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FILM COMMENT spoke at length with Lapid last year at the Cannes Film Festival shortly after the film’s premiere. The Kindergarten Teacher begins its run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center Friday, July 31. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film having seen Policeman. This is such different subject matter, on the surface. And it’s hard to make a movie at least partly about literature. When did you get the sense that this is something you would actually make a movie about, and that it could work out?...

Milla opens with a dreamlike image: 17-year old Milla (non-actor Séverine Jonckeere, an endearingly unaffected presence) and her boyfriend Leo (Luc Chessel) snuggle together in a car, lit by the gentle glow of foggy windows. In a series of languorous scenes, they set themselves up in an abandoned house by the sea, furnishing their home with scavenged scraps and making feasts out of sandwiches and wine. Massadian’s wide, sunlit compositions render the couple’s meager existence without pathos or pity; she is invested more in the immediacy of their experience than in any abstract forms of social commentary....

Rutger Hauer in Turkish Delight (Paul Verhoeven, 1973) Renowned Dutch actor Rutger Hauer passed away last week at the age of 75. The actor was famed for his intense, nuanced performances in Blade Runner, The Hitcher, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, and Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, among countless others. In a 1990 Film Comment interview, Paul Verhoeven described his relationship with his frequent collaborator thusly: “I was looking at Soldier of Orange a couple of weeks ago—my kids were looking at it—and I was just looking at Rutger and I said, ‘Oh, fuck, he’s such a great guy!...

The family car of Dorothea and her teenage son Jamie catches fire in the first scene of Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women. But while the flames engulfing the beat-up Ford Galaxie—a remnant of a long-absent husband and father—are promptly extinguished in a grocery-store parking lot, emotional fires burn steadily throughout the film, across the summer days of those residing in Dorothea (Annette Bening) and Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann)’s large under-renovation home in 1979 Santa Barbara....

The Idiots Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle lays bare every facet of the writer’s life, from his favorite bands to the humiliating details of his sexual failures. Perhaps the only thing we aren’t privy to are his opinions on cinema, which is why it was such an unusual pleasure to hear him talk about Lars von Trier’s 1998 film The Idiots, shown as part of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Print Screen series....

Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! Premiering in Critics’ Week at Cannes, the 2007 film immediately put Yoshida on the map as a masterful practitioner of weird, dark comedy, after a start making TV commercials. In Funuke, the children of a couple who die while attempting to rescue a cat are forced to live under the same roof for the first time in years: dorky little sister Kyomi, an aspiring manga artist; sexy, psychotic older sister Sumika, an aspiring, talentless actress; half-brother Shinji, and his cheerful, long-suffering wife Machiko....

Hallelujah VIOLET LUCCA: Today we’re talking about black performances and black actors. People who have been overlooked or underappreciated throughout history. In preparation, I asked Ashley and Ina to think about remarkable performers… INA ARCHER: When I was thinking about this, the thing that came to mind was all of this potential. One of the people that I was just watching the other day was Nina Mae McKinney, whose career was in the 1930s....

In The Master, the American past of the late Forties and early Fifties is a very, very foreign country, rendered doubly strange from the perspective of the early 21st century and its nervous obsession with right now. Who are these people? Who is this grandiose, folksy, impetuous, self-appointed sage named Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman)? Who are these wealthy people who subsidize him, invite him into their homes and onto their yachts, and listen to him with such rapt attention?...

The time is ripe for a life of Pauline Kael. Ten years after her passing, her insistent, astute voice continues to resonate in the culture. The Library of America has just published a hefty selection of her best pieces, which makes the case definitively for her mastery as film critic and prose writer. What follows, naturally, is curiosity about the woman herself, such as only a biography can supply. Brian Kellow, a seasoned biographer of Ethel Merman and the Bennett sisters, editor at Opera News, film buff, and Kael admirer, would seem right for the job; and he has written a quite decent, balanced, revealing, and informative book....

The lives of the Brontës were marked by ambition, transgression, and tragedy, but André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters is all the more haunting for being stylized and elliptical. The script by Pascal Bonitzer draws on primary sources, and Téchiné elicits restrained but electric performances from Marie-France Pisier (Charlotte), Isabelle Adjani (Emily), Isabelle Huppert (Anne), and Pascal Greggory as the sisters’ beloved, doomed brother Branwell. While the astringent formalism echoes the family’s austere circumstances, the characters’ vivid interior lives emerge through language and gesture....

Bette Davis The old man in the black coat stands up and turns to stare out the window. His hunched-over back shows the secret he has kept for decades. He experiences a long-delayed reckoning with what he had done in the past or, more accurately, what he had not done. In the 1976 mini-series Sybil, Charles Lane plays Dr. Quinoness, the doctor who had treated the troubled Sibyl for UTIs when she was a child....

There’s such a fine line between stupid and clever, as we were taught by the heavy metal brainiacs of 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap. Thirteen years later Christopher Guest, who plays Nigel Tufnel in that original mock-doc, directed Waiting for Guffman, a follow-up that treads a fine line of another kind. Here, Guest plays the similarly softheaded Corky St. Clair, a small-town community theater director mounting a musical celebrating the sesquicentennial of Blaine, Missouri, the “Stool Capital of the World....

McCay certainly wasn’t the inventor of animated cartoons, but that didn’t stop him from billing himself that way in the opening credits of his 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania. And although many would identify Gertie as the first animated film, that, too, wasn’t the case. It wasn’t even McCay’s first, as it was proceeded by Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912), both adapted from his incredibly popular newspaper strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, respectively....

It’s been 40 years since the onset of the Women’s Liberation Movement, but its television miniseries history has yet to be produced. Why the history of Second Wave Feminism does not warrant its own Eyes on the Prize is another story, but in the meantime we have Lynn Hershman Leeson’s bold new documentary !Women Art Revolution, which reexamines Women’s Lib through the lens of the incendiary feminist artists who ignited a cultural revolution....

Dominik Graf was unhappy with this design, and rightly so: Beloved Sisters is most definitely not a film in which the 18th-century writer-revolutionary took time out from permanently changing the way Germans saw themselves for a couple of amorous dalliances. Graf had no intention of indulging a cult of genius or relegating love to the realm of passing fancy. That said, it’s hard to imagine a poster that would do justice to Beloved Sisters, a film that deals with a lifestyle that our culture mainly conceives of in clichés: love nurtured and shared among three people....

Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf, 2021) As Germany’s foremost purveyor of genre films, Dominik Graf represents an alternate vision of modern German cinema—one distinct from the austere experimentation of the Berlin School or the political provocations of the New German Cinema. He has directed more than 70 films over a nearly 50-year career, working mostly in television. Across stand-alone works such as the TV movie Friends of Friends (2002) and the 10-part miniseries In the Face of Crime (2010), or feature-length contributions to long-running crime shows like Tatort and its East German counterpart Polizeiruf 110, Graf has developed a singular style in which ever-shifting character relationships within a recognizable genre framework tease out Germany’s social, economic, and political conditions....

Sometimes accused of making films like Tsai Ming-liang, James Lee, one of the leading figures in Malaysia’s independent filmmaking explosion, once told me that Team America: World Police reminded him of Tsai—and in particular, the scene in which an angst-stricken animatronic pretty boy spews copious amounts of vomit in an alley behind a dingy bar. In order to appreciate Lee’s peculiarly incisive observation, two things need explaining. First, that Lee meant his conflation of the sex-istential longueurs of Taiwan’s second-most-celebrated contemporary filmmaker’s body of work and Trey Parker’s anti-American puppet-prop as an altogether knowing compliment....