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Photograph by Jamel Shabazz And for Charlie Ahearn, director of the deceptively simple, sneakily heartbreaking new documentary Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer? Presumably some combination of the above, but it’s never entirely clear: save for a couple of spontaneous off-camera laughs, Ahearn (of Wild Style fame) remains a mostly invisible presence. If that sounds like an aloof move in theory, it turns out to be liberating in practice. Jamel Shabazz is a relatively rare kind of contemporary documentary—one in which the on-screen action doesn’t seem as if it were taking place for the camera’s benefit....

In the British prison system, an inmate under 21 who proves too dangerous to be held in a youth offender institution will be moved—or “starred up”—to an adult facility. So it is with Eric Love (Jack O’Connell), a 19-year-old working-class Londoner in Scottish director David Mackenzie’s punishing realist drama, written by Jonathan Asser, who drew upon his own experiences working as a counselor in HM Prison Wandsworth. Initially held in solitary, Eric is unfazed by having to keep company with all the Choppers and Bronsons when he’s assigned a cell in a communal wing....

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal, 2023) Vampires know from purgatory: trapped somewhere between life and death, their plight is nothing less than an existential endurance test, with scattered perks and plenty of downtime. The 20-year journey of André Øvredal’s new supernatural thriller The Last Voyage of the Demeter through the Stygian depths of development hell gives the film a grimly self-reflexive dimension. It asks: how long can you be trapped in a confined space with Dracula before you go mad and/or give up the fight?...

In The Student, man is a political animal, with the emphasis on animal. Roque (Esteban Lamothe) is a fresh-faced kid from the provinces who arrives in Buenos Aires for his third shot at undergrad studies. It’s no wonder his first two attempts failed, seeing that he treats his school days as an excuse for partying, snorting coke, and seducing every comely coed who crosses his path. First falling in with lovely, playful Valeria (Valeria Correa), he’s soon drawn to the passionate, older Paula (Romina Paula), an assistant prof and lifelong activist with deep ties to a political faction in the midst of a heated university election season....

In interviews, Frederick Wiseman routinely maintains that most people are simply incapable of putting on an act while he’s filming them—a statement that’s more persuasive as a first principle of his brand of observational-analytical nonfiction than as what necessarily happens. Filmmaker and critic Robert Greene explicitly bases his new film Actress—its title, like so many of Wiseman’s, winkingly plain—on the premise that his subject is always performing, by invitation or otherwise....

Emma Thompson’s screenplays foreground sexually restrained women. Her 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was prompted by her television comedy sketch about an ignorant Victorian newlywed disgusted by the sight of the lifeless “mouse” attached to her husband’s lap. The disgusted Victorian newlywed in Effie Gray—conceived by Thompson as a feminist fairy tale—is the art critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise). He takes one look at his naked bride, Euphemia (Dakota Fanning), on their wedding night in 1848 and flees the bedchamber....

Can a film be haunted? With its distancing long shots, creeping camera, and moodily underlit silhouettes, as well as an aura of otherworldly presence sensed throughout, The Eclipse makes a compelling case for the idea. At the very least, it serves up a cast of extraordinarily haunted characters. Michael Farr (a terrific Ciarán Hinds) is haunted by the death of his wife, as are his two children by the loss of their mother....

“You look wan,” Abby (Rosemarie DeWitt) announces to her older brother Paul (Josh Pais) at the dinner table. The two siblings are like yin and yang; while Abby’s new-age massage table is hopping with clients addicted to her healing hands, Paul’s ultra-clinical dental practice is waning along with the lives of his geriatric patients. But when Abby suddenly loses her magic touch, the family dynamic begins to shift. Now utterly repulsed by the idea of skin-to-skin contact, Abby sees minute epidermal cracks as gargantuan fissures, the smallest hairs as menacing spikes....

Back to the Future “I’ve made the mistake of meeting some of the subjects in the middle of the editing process . . . You get opinions about them and you just don’t want that kind of baggage,” Mr. Death editor Karen Schmeer once said of her experiences working with Errol Morris. This simple yet intriguing comment comes from a Manhattan Edit Workshop held in 2009, and it’s just one of many interviews with professionals to be found on Art of the Guillotine, a sprawling educational resource for editors of all stripes....

Person to Person takes place over the course of a single weekday in New York City and is made up of five identifiable narrative threads. Record collector Bene (Bene Coopersmith) sets out to buy a rare edition of Charlie Parker’s Bird Blows the Blues from a dealer who turns out to be a hustler. Bene’s depressive roommate, Ray (George Sample III), has problems of his own, with his ex-girlfriend’s brother threatening to break his legs as revenge for Ray posting nudes of his ex online....

On today’s episode, our fifth from Berlin, FC Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Ela Bittencourt and Frédéric Jaeger to talk about their recent viewing, with a focus on the German cinema at this year’s edition. They discuss Eva Trobisch’s Ivo, Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, and Andreas Dresen’s From Hilde, with Love, among others, before turning to a selection of features directed by women, including a retrospective of work by Helke Sander and new films including Christine Angot’s A Family, Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep with Your Eyes Open, and Anja Salomonowitz’s Sleeping with a Tiger, among others....

As the tide of cinema ebbs from the shores of the Riviera, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by Frédéric Jaeger (editor at critic.de and programmer), Caitlin Doherty (editor at the New Left Review), and critic James Wham to discuss selections including Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition....

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Drawing from three books—Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist, which borrows its title from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; and Silencing the Past by Haitian-American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot—Peck crafts a sweeping historical documentary that feels at once intimate and sweeping, familiar and new. In this episode of the podcast, Film Comment editor Devika Girish chatted at length with Peck about assembling this expansive series, confronting the gaps in colonial archives, and drawing continuities with the contemporary crises of fake news and historical amnesia....