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I Love You, Daddy This year, the Toronto International Film Festival undertook a “slim-down” in its slate and sections (to quote a recent “exposé” tucked away behind the Toronto Globe and Mail paywall), and reportedly dipped in attendance numbers by around 2,800—if you’re keeping count. That’s all for the good amid its glutted market conditions, but you wouldn’t know it from the snarls or delays of up to half-an-hour that accompanied many screenings in the Scotiabank multiplex....

Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, 2021) After many well-traveled 16mm shorts, Portuguese-American filmmaker Fern Silva tackles the feature-length form for the first time in Rock Bottom Riser, a slippery essay film which refuses a clear subject position. Over the course of its 70-minute runtime, Silva employs an art-as-research methodology, pairing observational scenes and interview segments with Super-16 footage of objects, maps, documents, and other related media. The film handily traverses serious topics like Polynesian navigation techniques, Indigenous theater production, Mauna Kea land defenders, the SETI institute’s search for signs of extraterrestrial life, and pop-cultural depictions of Hawai’i, as well as irreverent plays on the words “rock” and “volcano” (a scene in a smoke shop named “Volcano” is scored to heavy bass drops)....

Some might feel that Jia Zhang-ke’s new film has a whiff of the ersatz about it. There’s the title, for a start: alluringly spicy, echoing King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, it could hardly feel more like a sales agent’s marketing ploy (the original title Tian Zhuding simply means “Ill-Fated”). But then fakery is partly what the film is about. The opening credits run over a trompe l’oeil backdrop of jungle leaves, the meaning of which only becomes clear much later when we notice that it’s the wallpaper pattern in a sauna-cum-brothel....

A White, White Day (Hlynur Pálmason, 2019) Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic drama A White, White Day is a stark, controlled psychological thriller that unpicks its hero’s troubled soul with forensic coolness. Yet at the same time, it’s also an exercise in highly stylized film language that every now and then makes you sit up in amazement at the boldness of the directorial flourishes. In theory, this shouldn’t work: what Pálmason does ought to “take you out of the story,” as the phrase goes....

In the final scene of Hong Sangsoo’s On the Beach at Night Alone, a woman gets confrontational with her older ex-lover, a film director. “Are you tormented?” she shrieks at him, shortly after he’s burst into tears. Do the other people at the table—members of his film crew—know what’s going on? Can they read the meaning of the exquisitely painful emotional currents crackling around the table? Watching this scene, it occurred to me how much Hong’s films—in which drunken, soju-fueled get-togethers around bar and restaurant tables have an almost ritualistic, revelatory status—are not only about the central characters but also very much about the other people at the table who look on in embarrassed bewilderment when this sort of emotional agitation erupts....

Errol Morris’s interview films are notorious for using his device the “Interrotron”—devised for getting subjects to talk directly to camera, and named by his wife, Morris has said, for its combination of two key concepts, “interview” and “terror.” In Morris’s new film, there’s no sign of this contraption, nor any hint of terror—it’s hard to remember any of his subjects talking about themselves with such cheerful ease as the good-humored artist portrayed in The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography....

The films of German director Christian Petzold often depend on what you might call effects of misperception. They are “Schrödinger’s Cat” movies, which can’t easily be resolved into one alternative or another, but occupy a state of suspension between two mutually exclusive states of possibility. Yella (2007) exists precariously on a borderline between events actually happening and only hypothetically happening, between its protagonist being alive and dead. Period drama Phoenix (2014) is about a woman who returns from a concentration camp, her damaged face transformed by plastic surgery into a close approximation (we don’t know exactly how close) of her former appearance; although she’s recognized by people from her past as resembling herself, no one recognizes her as herself....

A superhero movie for the Super PAC era, the Marvel Comics all-star revue, The Avengers, reminds us that there’s still strength in numbers, at least where the fortunes of the Walt Disney Company (which is distributing the film as part of a long-term deal with Marvel) are concerned. Even before opening in the U.S., The Avengers has already racked up an impressive $300 million—or roughly $30 million more than the beleaguered John Carter earned in its entire release—and far be it from me to begrudge this superhero smorgasbord its success....

Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine, 2022) The origins of the Jackass project are the stuff of legend: director Jeff Tremaine and co-creator Johnny Knoxville’s editorial scheming at the willfully sophomoric Big Brother skateboarding magazine in the late 1990s eventually bore fruit in an anarchic MTV comedy-stunt series that ran for three seasons starting in 2000. Feature films followed in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2013, which were in turn supplemented with various direct-to-video spin-offs—all devoted to the hijinks of mastermind/master of ceremonies Knoxville and his pals, a loving and beloved ensemble of rebellious overgrown kids misbehaving for their own amusement....

A film is not just what’s on screen. To me, the significance of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was cemented before its release. No matter what the finished film looked like, its production was important to the Osage Nation leaders who proactively sought to collaborate in its making and the Osage people in the cast and crew. The movie aids Osage language revitalization efforts, and its undertaking is a key moment in the development of an Oklahoma film industry that could benefit Native artists in the state....

To merely utter the words “I will never confess” is, according to an Israeli interrogator in Hany Abu-Assad’s new film, a confession in its own right. Philosophers and lawyers may dispute this, but the attitude does bespeak a heightened intolerance of resistance. By the time a lovelorn Palestinian named Omar hears this, he’s in prison being tortured for aiding a nighttime attack on a military outpost. After Omar’s release, on condition that he betray his accomplices, both childhood friends, the stringently shot film becomes an unpredictable kinetic thriller, a turbulent drama of conflicted conscience, and a passionate romance with barely a kiss....

Escalante’s latest feature, The Untamed, which screened in Film Comment Selects, departs from a social realist aesthetic but remains grounded in an ethos of explicit candor. It’s a story of sexual repression centering on encounters with an otherworldly creature with the ability to ensnare the psyche and unleash desire. At first, the creature seems to dwell separately from the main drama, its cabin in the woods worlds away from the city lives of Alejandra, her husband Angel, and her brother Fabian....

Terra Femme (Courtney Stephens, 2012-2021) In a 2013 essay for The American Reader, Vanessa Veselka reflects on the dangers she faced as a teenage hitchhiker and links them to the lack of female road narratives: “Power and patriarchy can’t afford women the possibility of quest, because within these structures women are valued as agents of social preservation and not agents of social change. You can go on a quest to save your father, dress like a man and get discovered upon injury, get martyred and raped, but God forbid you go out the door just to see what’s out there....

Gregg Turkington is the star and co-writer of Entertainment, the new film by Rick Alverson, in whose film The Comedy he had a small but memorable role, discussing the immaculate cleanliness of hobo dicks. In Entertainment, Turkington plays a man named Neil whose stage persona is that of a lounge act comedian named “Neil”—and though he is not explicitly addressed as such, the character of “Neil” is very near to that of Neil Hamburger, a character who Turkington has played, on stage on album, for nearly 25 years....

Martel and I met for an interview in early September during the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival, where Zama had its North American premiere as part of TIFF’s “Masters” program. We alternated between English and Spanish. What follows contains material translated by myself and Peter Goldberg. A retrospective of Lucrecia Martel’s films run April 10–15 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Zama opens on April 11. I’d like to speak with you about a knotty subject, that of the Argentine character....

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal; 2024) Since its premiere in February at the Berlinale, the documentary No Other Land has been the talk of the festival circuit, a subject of both fiery discourse and critical acclaim. Co-directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli artists, including the journalists Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, the film is composed of footage shot between 2019 and 2023, showing the violent expulsion of the people of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)....

“Carry the tiger, pull the horse” might be the “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” of modern Chinese cinema. Coming right in the middle of Tsui Hark’s Taking Tiger Mountain—a blockbuster war flick that has earned close to US$112 million at the Chinese box office in just two weeks—the line is a perfect example of the kind of high-level absurdity that Tsui dishes out by the plateful, right alongside tiger attacks, prisoners transformed into human dogs, a Lord of the Rings–scale mountain fort, bandits sporting black lipstick and facial tattoos, ski attacks, lots of grenades, a tank, a fight on top of a crashing biplane, and a New York City traffic jam....

So what do the responses of Film Comment’s editors and contributing editors say about our magazine? Not surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus. We have no “Top Ten of the Sight & Sound Top Ten” to offer you. While Vertigo appeared on six lists out of 15, other films that topped the Sight & Sound’s top ten (Sunrise, The Searchers, Man with a Movie Camera) only garnered one or two votes apiece....