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Tsili In hindsight, the most puzzling thing about the festival was the placement of the films—what was deemed main Competition material, and what was left to sidebars and ancillary lineups such as the International Critics’ Week and Venice Days. Established names—Ann Hui (The Golden Era), Amos Gitai (Tsili), Peter Chan (Dearest), Peter Bogdanovich (She’s Funny That Way), Im Kwon-taek (Revivre)—played Out of Competition despite all coming up with remarkable films that showed up most of the Competition lineup, with Im and Gitai delivering their best work in a long time....

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022) A solitary island off the coast of Cornwall proves the perfect place for a mind to unravel in Enys Men, Mark Jenkin’s ambitious, slippery follow-up to his 2019 breakthrough, Bait. While both films probe the historical and cultural specificities of this unique region of the U.K., this new work also plays with genre conventions, privileging repetition and rhythm over narrative to conjure up an atmosphere of dread....

Vaz’s 15-minute short-form work oscillates between 16mm film, HD video, and an array of formats in appropriated footage. With a speculative gaze, Occidente observes the colonial threads that bind Brazil and Portugal. Images of Lisbon’s maritime life, extreme surfing, kitsch dinnerware sets, and the city’s iconic Praça do Comércio, composited through Google Street View, together serve to signify a turbulent relationship. Projections co-curator Aily Nash spoke with the Paris-based artist last week by phone....

Grégoire Colin and Juliette Binoche in Fire (Claire Denis, 2022) When Sara (Juliette Binoche) glimpses her old lover François (Grégoire Colin) by chance on the street for the first time in years, the sight of him hits her with physical force. No matter that she is seemingly happy with her current partner, Jean (Vincent Lindon)—the passion and sting of the past resurge in ways she cannot control, jolting her out of the comforts of coupledom and into a reckoning with her own desire....

As if aware that no one argument or structure is ever going to be sufficient to describe the complex interplay between attraction, lust, looking, and the body, the German director’s first feature-length work merely assembles a set of wildly differing, often oblique takes on matters of the flesh and lets their overlapping visual motifs and themes seep into one another at will. Where most essays eventually converge on one particular insight or finding, perhaps the only sure conclusion drawn by Casanova Gene is that there’s nothing as decentered as desire, an entirely apt assertion that inspires the form of the film in turn, its different images bouncing off one another like so many thoughts darting through the mind, unburdened by either words or the need for rote interpretation....

How did you meet Ousmane Sembene and become involved with Black Girl (aka La Noire de…)? I didn’t go looking for Sembene. In Ivory Coast, a photographer and close friend who worked for the Senegalese news photographed me; Ousmane Sembene then saw my photograph. After seeing my photo and discussing me with my photographer friend, he wanted to meet me. He came to my house and asked me a few questions....

Cinematographer Natasha Braier and Alma Har’el on the set of Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019) One of today’s most sought-after cinematographers, Natasha Braier skillfully blends realism and fantasy in Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy (2019), written by and starring Shia LaBeouf as a fictional version of his father, a domineering but devoted recovering alcoholic and Vietnam veteran. Intended as a therapeutic exercise, the film shifts between the childhood and rehab treatment of Otis Lort, a troubled young actor and surrogate for LaBeouf himself alternately embodied by Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges....

Song Raised in New York on a steady diet of Westerns and Disney True-Life Adventures, Nathaniel Dorsky started shooting 8mm movies at the age of eleven. In 1963, when he had just turned 20, he made Ingreen, a boldly symbolic psychodrama about a young man’s sexual coming of age. At that film’s premiere, he met soon-to-be fellow filmmaker Jerome Hiler, who would become his partner in life and a major inspiration for his work....

All images from Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina, 2019) Part coming-of-age film, part suburban fever dream, Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye is a charming and pleasantly strange amalgam of half-forgotten childhood memories. Reflecting an adolescence spent immersed in 1990s TV culture and a more recent engagement with the international art-house pantheon, Taormina’s shape-shifting debut performs a clever sleight of hand, coming on like a slightly surreal teen comedy in the vein of early Richard Linklater before segueing into something far stranger....

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019) This interview with the director of Vitalina Varela took place at the Locarno Film Festival where Pedro Costa was awarded the Golden Leopard and Vitalina Varela won the award for best actress. The full interview will appear in the November-December 2019 issue of Film Comment. Early in Pedro Costa’s 2014 film Horse Money, a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina recounts in detail the heartrending story of her late arrival to her estranged husband’s funeral in Lisbon....

—Michel Auder, The Feature The Feature It’s telling that director Michel Auder refers to himself in the third person in this quote from The Feature. He’s referring to events he lived through, but in discussing films he made about and during those events, “I” becomes “he” to match the filmmaking alchemy that transforms an individual into a character. Complicating things further is the fact that The Feature is an avowedly fictional creation stitched together from decades of autobiographical footage, all of which was originally created using that hybridizing alchemy....

Story of My Death screens March 26 and 29 in New Directors / New Films. The following interview by Ángel Quintana originally appeared in the film journal Caimán Cuadernos del Cine and is used with permission. Where did the unconventional cross between the myth of Casanova and the myth of Dracula come from? Everything began after Birdsong [08]. It came out of the possibility of shooting in Romania—I immediately thought of Count Dracula....

Joshua Oppenheimer Item of the day: Joshua Oppenheimer will follow up The Act of Killing with The Look of Silence which continues the earlier film’s examination of the Indonesian genocide, this time from the point of view of a family who confront their son’s killers. Oppenheimer describes it as “a lyrical lamentation to silence borne of fear, but also a poem about the necessity and trauma of breaking it.” … Billed as “the very first Persian gangster film,” The Loner is the next from actor-producer Reza Sixo-Safai, star of Circumstance and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night....

Fuses (Carolee Schneeman, 1964-66) Barbara Loden’s Wanda is set to see a Criterion release later this month (with an Amy Taubin essay in the Special Features, no less). Shonni Enelow would be quick to remind you, however, that Wanda wasn’t Loden’s only film—she in fact teamed up with Joan Micklin Silver in 1975 to direct The Frontier Experience, an educational film for Learning Corporation of America (also available as a Criterion extra)....

L to R: Bacurau, The Wild Goose Lake, To the Ends of the Earth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Synonyms, Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story, Wasp Network, Martin Eden The Main Slate of the 57th New York Festival is now online! The line-up features several films we’ve covered in detail in the July-August 2019 issue of Film Comment—including Atlantics by Mati Diop and Synonymes by Nadav Lapid—as well as exciting new work by Bong Joon-ho, Pedro Costa, Kelly Reichardt, Corneliu Porumboiu, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Bertrand Bonello, and others....

The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami, 1974) A cart loaded with fragile treasures jolts at high speed through steep, uneven streets. The opening scene of Downpour (1972), the first feature film by Bahram Beyzaie, depicts the arrival of a schoolteacher in the poor Tehran neighborhood where he has been sent to work. Packed with invention, wit, and breakneck energy, it is also a cinematic arrival for this filmmaker. The unloading of the cart amid a swarm of curious, meddling urchins becomes a playful fantasia of mirrored doubles, frames within frames, and a suddenly haunting procession of ancestors as the children carry their teacher’s family photos above their heads....

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Steven Soderbergh, 2023) Mark Asch: Art and commerce, fantasy and reality, are the thesis and antithesis of the Magic Mike series—three films now, each about the production of a male revue, which collectively demonstrate that “Let’s put on a show” can be either cynical or guileless. The original Magic Mike, directed by Soderbergh and released in the post–Great Recession days of 2012, caustically portrayed Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) as a struggling gig worker clinging to a false dream of entrepreneurship....

Only two of Madsen’s seven features have been distributed in the U.S.—Kira’s Reason: A Love Story (01) and Flame & Citron (08)—and somehow I managed to miss both. As I dove in fresh, it quickly became apparent that Madsen has little interest in making the same film twice. Each is tonally and stylistically distinctive. SuperClásico, the third in his “marriage” trilogy, is an old-fashioned screwball comedy about one man’s efforts to woo his wife back after the couple’s separation....

Having crossbred genres in his first three films, Ben Wheatley opts for temporal conflation in his fourth. Whereas he and his editing-writing partner Amy Jump touched upon British folklore in the contemporaneous Kill List (11) and Sightseers (12), they imbue their supernatural Civil War–era tale A Field in England with Sixties psychedelia (strobe effects, Rorschach hallucinations) and modern urban diction persuasively applied to archaic vernacular dialogue. The strategy is not unfamiliar but, aided by Jim Williams’s ethnic ambient score, the fusion is so successful here that it makes the strangeness of mystic Albion come stunningly alive—notwithstanding the playful, ribald storytelling....