hits almost too close to home. Was this your intention?...