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Hardcore auteurists are predisposed to love or at least like Paul Schrader, whose obsessions can be traced—obsessively, even—through his work as critic, scholar, screenwriter, director, and, in Film Comment a year ago, canonist (“Canon Fodder,” Sept/Oct 06). Whatever else that essay’s straight-arrow shot to the heart of “special causes” did for his reputation as cinephilia’s master-stroker, it sports elements conducive to appreciation of Schrader’s new and highly familiar film The Walker: chiefly, his pledge to “ride the broken-down horse called movies into the cinematic sunset”; and his appropriation of Harold Bloom’s term “strangeness” to describe that which matters more to the canonist than originality....

Men of Hard Skin (José Celestino Campusano, 2019) In 2018, the International Film Festival Rotterdam hosted a near-complete retrospective of Argentine iconoclast José Celestino Campusano. For many, including your humble correspondent, it was at once an overdue introduction to a director whose work is more often rumored about than seen, and the highlight of a festival whose generous repertory programming can occasionally overshadow their main selection. Appetites sufficiently whetted, Campusano returned to Rotterdam in 2019 with a new feature, Men of Hard Skin, which, as fate would have it, was one of the best world premieres at this year’s festival, the fourth and most curatorially rich to date under artistic director Bero Beyer....

A welcome antidote to self-congratulatory post-revolutionary fade outs, Tanya Hamilton’s debut feature is set in bicentenary-year Philadelphia in the aftermath of the Black Panther movement. Despite some on-the-nose dialogue and a needless revelatory flourish toward the end, Hamilton gets at the strangeness of lived American history, in which violent ruptures leave behind poorly understood scars. Back from points unknown, hard-headed but chastened Marcus (Anthony Mackie) returns home for his father’s funeral....

Shooting from spring 2007 to summer 2008 (with sit-down interviews later), this award-winning photographer and best-selling novelizer duo relocate the war- doc battlefield from Iraq to Afghanistan (anticipating Obama). Despite sweat-soaked advance press, their sustained coverage of the U.S. Army’s Korengal Valley outpost differs from other platoon embeds more in degree than in kind, though its most emotionally raw moments are indicative of their military subjects’ exceptional comfort level with their observers across 10 extended visits....

When writer, director, and visual artist Elisabeth Subrin told people about her upcoming feature, A Woman, A Part—about a middle-aged actress struggling to find herself independently of her career—even actresses responded by asking her why she would tackle such a subject. Her new website, Who Cares About Actresses, is partly animated by her belief, as she explains in a simple but powerful manifesto, that “our culture does not recognize the utterly critical role actresses have as ambassadors for female identity....

In 1999, director Jamie Babbitt premiered But I’m a Cheerleader at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was a cheeky, rebellious rom-com set at a gay conversion therapy camp. At the time, many didn’t know such camps even existed, and they were presented in the film in a thoroughly ridiculous manner. Nearly twenty years later, gay conversion therapy is no longer a joke. Nor is it a relic from the past we thought would disappear along with our newfound enlightenment....

Love Me or Leave Me has slipped through the cracks of serious critical consideration, despite its box office success, multiple Oscar nominations, and the draw of two gigantic stars like Doris Day and James Cagney. Even at the time, contemporary reviewers damned with faint praise. Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review: “To say that the Metro production, in color and Cinema-Scope, is expensive and atmospheric of the era of night clubs and booze is simply acknowledging the dependable, and to say that Charles Vidor’s directing is perceptive of the values in the story is to note what’s expected of him....

This year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, now in its 13th year, offered its fair share of gloom. This might reflect Greece’s worsening financial situation, which is certainly more evident with each new festival edition (docs in March; main show in November). Or it may just be that my admitted attraction to the darker side of cinema drew me to specific titles. But even upon closer inspection of the catalog I was hard-pressed to find many uplifting options....

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On Saturday, Film Comment’s Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold assembled contributors Eric Hynes, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Michael Koresky to discuss the work of Davies and Żuławski in front of a live audience during Film Comment Selects. The special edition was called Film Comment, Live! Listen/Subscribe:

The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

As the pandemic shut down cinemas and made travel impossible, festivals adopted a variety of strategies to keep bringing movies to their audiences. Some, like Cannes, were cancelled; others went fully online; and many, like the New York Film Festival, Sundance, and the Berlinale, experimented with hybrid formats. These new models have opened up a host of questions. Is it really a festival if you’re not in a cinema? What does the virtual format expose about the mechanics of festivals?...