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Isabelle Huppert’s acting is one of the great enigmas of cinema. You would never exactly think of her as a chameleon and yet, watching her on screen, you never really perceive her as “Isabelle Huppert” either. She seems capable of taking on any part she fancies, yet she almost never noticeably does anything to transform herself; she’s not one for putting on a voice, adopting mannerisms, or otherwise doing what is still widely known as ‘doing a Meryl Streep’ (grossly unfair as that simplification is to Ms....

Matthew Warchus’s Pride isn’t actually a musical, but it belongs to a strain of British films that I think of as “nearly political musicals.” That is, they’re nearly musicals—and if you wanted to be disparaging, you could write them off as nearly political. I’m thinking of 1996’s Brassed Off and 2000’s Billy Elliot (both set against the background of the 1984-85 U.K. miners’ strike), 1997’s The Full Monty (about redundant steelworkers), and 2010’s Made in Dagenham (women workers for equal pay at Ford in the Sixties)....

These days, Mathieu Amalric plays adults with a bit of life experience behind them—a weary married man in Sophie Fillières’s recent If You Don’t, I Will, an émigré psychoanalyst in Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P., a burlesque impresario in his own On Tour (10). But Amalric still, as often as not, has the look of a frightened, small boy. That look worked superbly in his role as a theater director, and Polanski surrogate, terrorized by a femme fatale in Venus in Fur; and in Amalric’s own film The Blue Room, if he keeps that evident anguish more tightly under wraps, it still shows through as his character is outflanked by a sexually dominant mistress in this teasing jigsaw of a thriller, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel....

Yuri Ancarani’s The Challenge brings alive a phrase that you normally think of as being simply a conventional pairing of words: “fabulous wealth.” This strange documentary, if that’s what it is, makes you think that wealth genuinely can be fabulous, i.e. the stuff of fable, of fairy tale—that it can change the real world in ways that seem altogether alchemical. “Alchemical” in that the wealth on display in The Challenge seems to turn the base matter of reality into gold....

Saraband is the latest and, we can assume, the last motion picture directed by Ingmar Bergman—his parting gift to the medium that made him world-famous. Though Bergman is fortunately still with us, he has announced, yet again, his retirement from filmmaking. Not a surprising decision, given the fact that he is in his mid-eighties; in recent years has turned his screenplays over to others. Engrossing, worthwhile and respectfully helmed as the resulting films were, they all lacked the master’s edgy, patient ferocity....

When we pick up the story again in the magisterial The Dark Knight Rises, eight years have passed since that last sighting, and yet Gotham law and order manage to sit in a delicate balance, a RICO-like act enacted in Dent’s name having put most of the city’s organized criminals behind bars, the noble police commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) now an all but irrelevant appendage of his own department....

I had no money, and there was the matter of attending school, but I felt I had to go to the festival. Succumbing to the magical, corrupting power of the movies, I went against my mild, obedient, ethical character and decided to pretend to be a film journalist. I applied for a press pass as a writer for Rolling Stone, having heard they sometimes used teenage correspondents. And, since they were located in faraway San Francisco, I figured I had a shot at the deception....

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) Adèle Haenel should need no introduction, but this year, Cannes provided three separate ones for any who missed her in BPM, The Unknown Girl, Water Lilies, or Love at First Fight (aka Les Combattants), to name just a few of her higher-profile, high-intensity roles. My introduction to her talents came in 2014, also at Cannes, through her performance in Love at First Fight, a film that treated as a curiosity what is at the heart of the actor’s appeal on screen: a fiercely independent intelligence palpable in every scene, articulated at a moment’s notice with a bracing, often furious directness, which can in turn be at the edge of a bluff, or a dare, or a doubt....

After Singles you made a conscious effort to improve as a director. Why did you feel more like a writer than a director? I didn’t feel confident enough in how to tell the story with the camera. I had that a little bit with Laszlo Kovacs [dp on Say Anything], but for some reason I never had the opportunity to spend as much time with the cinematographer as I had with myself on the script....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Petzold about Phoenix last fall at the Toronto film festival, in a discussion driven by the director’s exhilarating style of storytelling and spitballing. No Man of Her Own Thanks for sitting for an interview—I know you’ve had a long day already. Film Comment! I have old Film Comments from the Sixties and the Seventies! I bought them at a flea market. Yeah, my English has been getting better, since I’ve talked all day....

From an imprisoned young man in René (2007), to a young woman who struggles with a debilitating drug addiction and motherhood in Katka (2010), to the families weathering highs and lows in Marriage Stories (1987) and Private Universe (2012), Třeštíková lavishes her empathic attention on minutiae without losing sight of the bigger picture. In her words she follows the “crack that gradually grows until we encounter a crisis of self-conception and are forced to formulate our story once again....

When professional flake Mat (Josh Lucas) is kicked out of his living situation with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Andrea (Lucy Owen), he spontaneously crashes a party at his estranged brother Alan’s (Stephen Plunkett) Harlem apartment. Alan and his live-in girlfriend Farrah (Mickey Sumner) are set to leave on a romantic vacation the next day, and their absence allows Alan (and later Andrea, her son in tow) to set up shop....

Spliced film strip from Tortured Dust (Stan Brakhage, 1984). Photo by Mark Toscano Mark Toscano, senior film preservationist at the Academy Film Archive, started on his chosen path quite early in life. While growing up in South Windsor, Connecticut in the 1980s, he became an avid Three Stooges fan, and set out to record every one of their two-reel shorts off of local television and onto VHS. “I got 176 of them,” Toscano said in an interview last week....

Surprise was the theme of our conversation, which, consistent with his philosophy of acting, was unstructured, digressive, and in no way predictable. Over the course of an hour he slipped seamlessly between personas as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Jan Murray, Bela Lugosi and Buddy Hackett, illustrating dynamically (and in hindsight poignantly) that we are the sum of our experiences, the totality of our encounters. His eventful life led him from New York’s fabled Actors Studio (where out of thousands of applicants, only he and Steve McQueen were accepted), to Hollywood in the autumn of the studio era (his first two films were Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest), to a starring role on Mission: Impossible at a time when rising film stars seldom dabbled in television, to a remarkable comeback at age 60, culminating in his Oscar-winning resurrection of Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood....

For FILM COMMENT Dan Sullivan interviewed Matías Piñeiro a few weeks before the U.S. premiere of The Princess of France at the New York Film Festival on October 5 and 6. How did you decide to place what is effectively the most elaborate shot in The Princess of France at the very beginning? Do you feel it presages events to come in the film’s plot? I believe that one film helps the next one to be, not only economically but also compositionally....

In her latest, Things to Come, which opens this week, Isabelle Huppert (in her second great performance this month after Paul Verhoeven’s Elle), plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a philosophy professor who navigates a series of major life changes at an age she’d assumed would be more stable. Her work becomes unstable, her mother becomes suddenly ill, and she learns her husband has been cheating on her. On one hand, Hansen-Love is exploring a milieu she knows well—both of her parents were academics, and she was already familiar with many of the texts and thinkers that Nathalie and others headily discuss in the film....

Pitchfork and the Devil (Mike Henderson, 1979) I was first introduced to the work of Mike Henderson sometime in 2015. His brilliant film Down Hear (1972) was playing in a touring program of experimental shorts called “Black Radical Imagination,” organized by curator Erin Christovale and filmmaker/programmer Amir George. Down Hear is an early example of Henderson’s “talkin’ blues” style, which usually features the artist singing, playing guitar, and providing commentary on the soundtrack....

It is, rather, an allegorical film tackling questions of contingency and loss. It does so by closely following Michael Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi), a middle-aged Israeli architect who shares his ultra-modern home with his wife Dafna (Sarah Adler) and their teenage daughter, Alma (Shira Haas). In a memorable opening scene, Dafna and Michael are informed that their 18-year-old son, an IDF soldier named Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray) died while guarding a military outpost....