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Kicking the Clouds (Sky Hopinka, 2021) The Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film program has historically been a more reliable home for grassroots, character-driven indies than for oblique conceptual shorts, but lately, there’s been a lively variety in the nonfiction competition. This year, the best nonfiction premieres were more experiential than expository. There’s no better example than Sundance alum Sky Hopinka’s Kicking the Clouds, which shares the visceral verve of his earlier films, especially his immersive feature debut małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore....

Chiseled into the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., above sculptures depicting a threadbare farmer couple and a stooped bread line during the Great Depression, is a quote from FDR’s second inaugural address, in January 1937: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” The quotation continues lower down: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little....

When Martin Scorsese adapted Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in 1993, he judged the result to be the most violent film he’d ever made, though it contains not a single burst of gunfire, and with one jarring exception the characters speak in hushed, polite tones. But there’s a scene toward the end where the truth of his claim is made manifest, as two pillars of Gilded Age society debate the prospects of a cousin who had the misfortune to marry a Polish count who preferred the company of prostitutes....

Images from Coma (Michael Crichton, 1978) Writer-director Michael Crichton’s critically forgotten 1978 smash, Coma, is a brisk, scary, clever thriller based on Robin Cook’s bestseller about a body-snatching scam in a Boston teaching hospital. When it came out, this macabre tale about a dedicated young doctor uncovering surgical skullduggery in the organ trade was topically linked to controversies surrounding both the Karen Ann Quinlan case and the unregulated practice of procuring organs for transplant....

O. Henry’s Full House Cinema’s answer to trail mix, the omnibus (or anthology film) is a collection of featurettes by different directors, presented one at a time and connected by a theme or framing story. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a surefire proposition: each segment boasts its own stable of talent, contributing their services quickly and cheaply, and the poster can claim five or six times the star power of a typical feature, plus the tantalizing prospect of auteurs joining forces....

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On June 8, De Palma, Baumbach, and Paltrow will participate in a Free Talk at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; De Palma opens June 10, and will screen alongside a retrospective of the director’s films at Metrograph theater. Listen/Subscribe:

On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch for a discussion about Nolan’s opus. The group was evenly split between fans and skeptics, and the result was a lively conversation—which, of course, is what the movies are all about. 

As we discovered, doubles, mirrors, and dubious impersonations can be found in nearly every era and genre of cinema, with the trope generating an apparently endless variety of themes, narrative forms, and interpretations. Links & Things: Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002) Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984) Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973) Madhumati (Bimal Roy, 1958) Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Chaal Baaz (Pankaj Parashar, 1989) Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) Here Comes Mr....

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Catch up on all of our TIFF 2022 coverage here—and stay tuned for more!

For today’s podcast, Wendell joined FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish for a fascinating oral history of the making of Chameleon Street, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990. He also revealed that he’s pulled some cons of his own: in 1978, he scored an interview with classic Hollywood actor Hurd Hatfield by pretending to be a Film Comment reporter. Now, if Wendell can locate the tape… Better late than never!...

Antoine and Antoinette “Are you so orderly?” Edouard asks his wife Caroline when she boasts of being able to find anything in their small, cluttered apartment. “No,” she replies gaily, “I have flow—it’s much better.” Flow is precisely what the early works of Jacques Becker have: a fluid and propulsive current of motion and energy that gives you the feeling not so much of watching, as of being swept up in something....

Forty years ago, as a would-be film journalist just out of college, I interviewed Schrader. He was astonishingly articulate and quietly confident. With good reason, as it turned out: later that week a film he had written, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, had its New York premiere. It was as if Schrader knew that he and his friends were about to make film history. I met Schrader again 20 years later when we both had films at the 1997 Venice Film Festival....