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The Conspirators (1944) Arthur Edeson with Hedy Lamarr (Courtesy ASC) Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) shooting Dinah Shore (Courtesy ASC) The Lost World (1925) Arthur Edeson, by camera, with crew at First National Studios (Courtesy ASC) Devil Dogs of the Air (1935) Edeson, with cigar (Courtesy ASC) China Clipper (1936) Edeson, standing hand in pocket, behind Humphrey Bogart on right (Courtesy ASC) Casablanca (1942) Edeson shooting Bogart and Bergman (Courtesy ASC) Across the Pacific (1942) (Courtesy ASC)

The Author —Sergei Dovlatov, The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard’s Story Like many of his compatriot artists, Sergei Dovlatov’s status as one of Russia’s most widely read and cherished modern authors came as the posthumous culmination of nearly a lifetime of rejection and tribulation. Born in the USSR to an Armenian mother and a Jewish father in 1941, Dovlatov sustained his family as a journalist while continually wrestling with censorship as a fiction writer before his eventual exile to the United States where he published a dozen of books and died in 1990....

Nothing if not protean, Patrice Chéreau’s four-decades-plus career has encompassed opera and theater as well as film. His works in different media are not merely complementary but inextricably intertwined. The demands Chéreau makes on spectators are high—not because his films are “difficult” or “obscure” in the usual sense, but because they are infused with an emotional force unprecedented in its physical intensity—so much so that the viewer is sometimes left exhausted....

Such matters have been on my mind since reading a piece on the subject of “being a colossal prick on the Internet” which the critic Glenn Kenny posted a few weeks ago on his website, in which the author reviews his history as an online shit-stirrer and town decrier. These reflections were prompted by a widely circulated Internet kerfuffle in which one Ed Champion unloaded 11,000 words of animus on Emily Gould (pictured above), a pioneering Gawker gadfly in the Wild West years of Web 2....

Film Comment’s interview took place at the Camerimage Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in November 2017, in a tiny music-rehearsal room at the Opera Nova, the building that serves as the HQ for the fest. Levy is a tall man and easily fills the room, but his imposing height is instantly disarmed by his engaging manner. Some pre-interview chatter led to Levy’s memories of being the son of a classical musician and recognizing these kinds of rooms from childhood....

Competition Palme d’Or: Parasite, Bong Joon-ho Grand Prix: Atlantics, Mati Diop Best Director: Young Ahmed, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne Best Screenplay: Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire Best Actress: Emily Beecham, Little Joe Best Actor: Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory Jury Prize (Ex-Aequo): Les Misérables, Ladj Ly & Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles Caméra d’Or: Our Mothers, César Díaz Palme d’Or – Short Film: The Distance Between Us and the Sky, Vasilis Kekatos Special Mention: It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman Cinéfondation First Prize: Mano a Mano, Louise Courvoisier Second Prize: Hiéu, Richard Van Third Prize: Ambience, Wisam Al Jafari & Duszycka, Barbara Rupik...

Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2019) One of the knocks against the Cannes Film Festival is their sometimes blind devotion to a certain roster of (mostly male) directors whose films show up in the competition like clockwork every two to three years. This year’s selection will do little to quell such complaints: perennials such as Ken Loach (Sorry We Missed You), Arnaud Desplechin (Oh Mercy!), and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Young Ahmed) are all present and accounted for, while Jim Jarmusch’s star-studded opening night zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die marks the whopping ninth time he has been selected to vie for the festival’s top prize....

The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021) This will certainly be remembered as the Cannes that had the critics salivating. Not so much because of the program, that is—though it’s mouth-watering enough on its own terms—but because of the COVID-19 regulations that require PCR tests every 48 hours for visitors from countries on France’s amber list. It’s not so onerous reporting to a marquee and dribbling into a tube, but having to book appointments ahead and shoehorn them into a full screening schedule added an extra challenge to the first COVID-era Cannes to happen live, with things already more difficult than usual....

Cannes came alive in its first weekend following the premieres of two strong entries, both directed by women. A festival that has faced persistent criticism for the underrepresentation of female filmmakers in its Competition section front-loaded two new movies—Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann and Arnold’s American Honey—in prime opening-weekend slots. The crew of American Honey dances on the #Redcarpet of American Honey by Andrea Arnold #Cannes2016 #Competition https://t.co/SXz7qvbSEx — Festival de Cannes (@Festival_Cannes) May 15, 2016...

In Disney’s Big Hero 6, a 14-year-old tech upstart named Hiro designs a “neurocranial” transmitter that deploys tiny robots—“microbots,” he calls them—to create any object he can imagine. What better metaphor is there for the computer-animation revolution of Pixar’s John Lasseter, whose teams have built entire worlds from digital bits? When Lasseter took charge of Disney animation after the mother company bought Pixar, he brought a new creative foundation to the house that Walt built, generating commercial and artistic hits like Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph as well as the phenomenon known as Frozen (that erratic, beloved mash-up of Wicked and “The Snow Queen”)....

Samuel Maoz’s marvelous, harrowing drama about death and life in Israel marches boldly through the no-man’s-land between realism and surrealism. It’s a prize collection of paradoxes, combining an intimate, eviscerating depiction of parental grief over a serviceman’s death with an empathic, absurdist rendering of young IDF soldiers manning a remote and otherworldly roadblock. The film achieves a panoramic reach with only two major locations: an elegant, chic Tel Aviv apartment and that military way station, code-named “Foxtrot,” consisting of a three-sided lookout tower, a repurposed ice cream truck, and a makeshift barracks (a shipping container!...

A crackpot suspense film about a fishing boat captain who veers into perilous existential waters, Serenity tries to pull off a “bait-and-switch” times two. But will anyone take the bait either time? Steven Knight’s third feature as writer-director, after the self-important revenge film Redemption (2013) and the stunt-like man-in-crisis movie Locke (2014), is so flimsily and whimsically conceived that we’re left with just the sprats, flies, and chum. Knight may be the kind of messy, catalytic talent who needs to work on a sprawling canvas, with legions of collaborators....

The provocative new documentary Zero Days, a j’accuse aimed at American cyber warfare by the ultra-gifted and industrious Alex Gibney, has been promoted as a “thriller.” Unfortunately, that thriller is Michael Mann’s Blackhat. It’s natural that two of our most talented and adventurous filmmakers, Gibney and Mann, would take up the challenge of depicting how virtual manipulation can lead to physical destruction. These filmmakers stumble partly because they can’t cut a clear course through uncharted waters or overcome the visual and dramatic monotony of the digital universe, no matter how fancy and insistent their CGI effects....

Jia Zhang-Ke’s roaming kino-eye finds an ideal subject with Useless, a three-part documentary ostensibly about the clothing designer Ma Ke, but actually concerning the spiritual life (or lack thereof) of the Chinese clothing industry as a whole. The first part of the film begins in industrial Guangdong where we see the hardcore world of the clothing factories. Enormous, oppressive, and alienating, these vast mechanical spaces seem to do everything in their power to neutralize the personalities and undermine the health of the workers within....

Images from JT LeRoy (Justin Kelly, 2019) There’s a photo, taken by Juergen Teller in 2002, of Asia Argento and Savannah Knoop on a beach together. At the time, Knoop was in the thick of the six years they spent embodying the feral, androgynous literary wünderkind JT LeRoy. LeRoy did not actually exist. He was just a pen name for Knoop’s sister-in-law, the writer Laura Albert. In a literary scandal for the burgeoning Internet age, Albert paid Knoop to act as her teen-boy avatar, dolled up in a tacky blond wig and oversized sunglasses....

Democrats A standout, Camilla Nielsson’s excellent, richly ironic Democrats avoids policy-paper treatment of its subject—the making of Zimbabwe’s new constitution in a not-really-quite-post-Mugabe era—to give a breathtakingly candid, on-the-ground view of people in action. Granted extraordinary access in a country known for police-state tactics and prone to banning foreign media, Nielsson’s (talking-headless) verité one-ups the classic horse race of Primary (60) with its two larger-than-life personalities and life-threateningly high stakes....

Manpower Il Cinema Ritrovato takes place in one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, Bologna, home of the world’s oldest university (established in 1088) and some of the nation’s finest cuisine. The festival is dedicated to restoration and to screening silent films, and it displays a very high level of film-historical and film-theoretical energy, both in its programming and in the critics, historians, and theorists invited to speak. For me, as a moviegoer, the main excitement of this year’s program involved rediscovering an American filmmaker I thought I already knew....

Under what conditions was the video shot? Was it arranged for the piece or found on site? Was it lit in any particular way? We collaborated with a scientist specializing in wasp behavior, a guy named Bob Matthews at the University of Georgia in Athens. Working early in the spring at his lakeside summer house, we located a number of queen wasps just starting to build nests in the eaves around the house....

Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog (Julian Radlmaier, 2017) Available to rent on Vimeo The world has gotten crueler since the 2017 release of Julian Radlmaier’s breezy, comely political farce. By now, just as flat-affect hipster lip service to revolutionary politics gets tedious fast, so does satire thereof. But this wry, tender film is something else—a heady sort of comfort watch. All ideology may be pretense, Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog suggests, but at least we’re in it together....