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Best to withhold judgment on that point, though forgive me if I am skeptical of the prospects of either of the abovementioned works achieving greatness. For those wishing to retreat to a more fecund period in the genre’s history, however, there is good news. Tomorrow, Paramount’s new 1080p Blu-Ray transfer of Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah will be out, and this week, New Yorkers can see a 35mm print of Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas writ large upon Anthology Film Archives’ screen....

Radu Jude on the set of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude 2021). Photo by Silviu Gheție. Courtesy of Radu Jude Guilty Pleasures is a column that invites filmmakers to list 10 movies they enjoy in spite of themselves. We asked Radu Jude (whose latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, won the Jury Prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival) to contribute an entry....

20 TITLES TO STREAM

You could have been forgiven if the year slipped your mind on a recent Thursday evening and you lit up a cigarette on the 9th floor of 721 Broadway. A broad swath of die-hard, largely old-time New York filmmakers had gathered to commemorate the loss of one of their own. Taken altogether, the group has been making movies in one way or another since the 1940s. There was film editor Miriam Arsham (The Eleanor Roosevelt Story) sitting with noted documentarian Manny Kirchheimer (Stations of the Elevated)....

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace The following interview with Adam Curtis by Chris Darke took place on September 15, 2011. I bumped into you a few years ago, after The Power of Nightmares, and I distinctly remember you saying “They hate me in BBC Current Affairs.” [Laughs.] Have they learned to put up with you since then? Well, with The Power of Nightmares I couldn’t help but criticize some of my colleagues....

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets by Bill Ross and Turner Ross When an old bar closes down, something special dies with it—not just a place, but a place to be. The dive in Bill and Turner Ross’s warmly inviting Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, screening in the U.S. Documentary section at the Sundance Film Festival, is one such place, dimly lit, filled with mementos and bric-a-brac, and, gradually over the course of the film, filling with people and their memories....

Since the Golden Bear-winning As Long as Shotguns Remain (2014), directing duo and real-life couple Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have established their own brand of art-house filmmaking through a string of hypnotic shorts capturing the turmoils of youth against Southern France’s suburban wastelands. Blending a hyperreal vision of the everyday with bursts of violence and sensuality, Poggi and Vinel’s short film collaborations—As Long as Shotguns Remain, Our Legacy (2015), and After School Knife Fight (2017)—find a rich, genre-bending synthesis in their dystopian debut feature, the ensemble-led Jessica Forever (2018)....

Few directors have such a vast knowledge of movie history and such an instinctive sense of how to use it to pursue their own obsessions. Gremlins (84), Dante’s benchmark hit, elicits nostalgia for the idealized small town created on Hollywood back-lots. It rouses nihilistic glee with the demonic antics of the title critters, who rip its greeting-card façade apart. Dante’s ability to embrace opposite qualities with equal fervor gives his movies their peculiar zest and enduring fascination....

It takes a certain amount of nerve to call a film, without qualification, This Is 40. But it may take even more nerve—or reckless abandon—to make intensely personal films in today’s Hollywood, with the backing of a major studio, and the confidence that there are people out there who will come to see them. This, in short, is the curious case of Judd Apatow, who makes confessional comedies that edge ever more towards tragedy, who exalts reality over escapism, and who seems scarcely persuaded by the industrial demands for name stars, “high” concepts, and audience “pre-awareness....

It all takes place in the city of Nanjing, where Lou shot Spring Fever (09) during his five-year ban from filmmaking by the film bureau of China’s State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), and where that film eventually had its China premiere at the 6th China Independent Film Festival. Since then, Lou has enjoyed a relatively smooth and prolific period of his career, completing three films since 2011....

At the 2018 EnergaCAMERIMAGE Film Festival, Matthew Libatique was nominated for his work shooting Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. But it has been through Libatique’s two-decade-plus partnership with fellow New Yorker Darren Aronofsky, with whom he attended the AFI Conservatory in the early ’90s, that the Queens-born cinematographer has pushed into new frontiers. In films such as mother! (2017), Black Swan (2010), Requiem for a Dream (2000), and Pi (1998), he has boldly experimented with technique to create phenomenologically vivid, haptic images that express characters’ subjective states....

Over nearly a half-century of filmmaking, Guzmán’s gaze has been equally inquisitive, demanding, intense. In Nostalgia for the Light (10) and The Pearl Button, which opens theatrically this week, the 74-year-old Chilean director exhibits a curiosity, and formal friskiness, that belies his elder master stature. While Nostalgia yoked together the cosmos and domestic politics, infinity and horrific recent history, contemplation and anger, The Pearl Button charts a winding course from a poetic-essayistic disquisition on the origins and power of water, to anthropological consideration of the ancient Patagonian cultures of southwestern Chile, to folklorist archival storytelling, to first-person oral history, then to a shockingly apt consideration of Pinochet’s genocidal policies, including an absolute gut-punch of a re-enactment sequence....

Unlike compatriots who’ve had to engage the region’s politics from places of chosen or forced exile, Mansky has long done so from within—until now. After helping to found the independent and influential Artdocfest in 2007, and after enduring state defunding efforts in part targeted at the director, Mansky moved shop to the Riga International Film Festival. And as recounted in his new film Close Relations (Rodnye), the filmmaker has had to grapple with the conflicted feelings and loyalties of being born in the Soviet Union, raised in the Ukraine, educated and developed into an artist in Russia, and ultimately left stranded by recent events....

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode Forty years ago last month, on June 29, 1974, a shot of Hiroshima’s ruined Genbaku Dome hit cinema screens like an epitaph, marking the end of Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode, the final film in Kinji Fukasaku’s epic secret history of post–World War II Japan, The Yakuza Papers. Essentially one 634-minute movie split into five parts, this is the story of a Japan where honor died in one mushroom cloud and human sympathy was incinerated in the other....

“You were mad for contact with the world,” director Mark Cousins says, addressing the subject of his film The Eyes of Orson Welles. And we are mad for contact with him, for some way to get inside his head, see through his eyes, fathom his astronomically vast but maddeningly messy gifts. We want to get under his skin the way he has gotten under ours. But how can we? In 1956, Henri-Georges Clouzot suggested an answer, stating in the prologue to his astonishing film The Mystery of Picasso that “to understand a painter’s mind, one need only follow his hand....

Speaking is Difficult The term “formalist” is partnered with the word “rigor” often enough that it’s hard to say one without automatically following it up with the other. Like morbidly obese or stark-raving mad, formalist rigor isn’t just descriptive of a process—it codifies that process as well as the words themselves. As employed in this formulation, rigor isn’t just an ethic, it implies a kind of patterned strictness, a form that contains and defines content with regularity and fidelity....