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The following are scenes from a modern-day miracle; tomb wafts from an ongoing resurrection; scroll scenes from forgotten legends, illuminated with stardust and leafed with bits of gold: A turd-brown monkey with a buttocks-shaped brow is flipping an impossibly young Leslie Cheung the bird; later, an impossibly young Maggie Cheung—almost unrecognizable beneath oodles of baby fat—wears a sweatshirt that reads “Moustache” during a “sex scene” that climaxes a montage of Adonis statues, brass balls, and a shot of Leslie sound asleep....

What Now? Remind Me What Now? Remind Me, on the other hand, is a first-person diary film that Pinto began to assemble shortly after beginning a year-long experimental clinical trial for sufferers of HIV, a disease with which he has been living—in co-infection with Hepatitis C—for two decades. The question of how a text can be made to take on a voice—to call out to a listener—is central to the first film and slightly less relevant to the second....

My Little Loves (Jean Eustache, 1974) When it won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 (despite the objections of jury president Ingrid Bergman), Jean Eustache’s magisterial The Mother and the Whore—an insightful critique of bourgeois mores and the attempts in 1968 to transform them through radical politics—was heralded as a groundbreaking masterpiece. It signaled a sea change in French cinema. As director Olivier Assayas has said: “[Eustache] made the film Rivette, Godard, Rohmer, and Truffaut would have died to make and every single one of them knew it ....

Fire (Claire Denis, 2022) That the Berlinale happened in person this year was cause for joy—although joy isn’t something that you usually associate with the bleak corporate facades of Potsdamer Platz, possibly the world’s most austere festival hub. Last year, the usual late-winter program went online only, and ironically turned out to be the best in recent memory (Koberidze, Sciamma, Hamaguchi, Ruizpalacios, et cetera), benefiting—as so many festivals did last year—from the backlog of quality work created during 2020’s lockdown....

BEST FILMS OF 2009 The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, U.S. The Headless Woman Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Spain/France/Italy Summer Hours Olivier Assayas, France 35 Shots of Rum Claire Denis, France/Germany Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson, U.S. Police, Adjective Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino, U.S./Germany A Serious Man Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S./U.K./France The Beaches of Agnès Agnès Varda, France Lorna’s Silence Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy/Germany BEST UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2009 Wild Grass Alain Resnais, France/Italy 24 City Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong/Japan The White Ribbon Michael Haneke, Austria/Germany/France/Italy The Limits of Control Jim Jarmusch, U....

The Big Racket I have been thinking about such matters over the previous week, because I was at Anthology Film Archives, dutifully attending screenings of a program called “The Italian Connection: Poliziotteschi and Other Italo-Crime Films of the 1960s and 70s.” It’s a series that seemed, in a sense, inevitable, as New York in recent years has hosted retrospectives dedicated to the spaghetti Western and the giallo, with sprinklings of Italian horror-fantasy in between....

Beware a Holy Whore Beware of a Holy Whore (70) is a hot-tempered entry in the canon of films about filmmaking. The cast and crew of a film congregate at a Spanish hotel, awaiting the arrival of their director, Jeff (Lou Castel), and star, Eddie Constantine, playing himself. This is no idealization of the filmmaking process: Jeff is verbally abusive and bitter, and most of the players move through the hotel’s corridors with fashionable ennui, rather than the excitement we might expect behind the scenes....

If Barry Jenkins’s cinema often feels like a symphony, then editor Joi McMillon is one of its expert conductors. In The Underground Railroad, McMillon—who earned acclaim for her work alongside Nat Sanders on Jenkins’s Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk—pulls off an ambitious feat, deftly calibrating the story’s historical and emotional breadth in the five episodes (or “mini-movies,” as she described them) that bear her credit. McMillon spoke to Film Comment‘s Devika Girish about some of the movies—and one book—that have influenced her distinctive approach to her craft....

Long before she dons glass slippers, Cinderella proves she has no glass jaw in Kenneth Branagh’s captivating Cinderella. Chris Weitz’s spirited, literate script imbues a sparkling heroine with a sturdy moral compass, just as Weitz did when he wrote his Philip Pullman adaptation, The Golden Compass (07). Free of silly princess fantasies, this Cinderella (Lily James) stays true to a general code—“have courage and be kind”—and a specific mission: honoring her father and mother’s love despite the cruelty of her grasping, malicious stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and Drisella and Anastasia (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger, respectively), the woman’s two noxious offspring....

Jake Gyllenhaal is a gutsy, sophisticated performer, but his boxer hero in Southpaw fights like a crude Method actor. Named Billy Hope—presumably because he uses his fists like billy clubs and stands for hope and redemption—he can’t get his head into a match unless his opponent enrages him. With the light-heavyweight title on the line, he lets his opponent beat his face bloody before he launches an attack. On paper, it might read like an attention-grabbing tactic for a movie, but it’s rendered so melodramatically that it beggars belief from the outset....

Writer-director Dan Krauss, in his gutsy first feature, The Kill Team, puts a revelatory speech in the mouth of a gung-ho soldier named Rayburn (Adam Long) as he relaxes at an army base in Kandahar after gunning down a blameless Afghan teenager. Platoon-mate Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff) knows that Rayburn is part of a plan to kill innocent civilians as a sociopathic sport, a rite of passage, and a statement that American troops can get away with anything....

The razor-sharp eye of Argentine director Pablo Fendrik carves its handheld way through The Mugger in proper caméra-stylo fashion—slicing into space and excising narrative elements with scalpel-like precision. The viewer never knows what propels Ramos (Arturo Goetz) to do what he does, and it’s only near the end of the film’s 67 brisk minutes that we even learn his name. (You may recall Goetz’s face from appearances in Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl and Daniel Burman’s Family Law....

Joy The penultimate night of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival included a career tribute to costume designer Ruth Carter, the genius who dressed Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner, David Oyelowo as Dr. King, and all the royals and subjects of Wakanda. She gave the world Buggin’ Out’s eye-popping spectacles and desecrated Jordans in Do the Right Thing (1989) and those purple-and-teal tearaway tuxes in The Five Heartbeats(1991), and she talked Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker into His-’n’-Hers, raised-checkerboard, black-and-white jumpsuits in Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013)....

La Truite La Truite/The Trout (★★★), Joseph Losey’s best film in a decade, is a plum pudding for auteurists. Sexual ambivalence, elaborate settings and camera work, game-playing, the corruption of the bourgeoisie, the intrusion of an outsider upon a social body, you name it—there are the Loseyan leitmotifs in abundance. More important, The Trout was the most enjoyable film on view at Lincoln Center this year. In the Roger Vailland novel on which the film is based, all but one of the principal characters are introduced in the first chapter, which takes place in a bowling alley....

Malaventura But a closer look revealed something entirely different. Programmed primarily by independent filmmaker and longtime programmer Michel Lipkes (he of FICCO lore and maker of Malaventura, which I wrote about in a previous post on Rotterdam’s Bright Future program), with fellow FICCO compadre Max Cruz (involved with the programming of FICUNAM, the two-year-old festival housed at the University of Mexico City, of which more in an upcoming posting) and Fernando del Razo, Riviera Maya proved to be the second spinoff of FICCO, after FICUNAM....

All About the Feathers Neto Villalobos’s All About the Feathers—the first Costa Rican film to play the SFIFF in its 57-year history—is a mellow, somewhat screwball comedy that matches the demeanor of its protagonist Chalo, a wholly likeable but dispirited security guard who’s set on breaking into the thriving yet illegal cock-fighting game to liven up his life and make some cash in the process. He finally gets ahold of a nice-looking rooster—appropriately named Rocky—and is determined to make a champion out of him....