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Navigators (Noah Teichner, 2022) “Our story deals with one of those queer tricks that Fate sometimes plays.” Buster Keaton’s 1924 seafaring silent comedy, The Navigator, opens with a title card bearing these words. The “queer trick” it references unfolds early in the film as a series of mix-ups that puts the rich fool Rollo Treadway (Keaton) and the girl who’d recently turned down his marriage proposal (Kathryn McGuire) together on the Navigator—a big, empty boat adrift on the Pacific Ocean, and the venue for the ensuing five reels of high-art burlesque....

Instead of a syrupy hagiography or meticulously researched list of people and art forms he borrowed/stole from, here’s a chronological list of my most powerful memories of David Bowie: frenetically dancing around the living room to “Modern Love” as a 7-year-old wearing a bathing suit and bike shorts; going through the giant stack of vinyl in that same living room at 13, discovering both Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Pinups, and instantly becoming obsessed with glam rock; at 15, renting a suit and dyeing a blonde mullet-wig red to dress up like Bowie in the “Life on Mars?...

A veteran of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, director Samuel Maoz attempts to render his experience with maximum fidelity in this tank-bound drama, and in so doing has produced something that fundamentally resembles a piece of experimental theater. Alternating between sweatily tense and dimly lit dialogue within, and the rubble and chaos outside scanned through the tank’s viewfinder, it’s a bluntly fractured work that founders on the stock quality of the characters and uneven acting in the film’s in extremis scenes....

I have had the good fortune to work at two of the over 300 independent movie theaters in the U.S. that primarily screen art-house movies. These venues host a somewhat more specialized audience, one that’s more mature and discerning, open to appreciating a blend of foreign pictures, small American films, documentaries of all sorts, and the occasional breakout hit that relies more on storytelling than pyrotechnics. Working at such film palaces was a fantasy that came true—with a number of asterisks attached....

East of Eden When Elia Kazan cast Jo Van Fleet as Kate in East of Eden, he knew she would have to convey hundreds of pages of backstory that had been cut for his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel. Kazan needed her to be both a Freudian archetype and a real woman in pain, a rebel who is hard and soft by turns. It was a tall order, but Van Fleet went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1955....

Some rituals help keep us focused throughout the year. This article marks the fourth time I have looked back at all the good things that occurred in the film biz and listed them for all of us—but the first time I am posting it in FILM COMMENT. Tracking them throughout the year keeps me from abandoning hope for film art, culture, and business. Sometimes they may just be the silver lining in the storm cloud, but nonetheless they keep me going and keep me convinced that we truly are building it better together....

On today’s episode, FC Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics (and FC stalwarts) Jordan Cronk, Jessica Kiang, and Jonathan Romney to talk about the festival’s change in leadership, before turning to the cinematic haul of the first couple days, including Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These, Assayas’s Suspended Time, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, Nicolas Philibert’s At Averroes & Rosa Parks, P. S. Vinothraj’s An Adamant Girl, and Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten....

On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s Fresh Air, for an in-depth chat about David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of festival coverage, and catch up on all our Cannes 2022 podcasts, interviews, and dispatches here....

It’s Great to Be Alive Around the time of the 2016 election a few newspapers referenced the 1924 silent The Last Man on Earth as the first film to show a woman as president of the U.S. As any old-movie lover knows, “first” is a dangerous pronouncement. I have a whole set of words I use for these occasions, such as “early,” “pioneering,” “formative” and if I want a dose of extra class, “seminal....

In 1995, on the occasion of the Centenary of Cinema, the Austrian Film Museum and its co-director, filmmaker Peter Kubelka, embarked on a project called “What Is Film” (Was ist Film). This series of “essential cinema” was modeled on similar endeavors that Kubelka had either curated (for the Pompidou Center in Paris, in the mid-Seventies) or exerted a strong influence upon (at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, 1969-70). “What Is Film” consists of 60 programs, repeated annually from 1996 to 2002 and beginning again in 2005, that aim to confront Viennese audiences with a dense and polemically nonmainstream film canon....

Talk about “immersive cinema,” and you’re usually referring to an experience in which it’s implicit that the viewer allows themselves to be engulfed—carried away on an overpowering sensory flow, suspending their critical faculties entirely. This isn’t the case with the cinema of Hungarian prodigy László Nemes. His cinema is certainly immersive, plunging us, and its protagonists, into breakneck torrents of incident which often make it very hard to keep afloat; but keep afloat we must, staying as alert as possible to make sense of what’s happening before our eyes (or sometimes concealed from them)....

The Inner Self in Outer Space This year, for example, Melvin Moti’s splendid The Inner Self in Outer Space diptych, Eigengrau and Eigenlicht, which was projected on 35mm in a darkened room, functioned as a meditative low-tech Other to festival opener Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s surprisingly fine 3-D mix of Hawks and Tarkovsky, with each work enriching the other. And in the Biennale’s Austrian Pavilion, Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life, a prohibitively expensive three-minute handcrafted homage to classic late-Thirties/early-Forties cartoons, made the hipped-up retro chic of the film festival’s TV short Disney Mickey Mouse O Sole Minnie look cheesy and soulless....

Eighteen maquettes, restorations of ones fabricated by Jean-Luc Godard as part of a proposal for an exhibition at Paris’s Pompidou Center, are on display at the Miguel Abreu Gallery under the title Memories of Utopia: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Collages de France” Models. For anyone interested in Godard’s films, the exhibition is essential. In 2006, an installation by Jean-Luc Godard was mounted in Paris at the Pompidou Center in conjunction with a then complete retrospective of films and videos, many in new prints and digital transfers....