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It’s obvious that what links these two trends historically is the phenomenon of home viewing, which has in the last 30 years made every viewer a potential “expert.” Prior to VCRs and DVD players, the only tools available for studying films at length were 16mm projectors and moviolas, most often belonging only to “professionals” of one kind or another. But if we recall that “amateur” also means devotee, these books demonstrate how acts of devoted attention are now possible for everyone....

How do you solve a problem like Annie Mary? Writer-director Sara Sugarman’s spirited not-quite musical Very Annie Mary opens with a tight shot of a baker’s delivery van moving along a road, accompanied by the effusive, grandiose strains of Pavarotti singing Puccini. As the van passes, the camera pulls back to reveal miles of unfettered, emerald countryside—our first view of the gorgeous rolling hills of south Wales. You could say these hills are Sugarman’s equivalent of the Alpine landscape of The Sound of Music, and her principal character, the artless, delightfully screwball Annie Mary (Rachel Griffiths), a substitute for Julie Andrews’ Maria....

Tristanoil Tristanoil was but one of several works on show at dOCUMENTA (13) that dealt in excess—even if the video looked almost humble up there in the empty old bar of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, the town’s former terminus which now sees but local train traffic. Audiovisual artworks by the likes of William Kentridge or Clemens von Wedemeyer are the only contact with the farther world the slightly run-down place makes these days....

Le Pont du Nord “Can cinephilia be recounted? It remains a mysterious, ritualistic, secret thing: like a personal diary or an intimate dialogue,” the film historian Antoine de Baecque ponders in his book La cinéphilie: Invention d’un Regard, Histoire d’une Culture (1944-1968). De Baecque’s question lingered with me as I navigated my way through the Lumière Film Festival in late October. Set in the medium’s native city of Lyon and captained by cinephiles Thierry Frémaux and Bertrand Tavernier, the Lumière Festival, which hosted its 9th edition in 2017, unfolded like an ethereal, kaleidoscopic journey through cinema joining the living and the departed, the modern and the classical, the marginal and the mainstream via an eclectic lineup of new releases, revivals, and restorations, including American westerns selected by Tavernier, from John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) to King Vidor’s Man Without a Star (1955); Henri Decoin’s Monelle (1948); Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981); John Cassavetes’s A Child Is Waiting (1963); and Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)....

The Notebook On a sunny autumn day in Savannah, Georgia, in the year of our lord 2014, a resplendent theater built in 1921 projected a disreputable film made in 2004, and the audience wept. Not many film festivals could get away with a 10th anniversary screening of Nick Cassavetes’s notorious weepie, The Notebook, at least not without efforts at critical reclamation. (As far as this softie is concerned, all reclamations are welcome....

Flight of a Bullet “Life wins over the movie,” said the director of Flight of a Bullet, a standout at this year’s True/False Film Fest. Filmmaker Beata Bubenec was describing why her tense handheld dispatch, which begins at a blown-up bridge in embattled Eastern Ukraine, detours into an interrogation at a makeshift base and dissipates into ornery chatter among bored and aggrieved soldiers. But her turn of phrase at a Q&A neatly captures the flickering of chance and opportunity at the heart of so much nonfiction cinema, as directors frame, shape, and filter what transpires before them, dependent on that X factor of spontaneity and found reality....

Where did the idea for Alps come from? Alps came from conversations I had with Efthymis Filippou, the co-writer of both Dogtooth and Alps, while trying to find an idea about our next film. He mentioned an idea about people asking other people to write letters to them, pretending to be someone who has died. Then I came up with this rough story about a nurse, who actually offers to stand in for deceased people, to help family and friends cope with their grief....

British writer-director Andrew Haigh made his name with his second feature, the realist gay romance Weekend (11), about the beginning of a relationship. His follow-up 45 Years is about the end of a relationship—or, at least, a moment late in a long marriage. It’s also about a relationship’s prehistory—its backstory, if you really must. The terrible event that makes 45 Years so intensely charged has happened long before the action begins—more than 45 years earlier, in fact—and what Haigh shows us is a sort of extended aftershock, following the belated bringing to light of something long forgotten....

Being of a certain age, I can remember the time when people started pointing out that such and such a film was “like a video game”—roughly around the same time that they first started comparing movies to theme park experiences. Steven Spielberg surely remembers that moment too, because he played a huge part in bringing about that shift in cinema—the theme park analogy nowhere being more overt than in Jurassic Park (1993)....

Why, in this day and age, make films in black and white? For Film Comment readers, that might seem a question hardly worth asking; we all know which black-and-white films, whether or not they’re channeling styles of the past, we find arresting, seductive, or poetic in ways they might not have been if shot in color. But sometimes you know a film needs a very limited palette, in order to not show certain things—perhaps grisly things that we’d prefer not even to guess at....

Zach Clark’s gently misanthropic comedy is not to be confused with the 1952 Finnish film The White Reindeer, much admired by scholars of Nordic cinema, in which, apparently, the titular beast is vampiric rather than red-nosed. The new White Reindeer is not from Finland, yet it does revel in a somewhat Finnish lugubriousness: this is one of the few Christmas films that you can imagine Aki Kaurismäki approving of. The reindeer of Clark’s title, though the meaning is never spelled out, seem to be the animals depicted on the bulky sweaters that overeager suburbanites and TV anchorpeople tend to start wearing in mid-November, whether to cheer up others or to stave off their own feelings of winter desperation....

Was it the intention of Thor to turn back the clock on large-scale superhero movies by a couple of decades, before visionary directors like Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, and Sam Raimi had enlarged our sense of what such movies could deliver, and proved that the mark of an auteur director’s eccentric personality could be a box-office asset rather than a liability? Did Paramount and Marvel Entertainment actually set out to rekindle long-suppressed memories of Masters of the Universe and Supergirl with this unrelentingly cheesy, Day-Glo version of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s take on the mythical Norse thunder god?...

exergue – on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athiridis, 2024) On August 31, 2023, the day after the opening of the 80th Venice Film Festival, news about another major European festival made headlines. As reported by Screen Daily, the Berlin International Film Festival had decided to abandon its co-director model following its 2024 edition, whereupon a single official would be tasked with overseeing both business and creative matters. Two days later, artistic director Carlo Chatrian announced that he would be leaving his position at the conclusion of his fifth year at the helm—and this just months after it was announced that managing director Mariëtte Rissenbeek would be stepping down when her contract expires in 2024....

Hiroshima Mon Amour The Marguerite Duras retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this month—18 years after the celebrated auteur’s death—presents an ideal opportunity to contemplate her place in the history of cinema. For while Hiroshima Mon Amour, the screenplay she wrote for Alain Resnais to direct, became an international success in 1960 (and remains a touchstone of “art cinema” to this day), the films she subsequently created on her own, beginning in 1969 with Destroy, She Said, have been alas, for the happy few....

Shortly after my column on Armitage was published, someone in the comments section repeated an apocryphal report that Armitage had suffered a stroke on the set of The Big Bounce. Below, a commenter calling himself “George Armitage” chimed in: “Just for that I’m going to make another movie! No stroke. Sulking.” This was, as it transpired after a couple of e-mails, the man himself, who was gracious enough to give me 90 minutes of his time to speak about his career in movies, which began in the 1960s with Roger Corman....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Abu-Assad about Omar last October at the New York Film Festival, but the conversation began with the intriguing news of another forthcoming project… Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance I read you have another movie lined up. Is that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance? I am developing three projects. I will not make the same mistake as Paradise Now… In Europe, you work on one project, then you develop it and make it....