<![CDATA[The Daily | The Criterion Collection]]> en-US Fri, 08 May 2026 09:54:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Out of Your World]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9150-out-of-your-world Did You See This?

Roberto Rossellini’s Blaise Pascal (1972)

Cannes has spent the week setting its jury and screening schedule and lining up its Classics and Cinéma de la Plage programs. We’ll be previewing the seventy-ninth edition, which opens on Tuesday and runs through May 23, early next week. Locarno, in the meantime, has announced that it will present the Pardo d’Onore, its Honorary Golden Leopard, to Darren Aronofsky.

In Berlin, the Arsenal Film Institute—best known to locals for its year-round screenings and to international visitors for running the Forum and Forum Expanded programs during the Berlinale—has reopened at its new location at the silent green Kulturquartier. From today through May 26, the Arsenal will present the city’s first Valerio Zurlini retrospective.

Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the series that launched in Los Angeles in 2021 with a gutsy idea and a modest lineup, has expanded to become a global event, rolling out this summer in seventy-three cities. The American Cinematheque has unveiled the schedule for the fifth LA edition, which will open on May 31 with the late Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) and run through June 7. Special guests will include Isabelle Huppert, Ari Aster, Denis Villeneuve, Werner Herzog, Gregg Araki, Theresa Russell, Louise Weard, and Vera Drew.

On Wednesday, the great poster designer Midnight Marauder passed along the shocking and terrible news that his immensely talented friend and collaborator, Tony Stella, had passed away. All across social media, fans and admirers of Stella’s work—including filmmakers such as Kleber Mendonça Filho and institutions like Japan Society—immediately began sharing their favorite posters, many of them harking back to the era of gloriously hand-painted illustration and all of them shot through with a vibrant immediacy.

“Losing someone so vital to the film world, and so revered by so many of us,” writes Chad Perman at Bright Wall/Dark Room, “leaves a deep and lonely space behind where so much art, passion, and joy used to be.”

This week’s highlights:

  • On Monday, Film Comment relaunched as a quarterly digital magazine, and the first issue offers Blair McClendon’s cover story on Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, Erika Balsom’s essay on Lucrecia Martel, Amy Taubin’s profile of Michaela Coel, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s reflections on writing for the magazine in the 1970s, and an introduction to FC’s latest incarnation from editors Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, and Michael Blair. The bright new site features a critics’ grid and notes on forthcoming articles, and subscribers have access to the entirety of every issue FC has published since its founding in 1962.

  • It’s been seventeen years since Richard Kelly directed his last feature, The Box, and like many, Cory Atad has been wondering what he’s been up to. So for GQ, he called Kelly up last month, and the two of them spoke first about Southland Tales, which critics dumped on when it premiered in Cannes twenty years ago. “A cult has steadily grown around the film,” writes Atad, “and while it hasn’t yet achieved the kind of classic status Donnie Darko quickly accrued, its tribe of evangelists is growing. Its vision of a world consumed by capitalism, self-branding, corporate war-making, and potential apocalypse remain depressingly resonant.” Turns out, Kelly has been writing. A lot. “I’m just sitting on an arsenal of screenplays that, once the first one goes into production, I’m pretty confident I’m just going to be making a whole lot of movies back-to-back,” he says. Also, “I have a gigantic novel that I’ve written. It’s gonna be published later this year.”

  • Lynne Ramsay’s filmography isn’t quite as sparse as Kelly’s. She’s made five features since her debut short film, Small Deaths (1996), and now, as Mark Smith notes in his profile in the latest issue of the Gentlewoman, she’s got five more projects she’s working on when she isn’t painting, shooting photos, writing songs, picking up her daughter from school, or meditating. And “curiously,” writes Smith, “the director who has given us child drownings, school shootings, and hammer-wielding hit men would like to make ‘the ultimate escapist film,’ as an antidote to our troubled times. ‘Because that’s what I loved as a child—something that just brought you out of your world. There is value to that, and I never thought I’d say that.”

  • Braddock, Pennsylvania, a boom town during the heyday of the American steel industry, boasted a population of more than twenty thousand in 1920. One hundred years later, that number had fallen to just over 1700. Filmmaker Tony Buba grew up in Braddock and began making a series of films about his home town in the 1970s. “Tony quickly became one of my favorite living American filmmakers,” writes Steve Macfarlane, who profiled Buba a few years ago for Topic. “If you only watch one of his masterpieces, pick Sweet Sal, his 1979 portrait of neighborhood hustler Sal Carulli. If you watch another, make it Tony’s breakout feature, Lightning over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (1988), a rib-bruisingly hilarious meditation on the eponymous town’s decline, and a ruthless interrogation of Tony’s mixed feelings over becoming the preeminent documentarian of said decline.” Buba will be in New York on May 15 and 19 when Spectacle screens Lightning over Braddock.

  • On the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, Sight and Sound is republishing Philip Strick’s 1976 interview. Rossellini was in London to present Year One (1974) and The Messiah (1975), neither of which—at the time, at least—seemed to have won much appreciation for the director’s late all-talk, no-action style. But Rossellini was convinced that the educational films he was making for television were having the desired effect. Blaise Pascal (1972), for example, had Italians reading the works of the philosopher and mathematician. “At the point in any Rossellini film when the individual must weigh his own wishes against the needs of his fellow men, individualism always loses,” observes Strick. “Pietro Missirilli goes to the guillotine, General della Rovere steps before a firing squad, Garibaldi hands Italy over to Victor Emmanuel, Socrates drinks hemlock, Alcide de Gasperi catches a train.”

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]]> Fri, 08 May 2026 09:54:00 +0000 <![CDATA[António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, Restored]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9151-antonio-reis-margarida-cordeiro-restored
António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Ana (1982)

In her program notes for António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, Restored, the TIFF Cinematheque series opening today and running through May 17, Andréa Picard writes that while their work may not be as well known as Manoel de Oliveira’s, “Reis and Cordeiro’s imprint upon successive generations of Portuguese filmmakers is arguably just as influential, with a mere four films made together. So many of the hallmarks of contemporary Portuguese cinema—whether its focus on its agrarian history, national myths, temporal palimpsests, or visionary style—can be traced back to Reis and Cordeiro’s loose trilogy shot in the remote northeastern Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal, where they elaborated a new cinematographic language.”

Toronto’s presentation of the restorations carried out by the Cinemateca Portuguesa launches Cinema Guild’s rollout of the retrospective across North America throughout the coming months. On Saturday, critic Saffron Maeve will introduce TIFF’s screening of Oliveira’s Rite of Spring (1963), which is essentially a restaging of a reenactment. Oliveira had been working on a documentary when he came across a performance of the passion play depicting the crucifixion of Christ that the residents of the Portuguese village of Curalha put on each year. Oliveira later returned to Curalha with assistant directors Reis and Paulo Rocha to have the villagers, playing themselves, dramatize the production.

Rocha’s first feature, The Green Years, was also completed in 1963, and he asked Reis to collaborate with him on the screenplay for his follow-up, Change of Life (1966), which screens on Sunday. By this point, Reis was a poet of considerable renown, and as Cordeiro recalled in a 1997 interview, when she met Reis in the mid-1960s, he “had already written the so-called neorealist Poemas quotidianos [Daily Poems, 1957], about workers, dockers, rural women, and housewives.” In Change of Life, a soldier returns to the fishing village where he grew up, and as Ela Bittencourt writes for Notebook, the characters’ lines, written by Reis, “have a fiery back-and-forth energy to them, often leaping over the music.”

Cordeiro, a psychiatrist, was working in a sanatorium in Lisbon when she came across a drawing that would lead to the first film she would make with Reis. It should be emphasized that, as Cordeiro noted in that 1997 interview, “We were both, each of us, responsible for one hundred percent of each film.” The exception is Jaime (1974), a half-hour study of the art left behind by a patient, Jaime Fernandes. Cordeiro requested that she not be given a codirecting credit because, even though she instigated the project and contributed to its production, she was still learning from Reis, who had already made a few short documentaries. Pedro Costa has called Jaime “a surprising and quite surrealist film that stands apart from his usual work. A beautiful artist’s portrait conceived in a very modern manner, like a collage.”

From 1977 until his death in 1991, Reis taught at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon, and Costa—whose Ossos (1997) will screen in Toronto on May 15 and 17—was one of his first students. “He was somewhere between a peasant and a guy in a rock band,” Costa tells Edward McCarry in a terrific interview for Metrograph’s Journal. “He was not the usual teacher that I knew from my studies.” Trás-os-Montes (1976), the first of three features credited to both Reis and Cordeiro, “was the first Portuguese film that gave me some clues,” says Costa. “Before then, I couldn’t figure out how to make films and shoot personal things, but Trás-os-Montes opened a lot of doors and windows, in every sense.”

When McCarry and Graham Carter presented Trás-os-Montes at Metrograph, they called the film “an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. In 1974, while traveling through villages in this isolated region, Reis and Cordeiro recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The rebelliousness of the peasants, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, their closeness to ancient things, to trees and rocks—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present.”

“As a poet,” writes Jonathan Mackris for Screen Slate, “Reis spent the ’50s traveling through Portugal, refining the style of his writing to match the terse regional dialects of those he lived with. This same method informed [Reis and Cordeiro’s] filmmaking, highly collaborative and completed across several years, working in off-hours and out of season. ‘We never filmed anyone without becoming their comrade or friend first,’ they told Cahiers du cinéma when asked about their approach in Trás-os-Montes.”

Reis and Cordeiro returned to the region to shoot Ana (1982), which centers on a serene matriarch played by Cordeiro’s mother, Ana Maria Martins Guerra. “Ripe with floating symbols of the ancient and modern world,” wrote Haden Guest when the Harvard Film Archive presented the series The School of Reis in 2012, “Ana is a meditation on history and human civilization and the infinitesimally small but profound role of the individual within the larger movement of longue durée. The film’s minimal and Rilke-inspired dialogue reveals Reis and Cordeiro’s interest in a deeper, nonverbal mode of communication, not only between generations but also between the land and those passing through it.”

Rosa de Areia (1989), Reis and Cordeiro’s final feature, is also their most abstractly essayistic, drawing on texts from a diverse array of writers including Franz Kafka, Michel de Montaigne, and Carl Sagan. The Theater of the Matters is running a never-before-published conversation about the film with its makers conducted by João Pedro Rodrigues and Amândio Coroado in 1989. “The film’s construction is above all elliptical,” said Reis. “There are scenes which, paradoxically, are constructed from autonomous shots. For anyone with a traditional concept of scenes as spatial, thematic units, etc., this will raise many problems of analysis.”

“People are unaccustomed to cinema that requires a bit more effort to watch,” added Cordeiro. “Either they’re used to music videos—what I call the ‘universal sauce’ system—or to the traditional narrative thread where they can easily project themselves onto one of the characters. It’s a psychological law; even we function that way.” Reis: “People have almost no senses left; they mainly have a taste for food, and even that has gone bad . . .” Cordeiro: “I’m an optimist, António is a pessimist. People are intact; they just don’t know how to use the potential they have within them.”

“The mystery when it comes to Reis and Cordeiro,” wrote Dennis Lim in an outstanding piece for Artforum in 2012, “is how works of such apparent austerity can achieve such complex effects—[Jean] Rouch even credited them with inventing ‘a new cinematographic language.’ No less than with Robert Bresson or Straub-Huillet, filmmakers who prompt similar questions, the guiding principle is distillation as revelation, an insistence on finding what Cordeiro, in an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, termed ‘literal images, images of an immediate and adequate vision.’”

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]]> Fri, 08 May 2026 09:08:00 +0000 <![CDATA[African Cinema in New York and Seattle]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9149-african-cinema-in-new-york-and-seattle
Estelle Kenza Dogbo and Aïssa Maïga in Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky (2025)

Directed by Erige Sehiri (Under the Fig Trees), Promised Sky begins with a bubble bath in Tunisia. Three Ivorian women—Marie (Aïssa Maïga), a pastor; Naney (Debora Lobe Naney), an undocumented mother; and Jolie (Laëtitia Ky), a student—bathe young Kenza (Estelle Kenza Dogbo) and piece together the girl’s story from her fragmented recollections. When they realize Kenza is a refugee who has survived a shipwreck and is now separated from her family, the women decide to take her in.

When Promised Sky opened the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes last year, Tomris Laffly wrote in Variety that the film “often feels like a mazy tapestry of moods and situations,” but it “adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts, becoming a unique drama about marginalized African immigrant women fighting for their dignity and place not in Europe (the usual setting for many similarly themed films), but on their own continent, Africa.”

Promised Sky will open this year’s New York African Film Festival tonight and then screen on Friday as part of the African Pictures program at the Seattle International Film Festival. At In Review Online, Padaí Ó Maolchalann finds Promised Sky to be “a fundamentally nuanced film, one that calibrates a fine, naturalistic balance between light and dark, comedy and tragedy, perceptive to the limitless implications in and interpretations of any detail that’s rooted in reality. A word here or a glance there may carry a very specific dramatic intent in a more calculated story; in Promised Sky, where these details are designed only to reflect real, complex stories, the intent is infinitely multifaceted.”

New York

Running through Tuesday, NYAFF 2026 will offer new restorations of two documentaries by Férid Boughedir, who will be taking part in Q&As after each screening. Following its Un Certain Regard premiere, Caméra d’Afrique (1983) returned to Cannes to screen in the Classics program in 2019. Boughedir weaves clips from eighteen films through interviews with such prominent figures as Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty to look back on twenty years in the history of African cinema.

Boughedir’s Caméra arabe (1987) takes a similar approach to Arab cinema, and when Il Cinema Ritrovato screened it last summer, the programmers ran an excerpt from Anthony Yung’s 1987 review for Variety: “A special place is reserved for Egyptian helmer Youssef Chahine. Chahine’s intelligent, anguished battle to describe Arabs’ shaken sense of their own identity in a world rocked by dramatic political events rather sums up the film.”

In an illuminating appreciation of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra that ran in Sight and Sound last year, Tambay Obenson called the filmmaker, critic, historian, and all-round facilitator “the architect working behind the scenes: enabling, documenting, and defending a self-defined cinema that had barely begun to take shape. Though he directed a handful of influential shorts, his deeper legacy lies in what he made possible—a networked African film culture with its own institutions, its own historians and, crucially, its own image.” Ahmad Cissé and Stéphane Soumanou Vieyra will be on hand to discuss Vieyra’s only feature, En résidence surveillée (1981).

The NYAFF’s Centerpiece presentation is The Eyes of Ghana (2025), a portrait of documentarian Chris Hesse directed by Ben Proudfoot, who has won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film twice. Now in his nineties and losing his eyesight, Hesse attempts to rescue a trove of more than a thousand reels shot while he served as the personal cameraman of Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Pat Mullen of POV Magazine calls The Eyes of Ghana “a deeply moving examination of the power of documentary films.”

Another highlight will be My Father and Qaddafi, directed by Jihan, who was six when her father, Libyan opposition leader Mansur Rashid Kikhia, disappeared. Her film is “part tender memorial, part murder mystery, and part family therapy session,” writes Stephen Dalton at the Film Verdict. “Around this deeply personal story, Jihan adds a broader sociopolitical framework sketching out the last tragic century of Libyan history, from genocidal colonial occupation to ongoing postcolonial struggles, from tyranny to anarchy.”

Along with further features and three programs of short films, NYAFF 2026 will also present a digital exhibition of materials from the festival’s archive. Never-before-seen interviews and photographs will spotlight guests who have attended over the past thirty-six years, including Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, William Greaves, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Ossie Davis.

Seattle

Opening tomorrow and running through May 17, Seattle’s fifty-second edition will present five features in its African Pictures program. Screening after Promised Sky on Friday, Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen “impresses as a taut character study encapsulating Sudan’s current condition and its deep-rooted heritage,” writes David Katz at Cineuropa. Mihad Murtada and Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud lead a cast of nonprofessional actors as a young woman and her matriarchal grandmother facing down the threat of their plantation’s takeover by an ambitious entrepreneur. Cotton Queen will also screen later this month as part of FilmAfrica, which opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on May 22 and runs through May 28.

Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday “illuminates disparities of wealth and class in contemporary Cairo through the affecting story of a resourceful eight-year-old maid whose devoted friendship with the daughter of the household she works for is frowned upon by her employers,” writes Alissa Simon for Variety. Goher “draws a performance of astonishing depth from Doha Ramadan as Toha, the illiterate but street-smart young domestic who doesn’t yet understand her position in Egypt’s complex social hierarchy.”

Sanduela Asanda’s Black Beats Fast is set at an elite South African boarding school, where Luthando (Esihle Ndleleni), a quiet high-achiever, is the token success story. Luthando’s world turns upside down when a lively new student, Ayanda Khumalo (Muadi Ilung), arrives. “Growing up in South Africa, anything outside the norm of heterosexuality wasn’t acknowledged,” Asanda tells Felix Seuffert in Diva. “I feel the urgency in giving young audiences the images and possibilities I never had.”

Andrew Harrison Brown and Bea Wangondu’s Kikuyu Land is a “beautifully composed documentary, which features exceptional photography of the verdant Kenyan countryside,” writes Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com. Wangondu, a Nairobian journalist, probes the role her family played in the colonization that pushed the Kikuyus off their land in the 1930s. “If you’re unfamiliar with where your tea comes from,” writes Daniels, “this documentary will probably shock and disorientate you.”

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]]> Wed, 06 May 2026 13:47:00 +0000 <![CDATA[San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2026]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9148-san-francisco-silent-film-festival-2026
Clara Bow in Victor Fleming’s Hula (1927)

Now that the century-old Castro Theatre has completed its two-year, $41 million restoration, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns on Wednesday to where it all began in 1996. Anita Monga, the artistic director of the nation’s largest silent film festival, tells K. D. Davis in the San Francisco Chronicle that the refurbished movie palace is “exquisite” and “as beautiful as it was in 1922, but with top-notch projection, sound, and better sight lines.”

Discussing this year’s program, the Chronicle’s G. Allen Johnson and Tony Bravo naturally begin with the opening night film—Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1929), starring Gloria Swanson—and it isn’t long before they bring up Pamela Hutchinson’s new book, The Curse of Queen Kelly. “The behind-the-scenes story, which Hutchinson tells in such rich detail, is as bonkers as the film itself,” says Bravo. “That says a lot—‘Von,’ as he liked to be known, was a mad genius at the height of his artistic lunacy. By the late 1920s, Swanson reached the zenith of her fame and creative ambitions. She was the Taylor Swift of her day, and she was looking for a new era.”

She found a whole lot more than she was after in the role of a convent girl who winds up running a brothel in Africa. Von Stroheim’s extravagance, financial and otherwise, led Swanson to convince producer Joseph P. Kennedy to pull the plug on the production. “A bastardized version was released abroad, leading to decades of wondering what might have been,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “Queen Kelly now returns in what Milestone Films calls ‘an improved reimagining’ that draws on nitrate prints, outtakes, stills, and more (after a previous reconstruction in 1985). The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjection.”

“Virtually every beat in the plot would have, given the chance, gotten the film banned in the U.S. for decades to come,” writes Michael Atkinson for Screen Slate. “Of course, the money is all on the screen—von Stroheim knew how to gild the lily and fill the frame—and, as the hot bulb of silent stardom at the movie’s center, Swanson was gorgeous in a witchy way movies haven’t seen much since. Her weird diva presence rhymes perfectly with the director’s wild excesses; in fact, as an autumnal artifact from the fading days of roaring ’20s libertinism, just as talkies took over and the Depression began, Queen Kelly ultimately makes a hot-to-handle case for von Stroheim being his era’s formative and most subversive constructor of camp.”

New York Times critic Wesley Morris will introduce Wednesday’s screening, and Eli Denson, who composed the new score, will conduct the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra.

Thursday

The first full day of the festival begins with a preservation showcase featuring clips, short films, and presentations from around the world. The Danish Film Institute’s Thomas Christensen will then introduce Urban Gad’s The Abyss (1910), starring Asta Nielsen, and A. W. Sandberg’s The Clown (1917), in which matinee idol Valdemar Psilander gave his final performance.

Paul Richter, whose work with Fritz Lang had turned him into a sex symbol of the Roaring Twenties, stars in Gennaro Righelli’s Sensation im Wintergarten (1929) as a count who runs off to join the circus and becomes a world-famous trapeze artist. Directed by William deMille—whose younger brother, Cecil B., capitalized the D in the family name and added quite a lot of cultural clout to it—Miss Lulu Bett (1921) stars Lois Wilson as a put-upon woman who frees herself from enslavement in the home of her half-sister to start a new life with the man she loves. Adapted from Zona Gale’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Miss Lulu Bett entered the National Film Registry in 2001.

Friday

Set in the mid-twentieth century—a future teetering on the brink of a war between the United States of Europe and the Empire of the Atlantic States—Maurice Elvey’s High Treason (1929) is, as David Cairns has put it in a piece for Notebook, “Britain’s answer to Metropolis.” The White Trail (1932), directed by skier and photographer Adam Krzeptowski, follows, and writing for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2022, Michał Pieńkowski noted that the story may be thin, but the film, which premiered at the very first Venice Film Festival, looks spectacular.

Friday afternoon brings Clara Bow in Hula (1927). When David Stenn, the author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, introduced the premiere of the new restoration at the Museum of Modern Art in January, he noted that Bow “cemented her ‘It’ Girl reputation with this smash-hit sex comedy from ex-Bow beau Victor Fleming, the future director of both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Fleming’s Paramount studio-mandated task in Hula was to showcase Bow’s phenomenal screen presence despite the flimsiest of plots.” Bow’s Hula Calhoun is growing up on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii when she falls for a married man. “The whole thing is pretty much an excuse to get Clara into grass skirts and wet frocks,” writes Fritzi Kramer, “but she sells it.”

A program of kami firumu—Japanese films from the 1930s made on paper rather than celluloid—follows. The Japanese Paper Film Project has digitally rescued more than two hundred of them. “There is something uncanny about watching the visibly worn sprocket holes, abstract dirt marks and stains, and folded creases that appear and disappear on the paper as the animations play,” writes Shelby Shaw for Screen Slate. “Rather than distract from the content, they magnify the sense that the paper itself is coming to life as it rapidly changes on-screen right before viewers’ eyes; meanwhile, the printed characters in the images seem not to take any notice of what mortality surrounds them.”

Marie Prevost was coming off of three films directed by Ernst Lubitsch when she starred in Lewis Milestone’s The Caveman (1926) as a bored heiress who decides to introduce a coal heaver (Matt Moore) to high society and pass him off as a professor. Future gossip columnist Hedda Hopper appears in a supporting role and a young Myrna Loy plays a maid.

Friday wraps with Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), the last film directed by F. W. Murnau, who died at forty-two in a car crash just one week before the film’s premiere. “The story is simple to the point of universality,” writes Jake Cole at Slant. “It’s a Romeo and Juliet narrative framed through the prism of island life, with Reri’s (Anne Chevalier) virginity placed under total protection by tribe elders to preserve her sanctity for the gods, much to the chagrin of her love interest (Matahi). The pair flees this repressive system only to find themselves, unluckily, in a Murnau film, with all its attendant focus on the corrupting influences of material greed.”

Saturday

Saturday offers four Laurel and Hardy shorts introduced by Serge Bromberg, a pre–Queen Kelly Gloria Swanson as a Parisian gangster in Sidney Olcott’s The Humming Bird (1924), and Ryszard Ordynski’s Janko the Musician (1930), an adaptation of an 1879 story by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. When Pamela Hutchinson saw Janko in Pordenone in 2016, she was “utterly besotted,” calling it “a very poignant film, with easy charm and visual lyricism.”

When Light Industry screened Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927) in 2013, the venue pulled a quote from Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (1974): “A masterpiece of psychological realism, its sexual triangle (caused by the postrevolutionary housing shortage) involved husband and lover changing places on bed and sofa, until the pregnant woman, tired of male chauvinism, decides to leave them both. The film is unique in its emphasis on the individual rather than class and its portrayal of unconventional sexual mores in early Soviet Russia; it reflects, in its anti-puritanical humanism, the atmosphere of the early revolutionary days far more accurately than some of the large-scale propagandist works of the period.”

His Greatest Bluff (1927) is a comedy driven by the search for stolen jewels and the identity switcheroos pulled off by twins played by director Harry Piel, but it is probably best known for featuring Marlene Dietrich in one of her earliest roles. Saturday then bows out with two French city symphonies. In 2011, Robert Polito wrote that with À propos de Nice (1930), Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman “discovered subtle and persuasive cinematic strategies to render the fantastic as if it were the everyday, and the everyday as though it comprised a vision of the end of the world.”

Two years ago, MoMA programmers noted that Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) “did for Paris what Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manahatta did in 1921 for New York: burnish the romance of the new metropolis in our collective subconscious, tracing in a melodic arc from dawn to dusk to dawn the intricate choreographies of the man in the crowd and machines in concert with nature; the rhythms of rain and regulated time; the abstract geometries of pattern and movement and shadow.”

Sunday

It’s heavy hitters from morning until night on the final day of the festival, beginning with William Wyler’s 1927 western Blazing Days. J. Hoberman has called Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926) “a good-natured send-up of sheikhs, jazz babies, and would-be wife swappers, replete with binge drinking, outrageous Freudian symbolism, and a writhing kaleidoscope that must be the ultimate Charleston scene.”

In Love One Another (1922), a young Jewish woman leaves her village for St. Petersburg, where she falls for a revolutionary eager to help overthrow the tsar. “A multiplicity of plot strands, life in the shtetl, and espionage in the city, Carl Theodor Dreyer pulls them together in a brutal crescendo,” writes Fernando F. Croce.

Writing for Screen Slate, Jonathan Mackris is “inclined to say” that Marie Harder’s Bookkeeper Kremke (1930) is “the true hidden gem of the entire festival. Harder’s career, lasting just under two years and comprising just two films, is a bit enigmatic. She’s almost certainly the first woman director in Germany to complete a feature film, made in her capacity as the head of the film department of the German Social Democratic Party.” Bookkeeper Kremke is “mostly built around dramatic sequences detailing the crisis of the German middle class as millions were put out of work during the Great Depression. Interspersed throughout are snippets of reportage decrying automation and depicting worker protests, complimenting and commenting on what is otherwise a straightforward kammerspiel drama.”

SFSFF 2026 closes out with one of the greatest films of any era, King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). Vidor “could call his own shots after 1925’s war epic The Big Parade, the highest-grossing film of the entire silent period,” notes Dennis Harvey at 48 Hills. “That vast canvas whetted his appetite for a story about the ‘little people,’ ordinary working Joes and Janes. He cast unknown James Murray and moderately-known Eleanor Boardman (who happened to be Mrs. Vidor) as two likable if nondescript New Yorkers whose love weathers various travails. If these lives are deliberately writ ‘small,’ devoid of standard glamour, Vidor’s treatment nonetheless is a showcase for both location shooting and studio-bound stylistic wizardry—The Crowd is rightly considered one of the crowning artistic achievements of Hollywood’s pre-talkie epoch.”

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]]> Tue, 05 May 2026 10:21:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Four by Sophie Letourneur]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9147-four-by-sophie-letourneur
Sophie Letourneur’s Les coquillettes (2012)

“I don’t situate myself or my work in bourgeois cinema or literary cinema, or these bourgeois conventions or codes,” Sophie Letourneur tells Helen Fortescue-Poole at Screen Slate. “In fact, I really like a mix of triviality and poetry, comedy and melancholy. Above all, I really don’t want to make snobbish cinema.”

Through May 26, L’Alliance New York is screening one of Letourneur’s features each Tuesday, and the series opened last month with L’aventura, which made Cahiers du cinéma’s list of the top ten films of 2025. As Letourneur told Giovanni Marchini Camia in BOMB in 2012, La vie au ranch (Chicks, 2009), screening tomorrow, is partly inspired by a time in her life when she extracted herself from a tight group of friends. Letourneur described the great lengths she went to in order to find her cast of nonprofessional actors before embedding herself with the group, often recording hours of improvised scenes that she would then winnow down to just a few minutes of screen time.

The result is a “raunchy dramedy about twentysomething hipsterettes,” as David Fear described La vie au ranch in Time Out. “It’s the filmmaker’s willingness to let these uncouth females un-self-consciously get drunk, piss in the streets, and talk like sailors that supplies La vie’s true emotional nakedness. All the narrative formlessness—ladies get shit-faced, fret over guys, don’t rinse, repeat—and extended scenes of little besides salty conversations might fool viewers into thinking that nothing happens. But as the characters gradually realize that their wild-child idyll can’t last, you see that Letourneur understands the impact of going out on a whimper.”

Letourneur’s 2011 short Le marin masqué won a prize that came with a tidy little sum, 30,000 euros. Locarno then invited Letourneur and her short, so she decided to spend her prize money on a feature she would shoot at the festival with two of her friends.

In Les coquillettes (2012), “Letourneur’s fictionalized version of herself is more interested in stalking Louis Garrel than she is in the screening of her own film,” noted Emma Myers at the top of her interview with the director for Film Comment. “Her two gal pals—the capricious Camille [production assistant Camille Genaud] and ultra-cool Carole [editor Carole Le Page]—are similarly man-crazy, immersing themselves in a whirlwind of parties hoping to score. Framed by the postmortem meeting of the girls back in a Parisian flat, the film derives its humor from the disjunction between the way they recount (and embellish) the events of the festival and the way we see them unfolding.”

Les coquillettes is another of Letourneur’s “seemingly improvised yet intricately written dramedies,” wrote Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “Drawing inspiration from the likes of Eric Rohmer, John Cassavetes, and Hong Sangsoo, yet managing to find her own voice, she has a real knack for depicting the je ne sais quoi adventures of French chicks getting off on their friendships, while never quite getting it on with their male counterparts.” Letourneur told Myers that she’d originally intended to shoot Les coquillettes at Cannes, but now, she tells Fortescue-Poole, she’s considering an adaptation set at SXSW.

Lolita Chammah has appeared in dozens of features, and in two of them, she’s played the daughter of characters portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, which is fine casting, considering that she is, in fact, the daughter of Huppert and writer, producer, and director Ronald Chammah. Letourneur cast Lolita Chammah in Gaby Baby Doll (2014) as a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown. She can’t stand to be alone, but her boyfriend has abandoned her in a remote country house. Gaby eventually finds her way to Nicolas, played by Benjamin Biolay, a singer, songwriter, and occasional actor who has worked as an arranger or producer with Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis.

Gaby Baby Doll is a “subtly frantic romantic com­edy,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “both a sentimental delight and a cinematic equation: add a budget, a script, and stars to a director of homemade, impro­vised, personal movies.” Nicolas, “a hirsute hermit, is as unfit for company as Gaby is for solitude; Letourneur pulls off the predestined magic with a light and giddy touch.”

Enormous (2019), the winner of the Prix Jean Vigo, stars Marina Foïs and Jonathan Cohen as Claire and Fred, a married couple who have agreed that neither of their lives has room for kids. But then Fred changes his mind and insidiously arranges to impregnate his wife. “Pregnancy can be everything all at once,” Letourneur tells Fortescue-Poole. “It can be beautiful, it can be monstrous, it can be unbearable . . . I realized that in order to do everything I wanted to do, I would have to make things even stranger.”

Richard Brody notes that much of Enormous “involves the couple’s consultations with doctors, midwives, and other professionals (real-life ones, filmed on site); much of the comedy comes from Fred’s outsized enthusiasm for his impending fatherhood (Cohen, a popular comedian in France, riffs wildly throughout). The movie confronts Fred’s domineering cruelty, yet Claire’s conflicts (keenly displayed in Foïs’s withdrawn bewilderment) get short dramatic shrift, replaced by antic physical and sexual comedy that nonetheless suggests the irrational bonds of love.”

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]]> Mon, 04 May 2026 08:15:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Magnanimous!]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9146-magnanimous Did You See This?

Tina Apicella and Anna Magnani in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951)

Australia’s great festival of “screen heritage and preservation,” Cinema Reborn, opens today in Sydney (through May 10) and next week in Melbourne (May 8 through 17). The program is a journey through time and around the world, ranging from musicals (Ernst Lubitsch’s One Hour with You, 1932, and Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models, 1955) through anti-colonial films (Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega, 1988, and three short films by Sarah Maldoror) to incisive studies of social dynamics (Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970, and Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome, 1989).

The Chicago Film Society, in the meantime, is throwing a Pre-Code Picture Party this weekend, and among the treats are films by Dorothy Arzner, William A. Wellman, and E. A. Dupont. At the Music Box Theatre, the Chicago Critics Film Festival will roll out more than two dozen Chicago premieres from today through Thursday. Along with recent festival highlights such as John Early’s Maddie’s Secret and Kent Jones’s Late Fame, the festival will also feature 35 mm screenings of David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).

In Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque series Watch Local: Z Channel (tomorrow through May 30) celebrates one of the country’s early pay television stations, which from 1974 to 1989 “influenced a generation of film lovers and filmmakers alike while popularizing the concept of ‘Director’s Cut’ versions.” On May 14, filmmakers Xan Cassavetes, Stuart Cooper, and Vera Anderson; producers Rick Ross and Marshall Persinger; and Z programmer Tim Ryerson will gather to discuss the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession.

This week’s highlights:

  • Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy Bellissima is “a case study in maternal obsession, a comic opera with nonmusical solos, and a satire of the Italian movie industry,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times as a new restoration opens today at New York’s Film Forum. Anna Magnani delivers “a Pirandellian meta performance” as a working-class mother determined to get her young daughter cast in the lead role of a film director Alessandro Blasetti is setting up at Cinecittà. “Bellissima likely inspired two younger directors, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, to address the film industry in their movies The White Sheik (1952) and The Lady Without Camelias (1953),” notes Hoberman. “Neither delved as deeply as Visconti and Magnani into the nature of acting.”

  • Pearl Bowser and the Black Film Series, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan (just a dozen or so blocks south of Harlem), has been extended through Sunday. Guest-curated and produced by Lisa Collins and cocurated by Aviva Weintraub (for the Jewish Museum), who have worked with filmmaking collaborators Mark Schwartzburt and Anthony Jamison, the show is a salute to the 1970 series put together by the late Pearl Bowser, whom Olivia Haynie describes in Forward as “a former cookbook author who became known as the Godmother of Black Independent Cinema for her work in film preservation and scholarship on Oscar Micheaux.” The exhibition features highlights from the fourteen films screened in 1970 and from documentaries on Bowser. “The political environment we’re in right now,” says Schwartzburt, “where there is so much erasure going on and backstepping—taking back civil rights—this couldn’t be more important.”

  • While Alexander Kluge, who passed away in March, “has been typecast as the worthy, old-world éminence grise,” writes Luke Dunne for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “his work isn’t so easily pinned down. Kluge’s films and fiction alike are often playful, flamboyant, sentimental (though rarely saccharine), and frequently very funny. That none of this comes at the expense of intellectual or moral seriousness, that Kluge refused to acknowledge this trade-off in the first place, is part of his charm. War and capital-H History, yes, but also angels, opera, and slapstick. For Kluge, there simply was no either-or—only both-and would ever do.”

  • Backrooms, the debut feature of twenty-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass and is set to open on May 29. In a burrowing backgrounder for the MIT Press, Shira Chess, the author of The Unseen Internet, notes that “there’s a surprisingly deep history behind Backrooms. It’s one that touches on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia. But above all, Backrooms captures a feeling—and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.”

  • And finally, happy May Day. If you’re looking for something to watch on this International Workers’ Day, Erik Loomis has written up an annotated list of twenty fine candidates for the Nation, and Le Cinéma Club is launching a new series, New American Voices, with Lucy Kerr’s Family Portrait (2023). For weekend listening, you might turn to the latest Outskirts Film Podcast, “Edward Yang’s Confucian Confusions,” and for reading, there’s a whopping new issue of Senses of Cinema with a dossier on the state of the film festival and articles on Lucrecia Martel, Jean-Luc Godard, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Sergio Corbucci.

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]]> Fri, 01 May 2026 08:15:00 +0000 <![CDATA[First Look, Second Weekend]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9145-first-look-second-weekend
Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow (2026)

April has somehow become the month for New York programmers to survey some of the most innovative films to have premiered over the past twelve months or so, many of them pretty exciting, nearly all of them at least interesting. Along with New Directors/New Films, copresented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for more than half a century, there’s the upstart Prismatic Ground popping up at various venues across the city. And for the past fifteen years, the Museum of the Moving Image—which, as Melena Ryzik reports in the New York Times, is thriving—has presented its showcase of “adventurous cinema,” First Look.

Following a robustly programmed first weekend, the festival returns today for its second with zi, the latest feature from Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang). “Shot in just three weeks in Hong Kong, taking an off-the-cuff approach in line with the unmoored wanderings of its characters, this translucent study of a mentally addled young woman finding an unlikely ally in an American outsider begins promisingly, mixing everyday city portraiture with glitchy flashes of uncanny psychodrama,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge.

Zi (Michelle Mao) is a concert violinist thrown off balance by time-scrambled visions when she’s approached by Elle (Haley Lu Richardson), who may or may not be a stranger just looking to help. And from a distance, Min (Jin Ha) is watching both women. “If its larger message is elusive, zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace,” writes Lodge. Dispatching from Sundance, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that “even as I find myself scoffing at its inadequacies, at its sketchy insubstantiality, I can’t quite shake the memory of this delicate, disarming film. Kogonada wins.”

Tomorrow evening, First Look will present the world premiere of The Whole World Is a Lie, actor Charlie Birns’s attempt to capture the “spiritual experience” of a New York Method acting class. But his classmates object to the way he’s going about making this film, leading to what MoMI describes as “a tricky yet emotionally resonant, and often very funny, exploration of the difficulty of capturing the ‘truth’ within an environment of shifting power dynamics and foregrounded ego.”

Kenichi Ugana’s I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn—a love story about a down-and-out Japanese movie star and the scrappy filmmaker who literally picks her up off the sidewalk and casts her in the lead role of his no-budget horror movie—will see its U.S. premiere tomorrow. I Fell in Love is “a charming culture-clash romcom with the added complication of the two leads being completely unable to understand one another when not using a phone to translate,” writes Jennie Kermode at Eye for Film. It’s a “classy film about a trashy film which shows respect for both extremes.”

Saturday

In 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa had been erupting for months when, on August 27, one of its explosions produced what remains the loudest known sound in history and a tsunami that hurls Kesuma, a fisherman played by Roni Hensilayah in Carlos Casas’s Krakatoa, onto a deserted island. His search for food and water leads him ever closer to the core of our planet. “Enmeshed in anachronism yet awash with the signifiers of a history yet to be tainted by the specter of environmental collapse,” writes Morris Yang at In Review Online, Krakatoa “mounts a brazen final act, disintegrating into the purest flickers of being and nothingness. With Nicolas Becker’s spectacular sound design approximating the very ineffability of destruction, so, too, do we prostrate before the blind embers of creation.”

Rachael J. Morrison’s documentary Joybubbles tells the story of Joe Engressia, one of the original phone phreaks who learned at an early age that by whistling, he could free up long-distance phone lines. Born blind and highly intelligent, Engressia consciously reverted back to the age of five in his thirties, legally changed his name to Joybubbles, and kept up with a vast network of friends around the world—over the phone. “Morrison is too smart to label Joybubbles as the forerunner to the titans of social media,” writes Amy Taubin for Film Comment, “although she includes a priceless clip of the young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (themselves inspired by Engressia) toying with the famously illegal ‘blue box,’ which hijacked long-distance phone networks by mimicking their signal tones. Joybubbles has the making of a minor cult classic.”

G. Anthony Svatek’s Humboldt USA is “a beautifully framed and expertly composed environmental documentary with a head-spinning premise,” writes Lauren Wissot at Slant. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, Svatek travels to three locations bearing the name of the nineteenth-century German scientist: Humboldt County in Nevada, where biologists attempt to save endangered bighorn sheep; Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California, where engineers create “organic algorithms”; and Humboldt Parkway, a tree-lined boulevard replaced by the Kensington Expressway that now divides Buffalo, New York. “While these three narratives might at first glance seem disparate,” writes Wissot, “they’re delicately bound together by the director’s own poetic voiceover, which connects us back to Humboldt’s point of view as a radical (and queer) visionary.”

Yanis Koussim tells two parallel stories in his debut feature, Roqia, a horror movie set against the backdrop of Algeria’s “Black Decade” (1992–2002), when the government strove to drive out Islamist rebels. “Islamic terrorism is not Islam,” Koussim tells Tariq Manshi in GQ Middle East. “Islam does not tell you to put babies in the oven, slaughter people, and rape pregnant women.” Manshi notes that Koussim references what he’s learned from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that “man is fundamentally born good and therefore evil comes from elsewhere. This is the philosophical critique that shapes Roqia.”

Saturday wraps with a showcase screening of Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, “a contemplative reverie about people, plants, the world, and their interconnections, anchored around an ancient ginkgo tree standing in the middle of a German botanical garden,” as Jonathan Romney describes Enyedi’s eighth feature in Screen. Silent Friend interweaves three stories, one set during the COVID-19 pandemic and starring Tony Leung as a Hong Kong neuroscientist and Léa Seydoux as a French botanist. Luna Wedler won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress in Venice for her performance as Grete, the first female student admitted to the University of Marburg in 1908, and the third strand features Enzo Brumm and Marlene Burow as students in the 1970s.

Sunday

In one long take shot from the back seat of a car, director Hansel Porras Garcia shoots a delicate and then heated conversation between a brother and sister, Frank (Ariel Texidó) and Fanny (Lola Bosch), reunited after twenty years now that Fanny has immigrated from Cuba to live with her brother and his family in Miami. At RogerEbert.com, Monica Castillo finds that Tropical Park “paints a nuanced portrait of the Cuban and Cuban American experience, exploring the tension between generations of arrivals and the ideological differences within a community too easily lumped into a monolith. It can feel claustrophobic to watch such an explosion of pent-up emotions in a small sedan, possibly uncorking some of the audience’s own unspoken feelings. But that’s exactly what makes Tropical Park so incredibly compelling.”

Gábor Holtai’s Feels Like Home won the Méliès d’Argent Award for the Best Fantastic Genre Feature Film at Sitges last fall. Rita (Rozi Lovas) has been working at a shoe store when she’s yanked off the street, whisked off to a nearby apartment, and told that her real name is Szilvi Árpád. “She quickly discovers that the other ‘family members’—including one child—are all kidnapped loners, physically and emotionally forced to play a role at the behest of Papa (Tibor Szervét), with his dirty work carried out by Rita’s new brother Marci (Áron Molnár),” writes Olivia Popp at Cineuropa. Working with cinematographer Dániel Szőke, Holtai “cultivates a feeling of complete and utter confinement within Rita’s surroundings.” As Rita learns how and when to play along, all the while secretly planning her escape, she discovers that the terror extends beyond the family.

Before Sunday evening’s presentation Moonglow, the Closing Night film of First Look 2026, director Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca), cinematographer Isaac Banks, coeditor Daniel Garber, composer Keegan DeWitt, and producer Alemberg Ang will discuss the making of Sandoval’s fourth feature. Set in 1970s Manila, a city rife with the corruption of the Ferdinand Marcos years, Moonglow stars Sandoval as Dahlia, a police officer who funnels money stolen from her superiors to the displaced residents of a slum her colleagues have cruelly set ablaze. Police chief Bernal (Dennis Marasigan) insists that Dahlia investigate the crime she’s secretly committed and partners her with an old flame, Charlie (Arjo Atayde, a star on Filipino television and a Nacionalista Party congressman).

Talking to Jason Tan Liwag in Vogue, Sandoval describes Moonglow as “a detective thriller and crime noir by way of In the Mood for Love. My emergent sensibility is the marriage of themes with political underpinnings with a style that is lyrical, poetic, visually lush, and sensuous.” For Lé Baltar at In Review Online, Moonglow is “a subtle demolition of the heist movie in the vein of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, or, on a more niche level, a cinema of cigarettes after crime, dangling its title card late in the movie in the sexiest way possible, a stylistic flourish that might as well be a willing accomplice.”

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]]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:45:00 +0000 <![CDATA[The Grandmaster: Tony Leung]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9144-the-grandmaster-tony-leung
Tony Leung Chiu Wai in Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994)

Before he presides over the jury at the Shanghai International Film Festival next month,  Tony Leung Chiu Wai will be in New York this coming Tuesday to talk about several of the landmark roles he’s played in the thirteen films screening from today through May 7 in Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective, The Grandmaster: Tony Leung. Chronologically, the series begins with Bullet in the Head (1990), one of three films in the program directed by John Woo.

Leung costars with Jacky Cheung and Waise Lee, all of them outlaws fleeing Hong Kong authorities to Vietnam, just as the war is heating up in 1967. “Almost immediately,” writes Jake Cole at Slant, “the magnitude of their mistake becomes clear as they find themselves in the middle of guerrilla raids, terror campaigns, and clandestine activities by various foreign agents using the chaos to make a quick buck . . . The sequences depicting U.S. and North Vietnamese assaults on villages demonstrate a gift for massive-scale action choreography that Woo would bring to his subsequent Hard Boiled, but here the staging emphasizes not a clarity of motion but the overwhelming chaos of being caught in the crossfire of war.”

Hard Boiled (1992) gives us Leung as Alan—a nod to Alain Delon and the killer he played in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï (1967)—an undercover cop posing as a high-ranking triad assassin and being trailed by Chow Yun-fat’s Inspector “Tequila” Yuen. Leung delivers “all the handsome melancholy he’d later bring to the films of Wong Kar Wai,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR. “Like a lot of John Woo movies, Hard Boiled is a bromance about professionally violent men being tender with each other, clinging to outdated codes of honor as a crass and ruthless new generation makes a mockery of their morality.”

On Thursday and Sunday, FLC will present 35 mm screenings of Woo’s 287-minute war epic Red Cliff, originally released in two parts in 2008 and 2009. Leung stars as Zhou Yu, the general who led his troops to victory over the numerically superior forces of the warlord Cao Cao at the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 AD. Red Cliff is “a grand, old-fashioned spectacle, with massive armies wreaking massive havoc in strategically ingenious ways,” wrote Scott Foundas in the Village Voice, and Leung is “at his most balletic as [warlord] Sun Quan’s magisterial viceroy.”

FLC will screen five films directed by Wong Kar Wai, probably the first filmmaker to come to Westerners’ minds when thinking of Leung. In Chungking Express (1994), “Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for,” wrote Amy Taubin in 2008. “The shot is ostensibly from [Faye Wong’s] point of view, but as Cop 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema.”’

Love breaks down in Happy Together (1997), costarring Leung and Leslie Cheung. “Wong has placed the utmost demands upon them, and they in turn make this harrowing, disintegrating relationship seem absolutely authentic,” wrote Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. Happy Together is “a take-no-prisoners movie from one of Hong Kong’s most idiosyncratic, shoot-from-the-hip filmmakers that’s the very antithesis of sentimental gay love stories. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Leung won the Best Actor award in Cannes for his performance in In the Mood for Love (2000) as Chow Mo-Wan, a journalist drawn to his new neighbor, Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), particularly when they both realize that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Set in Hong Kong in 1962, In the Mood for Love is widely regarded not only as one of the greatest films of this century so far, but also, as shot by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful.

A few years ago, we published a series of author Charles Yu’s notes on In the Mood for Love, and in one of them, he writes of Leung: “His eyes doing all the talking. Breaking into a slow smile, a smile that takes its time, moves from lips to eyes to temples and then back to the mouth, where it seems to soften and then turn into something else. The saddest smiles.”

“It’s hard to think of another actor who has made the self-negating effort of not wanting—of not needing anyone, while at the same time keeping the door of his battered heart slightly ajar—as sexy as Leung does in Wong’s films,” wrote Andrew Chan that same year. “These are luxurious romances filled with pleasure and possibility, but the questions at their core all have to do with pain: What is the right way to respond to the elusiveness of love, its cruel fictitiousness? How do we go on? More than any other star in Wong’s constellation, Leung wears these questions on his body. Looking at his face, you recognize the discipline required to carry on while holding all that ache inside yourself.”

Saturday’s screening of In the Mood for Love (2000) will be followed by a nine-minute coda, In the Mood for Love 2001, which in turn will be followed by 2046 (2004), a vision of a possible future in which Leung’s Mr. Chow has become a writer of erotic science fiction. “Sporting a Clark Gable mustache,” wrote John Powers in 2021, Mr. Chow “works his charm on several of Asia’s most famous leading ladies, including Carina Lau (playing another Mimi/Lulu), Gong Li (playing yet another Li-Zhen), and the Chinese Madonna, Faye Wong. His seductiveness reaches its peak in his erotic encounters—first delightful, then cruel—with Ziyi Zhang as Bai Ling, in a heartbreakingly passionate performance.”

Leung trained for four years to play kung fu master Ip Man in Wong’s The Grandmaster (2013), a “martial arts movie, though to describe it as such is somewhat like calling L’avventura a thriller about a missing woman,” as Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times. “Predictably, The Grandmaster is, given this filmmaker, less a straight biographical portrait of Ip Man and more an exploration of opposing forces like loyalty and love, horizontal and vertical, and the geometry of bodies moving through space and time.”

In Infernal Affairs (2002), the first film in a trilogy directed by Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak, Leung’s Chen Wing-yan, a cop posing as a gangster, is swept up in a dangerous dance with Andy Lau Tak-wah’s Lau Kin-ming, a gangster posing as a cop. “Leung—who had already played a cop (in Chungking Express), a gangster (in 1990’s Bullet in the Head), and a cop pretending to be a gangster (in 1992’s Hard Boiled)—here slips into one of his finest roles with commanding ease,” writes Justin Chang. “He is suitably roughed-up for the part, looking scruffier than usual in open-necked shirts and a black leather jacket, and sporting unkempt bangs that partially obscure his famously expressive eyebrows. But in his rare off-the-clock moments, Chen exudes a surprising lightness, warmth, and even flirtatiousness—especially in scenes with his sympathetic therapist, Dr. Lee Sum-yee (Kelly Chen Wai-lam)—that further compound the tragic weight of his personal sacrifice.”

The series also features Trân Anh Hùng’s Cyclo (1995), which won the Golden Lion in Venice and offers Leung as the mysterious Poet, who also happens to be a gang leader in Ho Chi Minh City. In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998), Leung is Master Wang, a wealthy patron of elegant nineteenth-century brothels.

Leung costars with Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, and Donnie Yen in Zhang Yimou’s dazzling Hero (2002), a Rashomon-like clash of conflicting narratives divided into five color-coded sections and shot by Christopher Doyle. And Ang Lee, who won a Golden Lion for Brokeback Mountain (2005), won a second one for Lust, Caution (2007), an erotically charged tale of World War II espionage. In her first feature, Tang Wei plays an actress recruited to set a honey trap for Leung’s Mr. Yee, a collaborator in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in 1938 and in Shanghai in 1942.

The FLC retrospective will segue into a theatrical run for Silent Friend, in which Ildikó Enyedi wraps three stories around an ancient ginkgo tree in the university town of Marburg, Germany. Leung is “ideally cast as Tony Wong, an introverted Hong Kong neuroscientist on a visiting professorship,” finds Variety’s Guy Lodge. “Few actors can play ruminative solitude with Leung’s degree of restless, unspoken intensity.”

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]]> Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:12:00 +0000 <![CDATA[TCM Classic Film Festival 2026]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9141-tcm-classic-film-festival-2026
Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in Gene Saks’s Barefoot in the Park (1967)

An eight-film tribute to Jane Fonda is screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Thursday, the day that Fonda officially opens the seventeenth TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles. Taking a break from setting up her next project—an adaptation of Virginia Evans’s best-selling novel The Correspondent that Fonda will star in and produce—and campaigning for California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer and against Paramount’s likely takeover of Warner Bros., Fonda will pay tribute to Robert Redford at the world premiere of a new restoration of Barefoot in the Park (1967).

The second of four films Fonda and Redford costarred in together, Barefoot in the Park is Neil Simon’s adaptation of his 1963 Broadway hit with Redford reprising his role as button-down attorney Paul Bratter, settling into a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village with his free-spirited wife, Corie. Mike Nichols directed that production, but Gene Saks took on the movie, replacing the first Corie, Elizabeth Ashley, with Fonda. “Simon has taken a plot as bland as a potato, sliced it into thin bits—and made it as hard to resist as potato chips,” wrote an unnamed critic at Time, adding in the parlance of the times that “Jane’s performance is the best of her career: a clever caricature of a sex kitten who can purr or scratch with equal intensity.”

Joan Crawford, too, could purr, scratch, and more, and one of the major hits of her career, Letty Lynton, directed by Clarence Brown in 1932, was pulled from circulation in 1936. Pamela Hutchinson has the full story in the Guardian, but the gist is that rights issues kept Letty Lynton, “the lethal tale of a Manhattan socialite, her fiancé, and her vindictive ex-lover,” from being legally screened for ninety years. Those issues have finally been cleared, and Crawford’s grandson and Warner Bros. library historian George Feltenstein will present the world premiere of a new restoration on Friday.

“The World Comes to Hollywood” is the theme of this year’s edition, and as Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming and content strategy at TCM, tells KPBS critic Beth Accomando, he and his team intend “to celebrate the immigrants who helped create Hollywood.” There are, for example, five films screening in the Architects of Noir program, all of them directed by immigrants from Europe: Boris Ingster’s Strangers on the Third Floor (1940), Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941), Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951).

Key events this year include Glenn Close planting prints of her hands and feet at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Friday prior to a screening of Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and John Turturro’s presentation of the Robert Osborne Award to Film Forum repertory artistic director and Rialto Pictures founder Bruce Goldstein before Saturday’s screening of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). There will be a tribute to Barbara Hershey with screenings of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Chris Menges’s A World Apart (1988) and another tribute to composer Paul Williams, who wrote “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog to sing in James Frawley’s The Muppet Movie (1979) and a slew of intentional misfires for the deluded singing duo played by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty in Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987).

Along with these honorees, special guests will be on hand to say a few words about each of the films. Charles Burnett will present the new restoration of his second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), and Faye Dunaway will help celebrate the world premiere of the fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Sidney Lumet’s Network. Further promising pairings include Joe Dante with Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Dana Delany with Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), Edgar Wright with Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), and Brooke Adams with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978).

“An air of uncertainty hangs over the fate of both the TCM Channel and the festival as a whole, puzzle pieces in the impending merger between Paramount and Warner Bros.,” writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, “so this year in particular it feels vital to appreciate this truly special event, which has been pivotal in expanding our definitions of what a classic film is. Enjoy it while you can.”

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]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:51:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Prismatic Ground, Year Six]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9139-prismatic-ground-year-six
Ka Ki Wong’s I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore (2026)

When Inney Prakash, now the Curator of Film at Asia Society in New York, issued an open call for experimental documentaries at the end of 2020, “a programmer directly engaging with his community of filmmakers with an open-hearted all-points-bulletin was the antithesis of conventional festival gatekeeping,” wrote Caroline Golum for Notebook. By April 2021, the first edition of Prismatic Ground was up and running, albeit as a primarily virtual festival. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was still very much a thing.

Copresented with Screen Slate and no longer strictly confined to nonfiction, the sixth edition will roll out from Wednesday through Sunday in five “waves” across five New York venues. On opening night, Ka Ki Wong will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to present her debut feature, I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore. Stories of requited and unrequited love are intertwined in the labyrinthine streets of Taipei, and when I Heard premiered at CPH:DOX in March, Wendy Ide, writing for Screen, called it an “uninhibited and wildly original picture which deals with pain, guilt, loneliness, and romantic disappointment in the most joyful and playful way imaginable.”

Among the highlights of wave 1 are Nicolás Pereda’s Cobre and Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives. “A wry thriller of bureaucracy that started after Pereda learned about the suspicious death of an activist protesting labor conditions in a mining town, Cobre begins as Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) finds a dead body on his way to work at the mines,” writes Cici Peng for Filmmaker. “As always, Pereda turns seemingly banal interactions into sly displays of power.”

Afterlives carries forward Lee’s exploration of the potential for the desktop documentary, which he calls “an emerging form of film and media making that presents the world as it is experienced through computer screens and networked interfaces.” With this one, he delves into the history of extremist propaganda and probes its possible futures, most of them likely involving a heavy reliance on AI.

“Afterlives insists on its own ambiguous relationship to visuals,” writes Savina Petkova at the Film Stage. “Perhaps this is why you will see Lee ‘leaving’ the desktop space and actually appearing in the flesh as a sort of exposure out of respectful necessity. Whatever cinematic form it inhabits, Afterlives is a dedicated, reflective documentary, the bell of its urgency ringing far into the past and into the futures of images.”

Screening as part of wave 2, Dane Komljen’s Desire Lines is “a spectral and hallucinatory landscape of bodies, which eat and gaze and desire but are also found to be frighteningly, or freeingly, insubstantial by those who inhabit them, as they shape-shift, merge, or even melt through walls,” writes Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. Komljen’s film is “a poetic, unrushed but endlessly surprising vision, which operates according to a certain dream logic of echoing images rather than a traditional plot. Nonetheless, it has an unforced, intuitive coherence and affinity with nature (in keeping with his previous features including 2022’s Afterwater and 2024’s The Garden Cadences) that mesmerizes.”

In Isabelle Kalandar’s Another Birth, eight-year-old Parastu (Shukrona Navruzbekova) is encouraged by her mother (Kalandar) to memorize poems by Forugh Farrokhzad (The House Is Black), whose lines are recited both on-screen and off. “Saddened by her mother’s pain and the constant craving of her grandfather (Niezmamad Navruzbekov) for a missing son,” writes Clarence Tsui at the Film Verdict, “Parastu roams the land and sets off with her best friend Guliston (Shoira Abdulgaezkhonova) to look for a mythical spirit that could rejuvenate her loved ones. Through their small expeditions, the world opens up for them and for the viewers: Janis Brod’s camerawork (with additional input from Vladimir Usoltsev) presents Tajikistan’s Shakhdara Valley in the most lyrical of ways.”

On Saturday at Anthology Film Archives, the festival will celebrate the publication of June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive with author Onyeka Igwe and then throw a spotlight on the work of Kohei Ando—a pioneer of video art and experimental media and this year’s recipient of the Ground Glass Award—with the first retrospective of his work in the U.S. Ando’s 1974 short My Friends in My Address Book will screen on Sunday, preceding Every Contact Leaves a Trace, the latest feature from filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. In 2021, Sachs received the first Ground Glass Award, and this year, on Wednesday, she will be honored at the San Francisco Film Festival with the Persistence of Vision Award.

The title of Every Contact Leaves a Trace refers to a principle of forensic science that Sachs reinterprets as the marks the many strangers she has befriended or forgotten have left on her life. The starting point is a stack of around six hundred business cards she’s collected over the years.

As Sachs sifts through them, “narrating associations or confronting blank spots in her recollection, the cards’ standardized form gives way to the unruliness of relation,” writes Delaney Holton for Screen Slate. “Sachs layers a restless flow of images, animations, and superimpositions over a diaristic voiceover, while frequent collaborator Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score hums beneath. She stages new encounters with select figures represented in her collection: a textile artist, a therapist, a refugee and mother who once cooked for her. Conversations always seem to turn toward days gone by, though the governing insight is less about recovering evidence of what ‘really’ happened than observing how the past is continually remediated through its recounting and the subtle gravity people exert upon one another’s lives across space and time.”

A 35 mm print of Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (2013), shot on analog video with three Sony AVC 3260s, will screen with Blair Barnes’s sitrep (2026), a twenty-minute short which “uses the 3250 as its foremost camera, with the Sony FX6 as the digital intermediary,” as Barnes explains. “The common denominator is the two-thirds-inch tube.”

Further Prismatic Ground 2026 highlights include several short film programs; three newly restored films by Iraqi Lebanese filmmaker Parine Jaddo; Adam and Zack Khalil’s Aanikoobijigan, the winner of an audience award at Sundance; “Horror, or the Splendour Of,” an evening of film and poetry; Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor, fresh from its screening in Los Angeles; and a program of contemporary Chinese experimental films.

The festival will wrap at Metrograph on Sunday with Gangsterism, the latest feature from Isiah Medina, who will deliver a lecture, “From ‘Images and Sounds’ to ‘Frames and Cuts,’” on Friday at Light Industry. In Gangsterism, film director Clem (Mark Bacolcol) sends his cinephilic associates looking for the culprit who has been leaking his work.

Writing for In Review Online, Dylan Adamson senses in Gangsterism “a certain family resemblance with the Godard of the 1980s, but a point of origin for the spirit of the work might rather be In Praise of Love (2001), a framed poster for which sits prominently in many of Gangsterism’s sets. With that film’s abrupt cut from celluloid to blown-out miniDV colors for its final thirty minutes, Godard asserted that a new digital cinema had arrived, whether we were ready for it or not. Medina accepts this as a challenge, developing a cinematic idiom that shirks all debts to the dominant twentieth-century modes.”

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]]> Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:17:00 +0000 <![CDATA[The Act of Watching]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9138-the-act-of-watching Did You See This?

Maurice Pialat’s La maison des bois (1971)

Two weeks after the big lineup announcement and just under three weeks before opening its seventy-ninth edition, Cannes has completed its Official Selection. As widely expected, James Gray’s Piper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller, will join twenty-one other contenders for the Palme d’Or in the main competition.

The festival has also added four films to its Un Certain Regard section, including Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho and Judith Godrèche’s A Girl’s Story, which draws from Annie Ernaux’s 2016 memoir; five films to its noncompetitive Cannes Premiere program, including Christophe Honoré’s Mariage au goût d’orange and Maria Martinez Bayona’s The End of It, starring Rebecca Hall, Noomi Rapace, Gael García Bernal, and Beanie Feldstein; one family screening, Olivier Clert’s Lucy Lost; and five special screenings, including Diego Luna’s Ashes.

Cannes has also lined up its Short Films Competition, featuring new work from Phạm Thiên Ân (Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell), Theo Montoya (Anhell69), and Federico Luis (Simon of the Mountain); unveiled its 2026 poster, a flashback to a shot of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis on the set of Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991); and set an Un Certain Regard Jury to be presided over by Leïla Bekhti.

The independent sidebars in Cannes have had a few announcements to make as well. Directors’ Fortnight has added a special screening of Red Rocks, which Bruno Dumont shot with a cast of young kids on the French Riviera, and Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light) will head up the jury for Critics’ Week. And another jury president was named on Thursday: Maggie Gyllenhaal will serve in Venice from September 2 through 12.

From July 3 through 11, Karlovy Vary will celebrate two anniversaries, its sixtieth edition and eighty years since its first. The retrospective program Out of the Past: KVIFF 60/80 will spotlight twenty films that, as artistic director Karel Och says, “are firmly linked to its history as milestones key to the KVIFF’s identity and reputation.” These include Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Emilio Fernández’s Río Escondido (1948), and Ken Loach’s Kes (1970). Another highlight will be the world premiere of a new restoration of Tainted Horseplay, a group portrait of friends in their thirties which Věra Chytilová shot in Karlovy Vary in 1988.

Dean Tavoularis, the production designer who worked closely with Francis Ford Coppola on thirteen films as well as with Michelangelo Antonioni, William Friedkin, Wim Wenders, and Arthur Penn, has died. He was ninety-three. Mike Barnes’s obituary for the Hollywood Reporter is a recommended read, peppered with stories about the challenges of realizing such unusual productions as Apocalypse Now (1979) and One from the Heart (1982). “I would be unable to list the many ways he benefited my work and my personal life,” writes Coppola. “He was a beloved uncle to my children. He was a great artist, a great friend, a great production designer, and a great man.”

This week’s highlights:

  • Through Tuesday, Film at Lincoln Center is currently launching the first U.S. theatrical run of Maurice Pialat’s seven-episode series La maison des bois (1971). Pialat himself takes a small role as Testard, a teacher overseeing a class of young boys, three of whom are staying at a gamekeeper’s house in the woods near a village far from the front where their fathers are fighting in the First World War. “Scenes of Testard’s students celebrating the signing of the armistice or of a gaggle of boys in motion—whether running, playing, marching in step with armed combatants, or gawping while rushing past an ambulance carrying those wounded in battle—crackle with unpredictability,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. The series is “a massive achievement, but pointedly not an epic,” writes Steve Macfarlane at Screen Slate. “Like any great film, it teaches you how to better watch it as it goes along . . . Taken as a whole, La maison des bois is an impassioned interrogation of childhood memory, a solemn acknowledgment of the spoils of wartime, and one of the most rewarding (and devastating) experiences a moviegoer can have.”

  • The recent passing of Joy Harmon, who shot to fame (albeit briefly) when she washed a car in Cool Hand Luke, happens to coincide with Angelica Jade Bastién’s deeply felt appreciation of Paul Newman, and in particular, his turn in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 film. “Witnessing a star-auteur in motion, in full command of voice, gaze, and what their body communicates has reached spiritual heights for me,” she writes. “By star-auteur, I’m not primarily referring to the fact that Newman was also a director. What I’m addressing is that his artistic identity formation in public, tending to his own cinematic image, the greatness of his performances, and the care he put into the work renders him an auteur of his films alongside and sometimes even superseding that of the director or writer.”

  • In an essay from the latest issue of Outskirts, “Real Graps: Luchadores, Kaijus, and Wrestling as Folk Poetry,” Alonso Aguilar writes about how such mid-twentieth-century heroes as Santo in Mexico and Godzilla in Japan came to embody the ideals of their respective nations. “These tales were unequivocally a part of industrial capitalist reproduction, with their rushed outputs and erratic quality control,” writes Aguilar. “And yet, at least during this period of postwar existential uncertainty and national reconstruction, they seemed to transcend those characteristics and genuinely exist as popular expressions: reclaimed, repurposed, and resignified without an ounce of whatever cynical intent came from the studio structures.”

  • As Sean Gilman has noted, in 2005, Johnnie To named Throw Down (2004), screening tomorrow and Sunday at New York’s Metrograph, as his favorite of the dozens of features the director had yet made. Bruce Bennett in Metrograph’s Journal: “Presenting as a triumph-over-adversity sports melodrama that ends in, at best, a draw; a romantic comedy without the slightest hint of rivalry, ardor, or sexuality; a violent crime picture absent clear-cut villainy, coherent heist film process, or sustained conflict; and a ‘vibes’ movie that restlessly keeps its characters in frantic and erratic motion for most of its running time, Throw Down continually subverts casual expectations.” And yet “the sights and sounds of Throw Down pull you in seductively while logical plot correlatives wriggle away.”

  • “Is it actually possible to make a decapitalized film?” asks Sophie Mellor, who, with fellow artist Simon Poulter and seventy collaborators recruited through Instagram, have realized We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher “with no budget, no studio backing, and no institutional permissions.” Fisher, the late cultural critic and theorist, is best known for his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and as Tim Burrows writes at the Quietus, “the effervescence of his prose and online persona reflected the playful, explorative discourse of the internet in the 2000s.” In the Guardian, Lauren Kelly notes the film  has been travelling to “universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms, and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden. The collective endeavor to undermine capitalism continues, the feature concludes: ‘We are making a film about Mark Fisher and, now that you are watching, so are you.’”

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000 <![CDATA[First Look, First Weekend]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9136-first-look-first-weekend
Bella Boonsang in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Morte Cucina (2025)

Two films that premiered in Rotterdam bookend this year’s First Look, the annual showcase of “adventurous new cinema” presented by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Director James N. Kienitz Wilkins and producer Emily Davis as well as a gaggle of cast and crew will open the fifteenth edition with The Misconceived, and the first half of the festival will run through Sunday. First Look 2026 then returns next Thursday before wrapping on May 3 with Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow.

At the Film Stage, Rory O’Connor has called The Misconceived an “incisive, inventive movie about the anxieties faced by the never-quite-made-it creative class.” Now in his forties, Tyler (John Magary) had hoped to be directing movies by this point in his life. Instead, he finds himself doing renovation work for an old college friend, Tobin (Jesse Wakeman), a sculptor successful enough to be campaigning to have his work invited to the Whitney Biennial.

That’s a fine set-up for discomfiting drama, but here’s the thing. As Kienitz Wilkins explains to Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw, he’s aiming to conjure something “authentic” via “inauthentic” means. The world of The Misconceived was built with Unreal Engine, a source-available commercial software driving such video games as Hogwarts Legacy and creating virtual sets for live-action shows like The Mandalorian.

“As was the case with its spiritual predecessor, The Plagiarists (2019), in which Kienitz Wilkins turned digital editing and awkward social interactions into dialectical exercises,” writes Chris Cassingham at In Review Online, “The Misconceived’s obvious accoutrements—3D animation, motion capture, stock music—obscure the more nuanced trickery simmering underneath their surfaces.” And the result is “a wildly entertaining film.”

“The Misconceived is, on its face, a surrealistic nightmare,” writes Chloe Lizotte at Reverse Shot, “and that feels right for the state of affairs it’s describing. But Wilkins and co. have found a way for the surrealistic nightmare to convey something personal and homegrown. The Misconceived is about the layers upon layers of human-made artifice that always stand between the maker and the viewer,” ultimately “transcending its status as a single film to expand on a self-referential, deeply idiosyncratic body of work.”

Friday

The first showcase screening of the festival offers another set of fortysomething adults at a crossroads. Noah (Chris Pine), a divorced single dad, and Rebecca (Jenny Slate), high-school teacher and debate coach, were once teenage sweethearts. And now they’ve walked back into each other’s lives. “Whether playing sexy comedy or hostility, raw emotional agita or hollowness, Chris Pine and Jenny Slate are so damn fine in Carousel that you keep wondering why we seldom get to see these gifted actors bite into characters of such substance and complexity,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Rachel Lambert’s latest is a strange and beguilingly lovely relationship drama. Eventually. But first, the writer-director needs to get out of her own way.”

In 2024, Damian McCarthy’s Oddity won audience awards at SXSW and the Overlook Film Festival, “and while it was topping year-end horror lists left and right, I was a bit less enthusiastic,” writes J. Hurtado at ScreenAnarchy. McCarthy has now cast Adam Scott as a reclusive and rather rude novelist who travels to an isolated Irish inn with, legend has it, a haunted honeymoon suite. “Whatever it was that was missing from Oddity for me is here in spades with Hokum, a nonstop fright factory that immediately bumps McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers,” writes Hurtado. “It’s a gripping story that unrelentingly ramps up the tension while simultaneously delivering some of the year’s best jump scares.”

Saturday

Kunsang Kyirong’s 100 Sunset is rooted in a Tibetan community in Toronto, where eighteen-year-old Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) steals a camera and befriends Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a recent immigrant. Kunsel’s “burgeoning fascination” with Passang “catalyzes a narrative charged with a sense of everyday enigma, with characters trying to get to the bottom of their own impulses and desires,” writes Adam Nayman in the Toronto Star. “At once precise and suggestive, 100 Sunset vibrates on dual frequencies of intimacy and unease that make it one of the most accomplished Canadian debuts in recent memory.”

Programmed by Genevieve Yue and David Schwartz, Little Stabs is a selection of avant-garde shorts that opens with a four-minute film by Alexandre Koberidze (Dry Leaf). Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and Kyath Battie will be on hand to say a few words about their latest works. Filmmaker, writer, and former researcher Erin Espelie will then present Ideas of Order, a rumination on cyanobacteria, the first organisms known to have produced oxygen. Experimental filmmaker Stephanie Barber narrates.

It Goes That Quick, the first feature codirected by editor Joe Stankus and cinematographer Ashley Connor, will see its world premiere at MoMI on Saturday. “A fittingly personal collaboration, it charts their extended family over a decade-long period with Mekas-esque intimacy,” writes Jordan Raup at the Film Stage.

Ramzi Bashour’s road movie Hot Water is “mellow, laid-back, and lived-in, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” wrote Jason Bailey in a dispatch from Sundance. Lubna Azabal plays a Lebanese single mom traveling from Indiana to California with her Americanized teenage son (Daniel Zolghadri). “The story beats don’t go anywhere unexpected,” notes Bailey, “but the performances are winners; Azabal turns a purely reactive character into something active and alive, Dale Dickey is (as ever) a joy in  her brief but memorable appearance, and Zolghadri is a real find; his mixture of charisma, restlessness, and recklessness legit recalls Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me.”

Shot in Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine over a stop-and-go period of nine years, We Put the World to Sleep stars director Adrian Țofei and cowriter Duru Yücel as fictionalized versions of themselves, filmmakers trying to make a movie about the end of the world and then deciding that they should just go ahead and actually end the world. Part of a trilogy that began with Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) and will conclude with Pure, We Put the World to Sleep won the Best Midnight Feature award at last year’s Nightmares Film Festival.

Sunday

The day begins at noon with two films running about half an hour each. Mohamed Mesbah—who will be taking part in a panel discussion about Muslim and SSWANA lives on-screen later in the afternoon—will present Still Playing, which centers on a Palestinian video-game developer whose work reflects the struggle of trying to raise two sons in Gaza as the war rages. And with L’mina, Randa Maroufi works with coal miners in Jerada, Morocco, to reconstruct an underworld in a living room with the aid of 3D scans and intimate Super 8 footage.

Ken Jacobs’s A Date with Shirley (2025), which MoMI calls a “colorful and cubist record of a Chinatown haircut,” will screen as part of The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, New York’s monthlong salute to one of the community’s most beloved couples. Shirley will be preceded by two shorts, Ana Vaz’s The Tree (2022) and Friedl vom Gröller’s Veronique (2025).

Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory!, set in Ukraine in some hopefully near future when the Russians have gone back home, won the Platform Award in Toronto. “Taking the acting lead, Vasyanovych and his crew run a Symbiopsychotaxiplasm playbook for scenes that repeatedly undercut and draw attention to their own construction,” wrote Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker last fall. “The mode is black comedy, with lots and lots of drinking, and whether or not you’ll like it depends as much on your tolerance for Ukrainian men getting hammered and skanking to Madness as your interest in master-shot compositional excellence. I found it all very funny and sharp.”

Nonfiction filmmaker Robb Moss’s “most remarkable work is his trilogy of ‘river films,’” writes Scott Macdonald at the top of his interview for Documentary Magazine, “beginning with the idyll, Riverdogs [1982], and continuing with The Same River Twice (2003), a feature during which several of Moss’s friends and Moss himself revisit Riverdogs, from their now-middle-aged perspective.” The Bend in the River (2025) returns again. “Together, the three films are as intimate and thoughtful an evocation of the process of aging as can be found in modern cinema.”

For Morte Cucina, his first feature since 2017’s Samui Song, Thai New Wave filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang reunites with actor Tadanobu Asano and cinematographer Christopher Doyle to tell the story of Sao (Bella Boonsang), an aspiring chef who recognizes in one the diners at the restaurant where she’s working the man who sexually abused her when she was a teen. “I won’t spoil it here,” wrote Katie Rife in a dispatch to RogerEbert.com from Tokyo, “but Pen-ek’s film speaks to the codependent nature of love and hate, and it makes a highly compelling argument for getting some Thai food after the movie.”

Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes won the Directing Award and an audience award when One in a Million premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance. The codirectors first spotted Israa, a Syrian refugee, in 2015, when she was eleven. She was selling cigarettes on a bustling street in Izmir, Turkey. The filmmakers followed the journey of Israa and her family—by bus, boat, train, and too often on foot—to Cologne, Germany, shooting over a period of ten years.

“Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders—truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage—but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “And despite all the history swirling around her, Israa remains at the center of this film. The unique achievement of One in a Million lies in the way it allows us to know this young woman while it preserves the mystery of a human soul.”

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:12:00 +0000 <![CDATA[IFFBoston 2026]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9135-iffboston-2026
Robert Christgau in Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic (2026)

“Only in Boston will you find a major movie festival that unspools everywhere except within the municipal boundaries of the city for which it’s named,” writes Ty Burr. The forty features and eleven short film programs lined up for this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston will be screening at the Brattle in Cambridge, the Coolidge Corner in Brookline, and the Somerville Theatre in Somerville.

Both Burr and Sean Burns, who previews IFFBoston 2026 for WBUR, have plenty of recommendations with a special emphasis on local talent. In Pourya Azerbayjani Dow’s As I Am, a sixty-year-old Iranian stations himself in an Airbnb in Hingham, Massachusetts, to stake out a house where an old friend from the Iran-Iraq War is now living with his wife and grandson. “This one’s a find,” writes Burr, “with flashes of meta-awareness that recall the greats of the Iranian New Wave.”

“Local film critic and music scene veteran Tim Jackson would have been at IFFBoston anyway as a spectator,” writes Burns, “but he’s here as a director this year with Marblehead Morning: 50 Years in Harmony, a profile of New England folk duo Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl, who have been performing together for half a century.” As it happens, Daring was a guest on Burr’s Watchcast three years ago, talking about his admiration for Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007) and his experience as a composer writing scores for nearly every film by John Sayles as well as for Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight (1991) and Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex (1998).

The twenty-third edition of New England’s largest film festival will open tonight with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters and wrap next Wednesday with Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. In Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Wilde plays “a flamboyant, foulmouthed, sex-crazed artist in various BDSM get-ups,” as Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri described her when Araki’s twelfth feature premiered at Sundance.

Wilde “has always stood out when she’s been allowed to go big,” wrote Ebiri, “and as controversial artist Erika Tracy, a self-described ‘pretentious bitch from hell,’ she gets what might be her best part yet. This is a woman who instantly peppers her newest assistant, the unassuming Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), with all sorts of inappropriate questions, and within a week of hiring him turns him into a sex toy, making him crawl on the floor of her office, tying him up, spanking him, dressing him up in leather and women’s clothing—just about all of it to his incessant delight.” In the Los Angeles Times, Amy Nicholson noted that “a murder mystery worms into the script that’s too screwy to be taken seriously. But as Erika’s mealy lover, Hoffman gets bossed around and humiliated and mostly digs his kinky misadventure. Me, too.”

Boots Riley, too, shows up in another film screening in Boston, Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic, a straight-ahead portrait of Robert Christgau, the “dean of American rock critics” renowned for the compact yet incisive reviews he’d stack up in the monthly Consumer Guide columns he wrote for the Village Voice from 1969 to 2006. At eighty-four, he’s still writing that column—and longer pieces as well—at Substack.

Along with fellow interviewees Colson Whitehead, Randy Newman, Thurston Moore, and Greil Marcus, Riley tells the camera about a Christgau review that hit home. As the frontman of the Coup, Riley especially appreciated reading Christgau on the band’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You because “I hear him listening.”

“For many,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear, “the first choice that comes to mind is his take on Prince’s Dirty Mind, an appraisal which ends with the immortal kicker, ‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.’” The Last Critic “isn’t the sort of documentary that reinvents the nonfiction filmmaking wheel. It doesn’t necessarily need to, thankfully,” adds Fear. “Wishnow makes sure all of the biographical beats get hit,” but “the film is also doing something besides letting us now praise a famous man, or serving up a portrait of artist as a critic (and critic as artist). It doubles as an ode to the art of criticism itself.”

Fellow music critic Carl Wilson has a few bones to pick with The Last Critic, but he does find that the film “gets across the ways Bob is at once warm and irascible, hypercompetent yet sometimes off-world. I like the loose framework of following him through the process of putting together one Consumer Guide, tracking the rhythm of his incredible work drive—and the accompanying sensation that, as Ann Powers memorably puts it, Bob is akin to a Jorge Luis Borges protagonist ‘whose intellectual passion leads him into a labyrinth he can never leave.’ He never wants to, apparently, till the literal living end.”

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]]> Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:54:00 +0000 <![CDATA[April Books]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9134-april-books
Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown in William Selig’s Something Good: Negro Kiss (1898)

Opening today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and running through Friday, A Hard Stare: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, and Their Circle on Film is a series organized by Andrew Durbin, the editor-in-chief of frieze and the author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. In 2026, Hujar is the more immediately recognizable name. Exhibitions such as the one currently on view in Berlin, several new books and reissues, and of course Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) have reignited interest in the work of the photographer best known for his portraits of New York cultural figures in the 1970s and ’80s.

When Thek died in 1988, barely one year after Hujar—Thek was fifty-four; Hujar, fifty-three—the obituary in the New York Times referred to him as “an artist best known for installations of objects depicting surrealistic scenes of death and renewal”—and then went a little fuzzy when it came to reporting on the cause of death. The truth was made plain the following year at the latest when Susan Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors with its dedication to Thek.

Thek’s “most important works were large-scale installations in Europe,” writes Alexander Cheves in the Guardian, “all lost, and which, as Durbin tells me, ‘everyone loved, but few could experience. And when they were finished, there wasn’t much left to sell. But I think his moment is about to come.’”

Thek and Hujar met in the mid-1950s, became lovers a few years later, and parted ways in 1975. “The Wonderful World is luscious and absorbing, if sometimes a bit giddy,” writes Moyra Davey at 4Columns. “But it doesn’t matter—Durbin’s writing is passionate, and novelistic in scope; it is also scholarly and precise where it needs to be about the art practices of both men.”

We should flag a few more events before we delve any further into this month’s roundup on new and noteworthy books. The third issue of Narrow Margin, featuring dossiers on the films of Larry Cohen and Rita Azevedo Gomes, will be launched in the UK next month as the Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Nothing but Life: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes, a retrospective running from May 2 through June 5. And on May 9, Megan O’Grady, whose new collection is How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, will present Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) in Los Angeles.

Great Silents

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival will open on May 6 with the recently reconstructed Queen Kelly (1929), directed—until he was booted—by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson as a convent girl who ends up running a brothel in German East Africa. Introducing her new book at Silent London, Pamela Hutchinson explains that The Curse of Queen Kelly is about how the film “came to be made, how and why it was abandoned, and how Gloria Swanson spent the rest of her life trying to reclaim it. This is film history as a rollercoaster ride. The things I learned surprised me, and the questions that it raised continue to trouble me. This is a story about the sharp end of silent Hollywood.” And Hutchinson has more to say in conversations with John Bleasdale (Writers on Film) and Marya E. Gates.

Paul Cuff has written a bit about von Stroheim and quite extensively about Abel Gance. His next book, Rediscovering Brigitte Helm: Film Performance and Stardom, 1925–1935, which will of course cover her unforgettable performance in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), doesn’t have a release date yet, but it does have a cover and a blurb. Cuff’s blog is The Realm of Silence, and he plans to use it in the coming days and weeks “to showcase a plethora of Helm memorabilia from my own collection.”

Lisa Stein Haven’s Early Buster Keaton: From the Vaudeville Stage to Comique Films, 1899–1920 is “a detailed, well-wrought look into the comedian’s early career(s),” writes Thomas Gladysz for Film International. Keaton’s “American-ness” is “at the heart of Haven’s investigation in to who Keaton becomes as a performer and filmmaker.”

Assertions of Presence

The discovery nearly ten years ago of Something Good: Negro Kiss, an 1898 short directed by William Selig and featuring vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown playfully smooching, has led to a book, Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Daniels talks with author Allyson Nadia Field about how, as she says, “it’s about not only the film but also how we understand the film. It’s about what the film meant then, which requires historical analysis. It’s about the performers and their lives and the other things that they did, and about the vexed world of turn-of-the-century Black performance. It’s about the cakewalk. It’s about the way these forms traveled into cinema. And ultimately, Something Good: Negro Kiss tells us a lot about Black performance and how we understand representation now, even though it’s a story from a hundred years ago.”

Artel Great—the author of The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance, a history of collaborations between comedians Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall in the late 1980s and early ’90s—will be at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles on Saturday to introduce Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (1991). On Sunday, Great will wrap the UCLA Film & Television Archive series The Black Pack: Rewriting American Comedy with a discussion of Murphy’s Harlem Nights (1989), and as Mark Olsen notes in the Los Angeles Times, further Black Pack programs are heading to Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago.

Ashley Clark has been talking about his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, with Ella Kemp at Letterboxd and with Ife Olujobi at Screen Slate. “It’s so crazy that year on year,” Clark tells Olujobi, “whenever any awards season comes around, we’re still talking about the same things, about the same types of erasure. I wanted to step aside from all of that and present something which confirms a history and a proud lineage of Black filmmaking, often against the odds. It’s not intended to be canonical—I’m not saying these are officially the hundred greatest Black films ever made—but it’s an assertion of presence.”

Star-Maker Machinery

“The construction of celebrity has always been collaborative: a script written by producers, journalists, and audiences alike,” writes Candice Wuehle at the top of a brief historical overview of books that “explore the machinery” of fame for Literary Hub. Over the past few weeks, Lena Dunham has kicked that machinery into high gear with Famesick, which the New York Times’ Alexandra Jacobs calls “an earnest, exposing book; a portrait of a lady on fire (indeed, a candle mishap in a hotel room sends her to the burn unit). Its quick hits of wit, especially about rich hipsters—‘film bros in their 30s and their wanly supportive girlfriends’ or the ‘jaunty, Keebler Elfish cadence’ of the Tracy Anderson workout method—are like sniffs from an oxygen mask.” Famesick “has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house.”

You’ll find much more on Famesick just about anywhere you turn, but let’s stick to the essentials. The New Yorker has an excerpt, “How I Became a Filmmaker,” and the book has been reviewed by Madeline Leung Coleman (Vulture), Sophie Gilbert (the Atlantic), and Scaachi Koul (Slate). David Marchese interviews Dunham and Amanda Hess profiles her, both for the NYT, and Emma Brockes talks with her for the Guardian.

Reviewing Liza Minnelli’s memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! for the New Yorker, Matt Weinstock writes: “Arranging her accomplishments on a single plane of vision is almost impossible, but what emerges in the attempt is a richly ouroboric body of work in which every concert alludes to her tabloid exploits and her tabloid exploits sometimes seem like guerrilla reenactments of things she’d done in her movies. As Minnelli once put it, ‘It’s a wacky career.’”

Kyle MacLachlan—FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and the Mayor of Portlandia—has written a memoir. Fictional Selves will hit the shelves in October.

Tinseltown’s Golden Ages

Lea Jacobs’s John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 “needs to be read slowly and carefully,” advises Kristin Thompson. “As Ford moves around among studios, different cinematographers, producers, script writers, and actors work with him from film to film, all having their influences . . . Jacobs accomplishes what most authors hope for: that the reader finishes by wanting to rewatch again films seen before, sometimes confident that her analyses will reveal them as much better than one had thought.”

Too often overlooked in discussions of what many claim to be the most golden year in Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1939, is George Cukor’s The Women, with its all-female cast featuring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine. “Directing ensemble scenes with upwards of half a dozen divas is no easy feat,” writes Caroline Golum at Little White Lies. “Leave it to Cukor to corral this kind of star power into a two hour-plus film that never takes a break to powder its nose.” September will see the release of Illeana Douglas’s Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women.

Not quite two months before he died in February 1966 at the age of fifty-seven, playwright, screenwriter, and director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) gave his last interview to Daniel Stein. The conversation is now being republished in Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, and Sabzian is running an excerpt. “This whole question of inner life,” said Rossen, wrapping an exchange about his final film, Lilith (1964), “I think there’s only one man that I know of in films that really and truly understands how to do it. And comes close, and that’s Bergman. I think Fellini’s a fake, totally and completely, a depraved—not depraved, that’s the wrong word—an Italian vaudevillian.” Rossen did like I vitelloni (1953), though. It “seemed realer.”

Reviewing David Streitfeld’s Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry for the Nation, Gus O’Connor writes that “Hollywood’s mythmaking machine was many things for McMurtry—a pain in the arse, an imperfect creative outlet, a curiosity, and, most importantly, a paycheck.” The author of the novels The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and the cowriter of the screenplays for Lonesome Dove (with Peter Bogdanovich) and Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana) “thought of himself, first and foremost, as a novelist and not a screenwriter. Yet one has to consider whether McMurtry’s films, more than his novels, have had a longer-lasting impact on popular culture, even if people have no idea he wrote those films. The question Streitfeld’s biography seems to orbit, then, is one about the connective tissue between the two mediums: how each of them informed the other and how, ultimately, the novel’s form was where McMurtry could best express his artistic and intellectual ideas.”

The “rampant consolidation” of the 1990s and early 2000s was a boon to the industry, as Thomas Schatz explains in Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System’s Last Hurrah: “Hollywood went on an absolute tear. Theater admissions in the U.S. spiked to their highest level in a half-century from 2002 to 2004, and all sectors were thriving—the major powers with their Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, and Spider-Man franchises; Indiewood with innovative gems like Lost in Translation (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); and the true independents with arthouse (and grindhouse) films and occasional runaway hits like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and The Passion of the Christ (2004). Not only was the movie industry booming, but it was striking a balance between art and commerce that hadn’t been seen since its vaunted Golden Age.”

New York, New York

Michael Lee Nirenberg’s Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking as Told by the Crews that Got the Shot takes us to the on-location sets of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), and more gritty tales of the big city. At the Village Voice, R. C. Baker reintroduces an excerpt that ran a couple of years ago, a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

“As a cornucopia of anecdotes, sassy portraits, and revealing asides, the book is unputdownably engaging,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Something that becomes apparent in Cinematic Immunity is that directors, for all their imaginative vision and dramatic sensibility, create, foremost, a social reality on the set, of which the events filmed—however artificial the design, however fantastic the story, however hyperbolic the performances—are a camera-angled slice of life. The views of the art of directing provided by the participants in Nirenberg’s book are exquisitely detailed and tangy with emotional immediacy.”

Michael Almereyda’s Writings and Relics: 1990–1995 chronicles a period when he shot Another Girl Another Planet (1992) in an East Village walk-up with a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 camera and directed the vampire movie Nadja (1994), which was “very much a neighborhood film,” as J. Hoberman wrote when a new restoration was released earlier this year. “Almereyda’s use of desolate downtown locations is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s in After Hours (1985). NoHo alleyways provide an instant netherworld and the illuminated windows of the old Tower Records on Broadway and East 4th Street are a notable effect. ‘The dead travel fast,’ Van Helsing [Peter Fonda] warns, and indeed, the woods of Transylvania feel but a subway ride away.”

Fiercely Independent

Jane Schoenbrun—whose third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, will open the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes next month—will also see their first novel released in October. Public Access Afterworld promises to be a “mesmerizing mashup of speculative fiction, horror, and conspiracy.”

Daniel Kraus—whose latest novel, Angel Down, was named one the ten best books of 2025 by the New York Times—has a new book out, Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World. Kraus claims to have seen George A. Romero’s 1968 classic more than three hundred times. “He has visited the locations, gone to conventions, purchased any and all ancillary products, and watched every remake, sequel, and spinoff, to the extent that I, a total stranger, am concerned for his well-being,” writes Vince Keenan. “There is a close reading of a film, there is a love letter to one, and then there’s what Kraus achieves here, which is an exploration of a work of art so intimate that it borders on invasive . . . I devoured Partially Devoured, and when I was done I saw Night of the Living Dead through Kraus’s eyes, appreciating it anew for the masterwork it is.”

Sticking Place Books is celebrating two other independent spirits with the publication of Gone Beaver and My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend: Lost Screenplays of the 1970s by Jim McBride (David Holzman’s Diary, The Big Easy) and My Lunches with Henry Jaglom, a collection of interviews with the late director of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) and Eating (1990) conducted by Daniel Kremer in the spirit of Jaglom’s own My Lunches with Orson. Kremer’s book features a foreword by Candace Bergen and an afterword by Noah Wyle.

En Avant

In 1983, Jane Brakhage, as she was known at the time, began interviewing her husband, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and within two years, the couple had a manuscript whose first title was The Autobiography of Stan Brakhage. The book project was set aside as the Brakhages’ marriage fell apart, but years later, the late P. Adams Sitney encouraged Jane Wodening, who had taken a new name and started a new life as a solitary writer in Colorado, to take a fresh look at the book—which was then published in 2015 as Brakhage’s Childhood. Sitney and David E. James then turned to further writing by and interviews with Wodening, and Sticking Place Books has just released The Autobiography of Jane Brakhage.

The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, a multi-venue series, carries on in New York through the end of the month. It coincides with the publication of I Walked Into My Shortcomings, a collection of Ken Jacobs’s writing and interviews edited by William Rose. Metrograph’s Journal is running an excerpt: “My early years were in a Yiddish speaking household in Williamsburg, where my grandfather took me by the hand to the Marcy on Sundays to see a Yiddish weepie double billed with a Hopalong Cassidy. Though I’d often be playing under the seats, some of the features had left impressions, mysterious disembodied cine-ghosts that I longed to meet with again.”

John Coulthart, in the meantime, flags the forthcoming publication this summer of Sophia Satchell-Baeza’s Sensual Laboratories: Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art, featuring a foreword by Jarvis Cocker.

Kluge and Farocki

Since Alexander Kluge passed away last month, there have been remembrances to recommend from A. J. Goldman in the New York Times and Bruce Robbins in the Baffler, and Carl Wilson points us to the late Gary Indiana’s engaging interview with Kluge that ran in a 1989 issue of BOMB Magazine. “At one level,” writes Sukhdev Sandhu at 4Columns, “Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances, a collaboration with Anselm Kiefer, translated by Alexander Booth, is merely the latest in Kluge’s ongoing book-length dialogues with visual artists, among them Georg Baselitz, Thomas Demand, and Gerhard Richter. But his affinities with Kiefer run especially deep . . . It’s been claimed that Kluge’s work is cold and impersonal. He himself says he writes ‘antirhetorically.’ Yes—but really, no. Intelligence Is the Art—its depths and orbits, elastic latitudes, lived and speculated histories—is supremely thermal.”

“Harun Farocki’s film and video work is almost too interesting to be art,” wrote Ken Johnson in the New York Times in 2011. Ted Fendt has translated a 1969 essay by Farocki that will be included in a forthcoming book, and it’s now up at e-flux. “Agitation speaks because it has a goal in view, and when it speaks, it does not lose sight of that goal,” wrote Farocki. “The agitation film is not produced in the film’s sphere of production; it comes into being only in agitation.”

Endnotes

In the latest seasonal roundup for Sabzian, Tillo Huygelen has notes on new books on André Bazin, the French New Wave and the generation of filmmakers in France that followed it, Anne-Marie Miéville, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Jocelyne Saab, Peter Watkins, and a whole lot more.

One of the most promising titles due this summer is The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, a new collection and the sixth book by Erika Balsom (Ten Skies). May 11 will see the release of the critical anthology Art/Film, and Melissa Anderson has been talking with Film Comment Podcast hosts Clinton Krute and Devika Girish about her collection, The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024.

Kier-La Janisse, the author of House of Psychotic Women and the director of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, has been running an independent publishing imprint, Spectacular Optical, which is now branching out into theatrical, streaming, and home viewing distribution. The first release is slated for tomorrow, Earth Day. Christopher Morris’s A Year in the Field (2023) will screen in the evening at the Roxy Theatre in Saskatoon, Canada.

Unlike many directors, Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) seems to have had a blast spending nearly a full “truly great” year promoting his movie. As Rafa Sales Ross reports for Variety, Mendonça is “currently writing a book about the ‘crazy’ experience.”

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]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:17:00 +0000 <![CDATA[A Reluctant Farewell to Nathalie Baye]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9133-a-reluctant-farewell-to-nathalie-baye
Nathalie Baye in Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980)

“I try to be watchful and make sure that I do not repeat myself,” Nathalie Baye told critic and French Film Festival UK founding director Richard Mowe in 2017. Baye, who has passed away at the age of seventy-seven, had broken through in François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), playing Joëlle, the script girl who assists Ferrand, the film director played by Truffaut himself, in maintaining some semblance of order on a set teaming with overblown yet fragile egos.

Surrounded by dazzling and dashing stars such as Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Joëlle is a rather plain yet calmly anchoring presence. “There was no way I wanted to be typed as the girl next door,” Baye told Mowe. “I saw myself playing dangerous and unsympathetic women.” In a career spanning more than fifty years, she managed to run the gamut, appearing in more than eighty films, garnering ten nominations for César awards—France’s rough equivalent to the Oscars—and winning four.

Born in Normandy, Baye grew up as the only child of a couple of starving artists “who, according to Nathalie, spent their lives ‘in a perpetual state of adolescent crisis,’” as Kim Willsher notes in the Guardian. She struggled with dyslexia and dyscalculia and found respite in dance, which led her to decide that her future would be in the theater. She often credited Truffaut with instilling in her a passion for cinema instead.

When Olivier Père, the director of Arte France Cinéma, interviewed Baye in 2021, he was primarily interested in hearing her talk about just a handful of the many directors she’d worked with: Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Claude Chabrol, Xavier Beauvois, and Xavier Dolan. There was a brief detour in the conversation when Père asked about Catch Me If You Can (2002), featuring Baye as the mother of Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man, but what Père wanted to know was whether she and Steven Spielberg swapped stories about Truffaut, who played a French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). They did.

Baye was particularly struck by what the two directors had in common. Driven by essentially upbeat, can-do spirits, both men, she said, lived for cinema. As Acquarello has noted, Truffaut’s The Green Room (1978), starring the director as a death-obsessed journalist and Baye as a secretary he befriends, is “an atypically static and somber film,” but Baye remembers the two of them constantly cracking each other up, which seems to have irritated assistant director Suzanne Schiffman no end.

Probably to the surprise of very few, Baye found Pialat to have a much “darker” outlook. In The Mouth Agape (1974), she plays one of four main characters, Nathalie, the wife of the son of a woman who is dying while her husband makes moves on other women. The director of “one gloriously uncomfortable film after another,” as Phillip Lopate has put it, Pialat was “a complicated humanist whose sympathies for his characters ran so deep that he felt no obligation to sugarcoat their flaws.” (Here we should mention that, starting on Wednesday, New York’s Film at Lincoln Center will present the U.S. theatrical premiere of La maison des bois, a 1971 series Pialat made for French television, along with three of his features.)

Baye was impressed with the way Chabrol involved so many members of his own family in the making of his fiftieth feature, The Flower of Evil (2003), and she had nothing but high praise for her fellow cast members. Bernard Le Coq plays the husband of her Anne, a candidate in an upcoming local election, and their kids from previous marriages (Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Doutey) are encouraged by their aging aunt (Suzanne Flon) to become lovers. “Another tastefully baroque roasting of petty bourgeois rites within suffocating domestic environs,” wrote Jessica Winter in the Village Voice, Chabrol’s “impassive melodrama begins with a prowl up a winding staircase that, as in La cérémonie and his previous effort, Merci pour le chocolat, can only portend corkscrewing revelations of murder and deceit.”

Baye won a César for her portrayal of a recovering alcoholic who heads up a Parisian police squad in The Young Lieutenant (2005), and Xavier Beauvois cast her again in the lead of his 2017 feature, The Guardians. Baye’s Hortense runs a farm while the men are off fighting in the First World War, and her daughter is played by Laura Smet, the real-life daughter of Baye and Johnny Hallyday, the hard-drinking rocker and occasional movie star who admitted to being taken by surprise himself when he and Baye fell for each other. Their parting nearly five years later was amicable, and they remained friends until Hallyday’s death in 2017. In 2015, Baye and Smet appeared together as comedically skewed versions of themselves in an episode of Call My Agent! directed by Cédric Klapisch.

Xavier Dolan was twenty-three when he directed Baye in his third feature, Laurence Anyways (2012), but he’d been acting since he was four, and as Baye told Père, that experience set him apart from many of the other directors she’d worked with. In Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World (2016), the winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes, Baye plays the garishly outfitted mother of a playwright who informs members of his family that he hasn’t seen in twelve years that he has a terminal illness. The cast is stellar—Gaspard Ulliel, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel—but on the whole, reviews were scathing.

A conspicuous absence in Père’s interview is Jean-Luc Godard, who directed Baye in Every Man for Himself (1980), which Godard called “my second first film,” and Détective (1985), “a rich comedy about the age of video” (Fernando F. Croce) dedicated to John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Clint Eastwood and costarring Hallyday, Laurent Terzieff, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Brasseur, Emmanuelle Seigner, and in her first role, Julie Delpy.

For her supporting performance in Every Man for Himself, Baye won her first César, and she was nominated that same year for the Best Actress César for playing an exhausted public school teacher in Bertrand Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation (1980). The following year, she won another Best Supporting Actress César for her turn as a troubled wife in Pierre Granier-Deferre’s Strange Affair (1981), and the year after that, won her first Best Actress César for her portrayal of a Parisian sex worker in Bob Swaim’s La balance (1982).

As news of Baye’s passing broke over the weekend, French president Emmanuel Macron remembered her as “a constant presence in French cinema over the past few decades, from François Truffaut to Tonie Marshall.” Outside of France, Marshall is not exactly a household name, but in 1999, she had a tremendous box-office and critical hit with Venus Beauty Institute and became the first woman to win the César for Best Director.

Marshall wrote her comedy set in a Parisian salon with Baye in mind as the lead, Angèle, whose coworkers are played by Bulle Ogier, Mathilde Seigner, and then-newcomer Audrey Tautou. Cast in lesser roles are even bigger names: Emmanuelle Riva, Edith Scob, Claude Jade, Marie Rivière, and Claire Denis. “Venus Beauty Institute has more than an unexpectedly playful and pointed sense of humor,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, and Baye delivers “one of her strongest performances. Sadness, anticipation, pity, fury, frankness, humor, and love, all these emotions and more play across her face as Angèle tries to cope with the choices life has given her.”

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]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:59:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Nobler in the Mind]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9131-nobler-in-the-mind Did You See This?

Tilda Swinton in Jes Benstock and Luke Losey’s The Box (1996)

The week began with lineups for two Cannes sidebars, Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and there’s one more that needs noting: ACID, the program that’s been put together by an association of film directors since 1992. You may not recognize many—or any—of the names behind this year’s nine selected titles, but ACID has quite a track record, having in the past presented first features from Radu Jude, Justine Triet, and Kaouther Ben Hania.

In other festival news, Tribeca, too, is all lined up and will open with Questlove’s latest music documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World). The twenty-fifth anniversary edition will run from June 3 through 14. Seattle (May 7 through 17) will showcase more than two hundred films and open with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Ebertfest is staging its “Last Dance” today and tomorrow, and in Nyon, Switzerland, Visions du Réel, opening today and running through April 26, will host guest directors Kelly Reichardt, Laura Poitras, and Sergei Loznitsa as well as artist Meriem Bennani.

Fans of Bollywood movies, “Brimful of Asha,” and/or the 2005 album You’ve Stolen My Heart are mourning the loss of playback singer Asha Bhosle, who has passed away at the age of ninety-two. “In some ways,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas for NPR, “Bhosle's career was the reverse image of that of her older sister, the equally famous playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. While Mangeshkar earned her reputation singing the roles of chaste, virtuous heroines, Bhosle specialized in saucier characters, such as in one of her most famous songs, ‘Dum Maro Dum.’ By Bhosle’s own reckoning, she recorded some 12,000 songs over a career that spanned about eight decades.”

This week’s highlights:

  • Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed, is the latest of many reinterpretations to appear in just the last year or so, and in his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri references plenty of them before considering why it is that “we seem to be at a rather ripe moment” for revivals of “the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays.” Hamlet “embraces grief, rage, betrayal, indecision, cowardice, duty, melancholy, madness, and so much more,” writes Ebiri. “For all his royal status, Hamlet is a figure of resistance, who targets, mocks, humiliates, and ultimately kills a king. He does this not for profit or ambition—unlike, say, Macbeth or Richard III—but for noble reasons. In one of this picture’s more intriguing twists on the material, Shakespeare’s invading Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, now becomes an encampment of activists pushed out of their homes by the Elsinore Corporation. Thus, Ahmed’s Hamlet discovers not just his father’s murder and betrayal but also the criminality on which his family’s entire wealth has been built. Hamlet’s disillusionment here feels of the moment, but it’s also thoroughly appropriate for this most rebellious of cultural icons.”

  • Starting tomorrow, New York’s Metrograph will screen new restorations of four erotic films directed by Radley Metzger, two of them released under his “nom-de-porn,” Henry Paris, and all of them introduced by Rob King, the author of the Metzger biography Man of Taste, and Ashley West, the founder of the Rialto Report. In his Journal essay on “that most aristocratic of pornographers,” Nick Pinkerton writes: “The elements that set Paris’s hardcore apart from the lower order of fap fodder are much the same that established Metzger as one of softcore’s gold standards: a keen compositional sense, a unifying air of suavity and ease, a sharp ear for comic dialogue, an aptitude for getting the best from performers, and a nimble erotic imagination uncolonized by pornographic cliché.”

  • Edoardo Rugo poses a question he then sets out to answer in his thoroughgoing essay on Marco Bellocchio for Bright Lights Film Journal. “Though shaped by a Marxist-Leninist background, his political vision frequently dissolves like smoke in the wind at the moment of mise en scène, in the crystallization of the cinematic image,” writes Rugo. “It is precisely this ‘coherent incoherence’ that becomes the true mechanism running through a career as vast as Bellocchio’s—a continuous and unrelenting engagement with history, which repeatedly translates into a disenchantment with the processes that political history is supposed to bring about and that private history is supposed to bear. Is it this disillusionment, this loss of faith in the student movements and the eventual recognition of rebellion’s impossibility, that forms the true authorial question in Bellocchio’s cinema?”

  • Inspired by “Film and Dreams,” a 1978 essay by Vlada Petrić—theoretician, historian, and cofounder of the Harvard Film Archive—Kinaesthesia is an exploration of dream sequences in silent-era cinema. Director Gerald Fox, who narrates over a rapid-fire series of countless clips, will be in London this evening to launch a season of hallucinatory movies he’s programmed for the BFI. For AnOther Magazine, Rory Doherty gets Fox talking about five essential sequences, such as the one in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) when the projectionist climbs into a movie. “The precision of those effects; they’re actually better than CGI,” says Fox. “You sense the authenticity of the imagery.” In Metropolis (1927), Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder has ominous visions, and Fritz Lang pulls off the sequence “through photographic means, through montage, through architectural means. Every film director who has wanted to do sci-fi with that kind of edge has gone back to that film.”

  • For designers, or for those of us who simply enjoy engaging eye candy, Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s newsletter Meanwhile is an essential subscription. The latest issue, #233, points us to a daunting array of sci-fi book covers, a postcard collection that could kill an entire afternoon if you’re not careful, coffee machines turned into tiny cafés by “Wes Anderson’s go-to model-maker Simon Weisse,” and a delightful, five-year-old interview with director Jes Benstock about the making of the stop-motion animated video for Orbital’s “The Box,” featuring Tilda Swinton as an alien wandering through East London. She was very, very into it, and as Benstock explains, she left the team “a gift” that they would only discover when they saw the rushes.

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]]> Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000 <![CDATA[This Is Not a Fiction 2026]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9128-this-is-not-a-fiction-2026
Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990)

Barbara Kopple will be in Los Angeles this evening and tomorrow to discuss her two Oscar-winning documentaries, Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dream (1990), as the American Cinematheque presents new restorations of both films as part of the third edition of This Is Not a Fiction. Kopple will be one of dozens of guests talking about their work as the festival screens forty-five films from today through April 24.

Writing about Harlan County in the Village Voice twenty years ago, Michael Atkinson noted that “Kopple documents a 1973 Kentucky coal miners’ strike in what amounts to real time—there are no after-the-fact summaries, but a persistent present tense of murder, gun threats, crowd violence, poverty, corporate usury, and in the end, astonishing communal solidarity . . . In 1976, Kopple’s rather terrifying film rocked its minuscule audience and instantly became a cultural touchstone.”

In 2017, Melissa Anderson wrote in the Voice that Harlan County is “filled not just with the talk—aggrieved, mournful, funny, inflamed—of the miners and their families but with their songs. When bird-boned Florence Reece, nearing seventy-five at the time, sings her anthem ‘Which Side Are You On?’ to an auditorium of strikers, her voice is almost whisper-soft. The lyrics, though, are emphatic, urgent, and always timely, as is Harlan County USA.”

Ten years after that standoff in Kentucky, around 1500 workers walked out of the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, after the company introduced a pay cut. Labor activist Ray Rogers alerted Kopple, and as she told Bailey Pennick when American Dream screened at Sundance back in January, the community “welcomed me with open arms and treated me and my crew like family.”

In the Reagan era, though, “it was hard to gather funding for a film on unionism,” said Kopple. “There was a point in the middle of the infamous Minnesota winter where we had less than three hundred dollars in the bank . . . I couldn’t have done it without the support and sacrifice of my crew, and the strength of the people of Austin, Minnesota.”

The story that played out in front of Kopple’s cameras became far pricklier than the more streamlined, us-vs.-them narrative that drives Harlan County. Rogers convinced the local union to ditch the strategy advised by the national union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and as Kenneth Turan wrote in his 1992 review in the Los Angeles Times, “the company and its positions almost fade from view in favor of the agonizing and unprecedented battle that took place within the striking union itself, a fight without heroes or villains, only victims.” American Dream is “above all a thoroughly human story, a tale of euphoric highs and dark lows, of a battle over principle that chillingly turned brother against brother and reduced participants to fistfights, fury, and tears.”

For Murray Kempton, who wrote about American Dream in the New York Review of Books in 1992, Kopple’s “gift is to make us feel almost as kin to the few who quit as to the many who stuck it out. There is no cruelty quite like that which gives a man or woman no choice except the surrender of dignity for a job or of a job for dignity.” Kopple will be in New York on Friday, May 1, when the new restorations of Harlan County and American Dream open at the IFC Center.

Restorations and Anniversaries

A good number of screenings at this year’s festival are being cross-pollinated with the Cinematheque’s current retrospectives of work by Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice for Sacro GRA (2013) and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Fire at Sea (2016), and Peter Watkins, the director of The War Game (1966) and La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) who passed away last November. There are also ongoing tributes to Želimir Žilnik, a key figure in the Yugoslav Black Wave, and Caveh Zahedi, whose confessional and ultra-meta “audacity is so overwhelming as to be blinding,” as Christine Smallwood has written in the New York Times. “It takes some time to notice that underneath the humor and raw willingness to humiliate himself is a rigorous, brutally efficient editor, shaping every moment for impact.”

This Is Not a Fiction will also present three short films that Sergei Eisenstein shot in Mexico in the 1930s, launching the Cinematheque’s series of Eisenstein restorations running from Sunday through May 17. Ross McElwee will be in town on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss two films he’s made about his late son, Photographic Memory (2011) and Remake (2025), and the new restoration of a true documentary landmark, Sherman’s March (1985). This “may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen,” wrote Nick Davis in 2006. Sherman’s March is a “humorously hangdog sojourn through the American South: the director’s home territory, densely populated with relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are trying to atomize his creeping dejection and couple him off with one Dixieland bachelorette or another.”

Among the West Coast premieres is Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Everybody to Kenmure Street, a chronicle of the spontaneous—and surprisingly successful—protests following the arrests of two men of Indian Sikh background by immigration authorities in Glasgow in the summer of 2021. “In the age of ICE and MAGA, and the Trump-inspired nationalist movements in the UK,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “it’s an amazing story of a community triumph, showing how the nasty little habits of domineering policing can be countered by stubbornly British—and in this case, specifically Scottish—insistence on justice. It’s a morale-boosting film.”

Howard Brookner completed Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS in 1987, and Aaron Brookner, his nephew, spent a dozen years working on the restoration that premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival. Wilson’s grand project, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, a collaboration with Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars, would have been a twelve-hour opera staged in six cities in conjunction with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Howard Brookner’s film is “a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself,” wrote Lauren Wissot at the top of her interview with Aaron Brookner for Filmmaker in September. “Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access—an overused term when it comes to docs—to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world.” The new restoration will screen in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music series Robert Wilson and the Moving Image, opening on Saturday and running through April 23.

If all this sounds deadly serious, rest assured, there will be moments of levity at This Is Not a Fiction in the coming days. Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy will be on hand for a screening of Best in Show (2000), which the late Eddie Cockrell called a “barkingly funny” mockumentary “that does for those canine pageants what [Guest’s] 1996 Waiting for Guffman did for small-town theatrics.” Akiva Schaffer, who codirected Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) with Jorma Taccone, will celebrate the tenth anniversary of what Screen’s Tim Grierson has called a “superbly silly sendup of the modern musical landscape” that is “as thimble-deep as the throwaway hits it’s satirizing, but also just as lively.”

Jackass Number Two turns twenty this year, and Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine will be there for Saturday’s screening. “Debased, infantile, and reckless in the extreme,” wrote Nathan Lee in the New York Times, “this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated, and cathartic comedy in modern movies.”

This Is Not a Fiction 2026 will wrap with Los Lobos: Native Sons, Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti’s portrait of the band at fifty, featuring interviews with Linda Ronstadt, Rubén Blades, Tom Waits, Dolores Huerta, Danny Elfman, Jackson Browne, Cheech Marin, Edward James Olmos, Peter Frampton, and George Lopez. And Los Lobos will tie it all up with a live acoustic set.

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:31:00 +0000 <![CDATA[New Directors/New Films 2026, Part Two]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9127-new-directors-new-films-2026-part-two
Vladlena Sandu’s Memory (2025)

Following up on last week’s overview of the first half of this year’s New Directors/New Films, the festival of fresh work by emerging filmmakers copresented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, we’re taking a look here at films screening from today through the closing weekend. “However fraught the state of the movie industry,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “New Directors insists that there are always filmmakers from across the globe producing inspired, inspiring work that demands attention, deserves respect, and may earn your love. It’s making good on that promise this year with one of its best lineups in ages.”

Wednesday

Set in Iztapalapa, a working-class borough of Mexico City, Clemente Castor’s Cold Metal opens with a brief street gambling sequence before shifting focus to two brothers. Óscar (Óscar Hernández) has escaped from rehab, and Mario (Mario Banderas) awakens to “images that don’t belong to him.”

Dispatching to Filmmaker from last summer’s FIDMarseille, where Cold Metal won the Prix Georges de Beauregard, Cici Peng wrote that “Castor’s work is often aggressively opaque, guided by a seemingly haphazard editing logic that deliberately short-circuits narrative momentum as the film drifts between nonfiction, epistolary voice-over, gestural performance, and the supernatural, staged by a largely nonprofessional cast.”

Peng was “surprised by the sensation of being adrift, teleporting between ever-shifting film textures and terrains, from the underground to the skies of what appeared like the edge of the world. The film’s dialectics aren’t strictly ideological but affective: like Mario, I found myself clinging to signs, grasping at symbols, trying to decode meaning from disorder in an almost schizophrenic mode before suspending any desire for formal cohesion.”

Yuiga Danzuka was twenty-six when his debut feature premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last year. Brand New Landscape is an “elegant interweaving of a Japanese family’s emotional unraveling with meditations on Tokyo’s ceaseless cycles of alienation and renewal,” wrote Patrick Brzeski at the top of his interview with the director for the Hollywood Reporter. “But what many Western critics overlooked is that the film isn’t merely an above-average entry in the arthouse family drama canon—it’s also a bold and somewhat provocative act of autobiography.”

Danzuka is the son of renowned earthscape designer Eiki Danzuka. In Brand New Landscape, an architect cuts out from a family holiday to take on a star-making project, leaving his wife depressed and his two children feeling abandoned. Ten years later, the son, on an impulse, snatches an opportunity to check in on his estranged father.

“Danzuka’s framing of people in buildings calls to mind great poets of urban alienation like Antonioni and Edward Yang,” writes Nelson Kim for Filmmaker. “The film has some rough spots—a brief documentary interlude critiquing the father’s designs for gentrifying once-diverse neighborhoods lands clumsily, and a promising third-act turn to magical realism fizzles out—but the core story of a broken family moving haltingly toward reconciliation carries a quiet emotional charge that lingers afterward.”

Thursday

Manon Coubia’s short film The Fullness of Time (2016) won a Golden Leopard in the Pardi di domani competition at Locarno and another of Coubia’s shorts, Children Leave at Dawn (2017), screened at Critics’ Week in Cannes. Coubia has also spent ten years as a warden at a mountain refuge, an experience that inspired her debut feature, Forest High, which garnered a Special Mention when it premiered in the Berlinale’s Perspectives program.

Forest High was shot on 16 mm over four seasons as three women, one after another, serve as seasonal caretakers for a hut in the northern Alps, seeing to the bare-bones needs of hikers during their brief stopovers. This is “not a film of major dramatic incidents and revelations, though its payoff is clear and cleansing as a mountain spring,” writes Variety’s new chief film critic, Guy Lodge.

At the A.V. Club, Monica Castillo recommends five films from the ND/NF 2026 lineup, and Ukrainian director Vladlena Sandu’s Memory is one of them. Born in 1982 in Crimea, Sandu was six when she was sent to live with her abusive grandfather in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The Chechen Republic won its independence in its first war with the Russian Federation but lost it again in the second war. Sandu walked past corpses in the streets and took shelter from the bombs falling from the sky.

“To recreate these difficult scenes from her youth,” writes Castillo, “Sandu uses toys, animation, her family’s photo album, younger actresses to stand in for her younger self, and dreamy 16 mm footage of the sites in her story—all of which makes for a painful yet playful look back at the trauma her family endured. Memory references Sergei Parajanov‘s intricate use of design and color, Andrei Tarkovsky’s careful use of landscape and time, as well as the dioramas of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Although her story is a tragic one, it never loses its sense of childlike wonder.”

Friday

A social worker in Brussels turns to sex work to make ends meet when she unexpectedly finds herself raising her daughter on her own in Alexe Poukine’s Kika. “At first blush, “ writes Manohla Dargis, “the filmmaking in Kika seems less radical than the movie’s open-minded attitude toward outré sex work. Yet the director Poukine’s choices, including her use of some productively disorienting narrative ellipses—time can leap forward in an eye blink—accentuates the destabilization that comes to define the life of its titular heroine (a nuanced, appealing Manon Clavel). Equally impressive is how fluently Poukine slides from realism to expressionism in a tough, touching scene in which Kika looks deep inside herself while keening in a room as red as blood.”

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno, screens Friday evening and Sunday afternoon and then sees a weeklong run at New York’s Metrograph starting on April 24. Drawing from two manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Miyake tells two tales, one of a summer romance by the sea, the other of a wintry friendship slowly forged at an isolated inn.

Miyake “combines dollops of Hong Sangsoo—bifurcation, self-reflexivity about the writing process—with the more classical, Imamura-style stringency one finds in Hamaguchi’s work,” writes Michael Sicinski, who finds Two Seasons to be “a perfectly pleasant ninety minutes, and I don’t mean that as faint praise.” Metrograph notes that the film has been “hailed ‘a true masterpiece’ by Shigehiko Hasumi, Japan’s greatest living film critic.”

Saturday and Sunday

As the New Yorker’s Richard Brody points out, ND/NF 2026 “highlights a diverse array of movies with invigorating approaches to narrative form—foremost, Variations on a Theme, the second feature by the South African filmmakers Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, which weaves together multiple story lines in its hour-and-five-minute span.” The winner of the Tiger Award, Rotterdam’s top prize, Variations is set in the South African village of Kharkams, where Hettie—played by Jacobs’s grandmother, Hettie Farmer—prepares to celebrate her eightieth birthday. “The life of the rural region is framed in airy and luminous wide-screen images that recur with a lyrical vision of vast arcs of time amid dramatic social change,” writes Brody.

Chinese artist and filmmaker Viv Li has traveled the world, and when the pandemic hit, she found herself more or less stuck in Berlin. She put her five years in the German capital to good use, though, shooting her first feature, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest. “Following her semi-autobiographical character through the cultural landscape of Berlin and Beijing, the film presents the artist as a ‘misfit’ between two cultures,” writes Mia Butter at the top of her interview with Li for Berlin Art Link. “Tackling themes of migration, belonging in a globalized world, and self-acceptance, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest explores the local queer scene in Berlin, traditional family values in China, and the state of limbo in which the protagonist finds herself.”

This year’s ND/NF will wrap with the U.S. premiere of Rosanne Pel’s Donkey Days, starring Jil Krammer and Susanne Wolff as adult sisters competing for the affection of their manipulative mother (Hildegard Schmahl). “Pel deftly weaves this tragicomic narrative from the same cloth as the Dogme 95 canon,” writes Sonya Vseliubska for Notebook. “It’s clear from her handheld camera, which captures her heroines in both hysteria and sadness, as well as the improvisatory style of her talented actresses, who wind their way through serpentine mise-en-scènes in sprawling rooms. But what truly gives Donkey Days its Vinterbergian touch is the dramatic setup at the heart of the story—a toxic family gathered around the dining table, where the aim is not to eat but to fight.”

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]]> Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:39:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Directors’ Fortnight 2026 Lineup]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9125-directors-fortnight-2026-lineup
Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens (2026)

First announced in 2022, Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam will finally see its world premiere as the opening film at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight. Balagov’s two previous features premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, where Closeness (2017) won the FIPRESCI Prize and Beanpole (2019) won both the FIPRESCI and the award for Best Director. Presenting the Fortnight lineup on Tuesday morning, artistic director Julien Rejl said that Butterfly Jam “brings to mind the films of James Gray.”

With a cast headlined by Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough and featuring Harry Melling, Tommy McInnis, and Monica Bellucci, Butterfly Jam tells the story of fifteen-year-old Pyteh, an aspiring professional wrestler who helps out at the Circassian restaurant in New Jersey run by his father and his aunt. One of his dad’s misguided schemes blows up in his face, and Pyteh will have to come to terms with the man his father truly is.

Founded in 1969 by the French Directors Guild, the Fortnight will screen nineteen features and nine short and medium-length works during its fifty-eighth edition, which runs from May 13 through 23. The selection of features is finely balanced between new work by established directors, debuts, fiction, nonfiction, and animation.

Big Names, Fresh Work

Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid has been adapted by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Benoît Jacquot, and last summer, Radu Jude told the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai that his version will be “like a very distant dialogue” with the original story. “I want to speak about immigration and about Romanians working abroad. It’s about a woman who works for a French family in Bordeaux while her own small daughter remains home . . . I’m interested in exploring this connection between the Western world and Romania and Eastern Europe through the story of a character.”

Adapted from Keiran Goddard’s 2024 novel by playwright Enda Walsh, who wrote the screenplays for Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025), Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning tracks five friends who have grown up together in a working-class neighborhood in Birmingham, England. They had dreams and plans to realize them, but the first sentence of Goddard’s novel reads: “And then none of it happened.”

Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom (La libertad doble) is a sequel to his 2001 debut, La libertad, which spent seventy-three mostly quiet minutes with Misael, an Argentine woodcutter simply going about his day. Twenty-five years later, Misael is still at it, still working alone in the forest, and still free—until his older sister falls ill and he’s called on to care for her.

Dominga Sotomayor has won a Tiger Award in Rotterdam for Thursday Till Sunday (2012) and a Leopard for Best Direction in Locarno for Too Late to Die Young (2018). La perra, adapted from Pilar Quintana’s 2017 novel and produced by Rodrigo Teixeira, will star Manuela Oyarzún (Pablo Larraín’s No) and Selton Mello (I’m Still Here) in the story of a woman living on an island off the southern coast of Chile. She rescues an abandoned puppy and calls her Yuri—the name she was going to give the daughter she never had.

July Jung’s A Girl at My Door (2014) premiered in the Un Certain Regard program and her follow-up, Next Sohee, closed out the 2022 edition of Critics’ Week. Jung’s third feature, Dora, features former K-pop idol Kim Do-yeon in the title role and Sakura Ando, who has starred in films directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The new film is “a very free and contemporary adaptation of Dora’s case study by Freud in 1900,” says Julien Rejl. “It’s a very famous case but transposed here to contemporary Korea . . . The issue of desire and the desire for a young woman is at the core of the film.”

Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) was met with outstanding reviews when it premiered in Berlin in 2020 and then went on to win five Africa Movie Academy Awards. The brothers’ follow-up, Clarissa, is a reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway set in contemporary Lagos, and it stars Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and Nikki Amuka-Bird.

Jorge Thielen Armand has screened his work in Venice, Rotterdam, New York, and at Sundance, and his latest feature, Death Has No Master, centers on a middle-aged woman who returns to her family’s cacao plantation in Venezuela after thirty years. She’s been thinking about settling down there, but former workers have taken over the place. The inevitable standoff turns violent.

First Features

Sompot Chidgasornpongse has made well over a dozen short films, but he’s best known for his close work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an assistant director, from Tropical Malady (2004) through Memoria (2021). As a producer, Apichatpong has overseen Sompot’s first feature, 9 Temples to Heaven. Nine members of one family aim to spend a full day visiting nine temples in order to build up the good karma they hope will prolong their grandmother’s life. “The film is an ensemble piece, and the audience will be immersed as an invisible member of the family,” says Sompot.

Sarah Arnold’s 2014 short Totems won the Pardino d’oro (Concorso nazionale) in Locarno, and her first feature, Too Many Beasts, opens with a conflict between hunters and farmers in northeastern France sparked by roaming wild boars. When one of the farmers goes missing, a Corsican police officer is called in to investigate.

Eivind Landsvik, whose 2023 short Tits screened in competition at Cannes, directs singer-songwriter Marie Ulven, better known as Girl in Red, in his debut feature, Low Expectations. Ulven plays Maja, an acclaimed artist who has worked, toured, and partied to the point of exhaustion. And she’s only twenty-nine. She decides to pull back, move in with her mom, take a part-time job, and just watch life go by from the sidelines—if life will let her.

Reed Van Dyk’s DeKalb Elementary (2017) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film, and he’s lined up Kenneth Branagh, Hiam Abbass, and Boyd Holbrook to head the cast of Atonement. Based on Dexter Filkins’s 2012 piece for the New Yorker, Atonement tells the story of a marine who seeks forgiveness from the surviving members of an Iraqi family he and his unit fired on in 2003.

Lila Pinell’s Shana is “the type of comedy we’d like to see more of,” says Julien Rejl. Pinell has made a handful of short films, worked quite a bit in television, and codirected two features. This is her first solo outing, an expansion of her 2021 short Le roi David, the winner of the Prix Jean Vigo. Eva Huault once again plays Shana, the inheritor of a ring she hopes will bring her better luck than she’s been having lately. The cast also features Noémie Lvovsky.

Documentaries

Now ninety-four, Alain Cavalier has been making films for nearly seven decades, and his Thérèse (1986) won Best Film and Best Director at the César Awards. Cavalier was also “among the pioneering discoverers of new films and talents at the start of the Fortnight,” says Julien Rejl. “We are extremely proud to present the final installment of his filmed diary,” Thanks for Coming.

Gabin, a portrait of the youngest son in a family that runs a butcher shop in northern France, is the first feature from Maxence Voiseux. Gabin is expected to take over the business, but he dreams of breaking free. Shot over the course of a full decade, Gabin traces a life from ages eight to eighteen.

The third documentary in the lineup premiered to raves at Sundance. Shot in the summer of 1972, when William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) gathered luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for an evening in Duke Ellington’s townhouse, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is directed by Greaves’s son, David Greaves, who manned one of the cameras. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has called Once Upon a Time in Harlem “one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction.”

Animation

We Are Aliens, the first feature from anime artist Kohei Kadowaki, traces the story of two friends who meet in the third grade, grow close, and then, over the course of thirty years, grow apart. Sébastien Laudenbach is best known for codirecting Chicken for Linda! (2023) with Chiara Malta, and he’s gone solo on Viva Carmen, an adaptation of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, “but also,” he says, “a spin-off.” The story is told from the point of view of thirteen-year-old Salva, a street kid in 1840s Andalusia who is determined to prevent Carmen’s death.

The 2026 edition of the Fortnight will wrap with Le vertige, a late and entirely unexpected entry from Quentin Dupieux, who already has Full Phil lined up to premiere in Cannes as a Midnight Screening. Julien Rejl won’t say much quite yet about Le vertige other than that it’s a 3D motion-capture animation featuring the voices of Dupieux’s frequent collaborators Alain Chabbat, Jonathan Cohen, and Anaïs Demoustier.

Endnotes

During the Fortnight’s opening ceremony, the French Directors’ Guild will present the Carrosse d’Or, an award presented since 2002 to “a filmmaker who has left their mark on the history of cinema,” to Claire Denis. And when all is said and done, the Fortnight will announce the winner of this year’s People’s Choice, introduced in 2024 as the first audience award to be presented in Cannes. The first winner was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, and last year’s winner was Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake, which also took home the Camera d’Or, the prize given to the best first feature to premiere in Cannes’ Official Selection, Directors’s Fortnight, or Critics’ Week.

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]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:52:00 +0000 <![CDATA[Critics’ Week Lines Up Eleven Features]]> https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9122-critics-week-lines-up-eleven-features
Aina Clotet in Viva (2026)

For the first time in its sixty-five-year history, Critics’ Week, the Cannes sidebar spotlighting first and second features from up-and-coming filmmakers, will open with an animated film. Phuong Mai Nguyen won the Adult’s Jury Award for Best Animated Short at the Chicago International Children’s Festival in 2015 for Chez moi, and her first feature, In Waves, is a Northern California love story.

Two teens—AJ, a shy skateboarder, and Kristin, a go-getter surfer—fall for each other, and all’s well until Kristin falls ill. The French voice cast is led by Lyna Khoudri, Rio Vega, Paul Kircher, and Birane Ba, while Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu lead the voice cast of the English-language version.

In Waves is one of four special screenings this year. Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, whose 2020 short Tender Age was nominated for a César, has cast Bastien Bouillon—who also stars in Léa Mysius’s Histoires de la nuit, slated to premiere in competition at Cannes—in Stonewall, the story of a brother and sister grappling with the release of their father from prison. Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel is a romantic comedy about two truckers in love starring Alexis Manenti and Julian Świeżewski.

Artistic director Ava Cahen and her team have selected Félix de Givry’s Adieu monde cruel to close out this year’s edition. De Givry cowrote and coproduced Ugo Bienvenu’s Oscar-nominated animated feature Arco (2025), and he’s cast Milo Machado-Graner, the breakout star of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023)—he played Daniel, the visually impaired son of Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis’s Sandra and Samuel—as a fourteen-year-old who has written a letter to his family and friends announcing his decision to kill himself. When his suicide attempt fails, he goes into hiding, but one of his classmates spots him.

Competition

Seven features are set to compete for the Grand Prize, and five of them are directed by women. Blerta Basholli, who won the Grand Jury Prize, the Directing Award, and the Audience Award at Sundance for Hive (2021), has completed her highly anticipated second feature. Set in Pristina on the brink of the Kosovo War in the late 1990s, Dua centers on a thirteen-year-old and her family as their lives are about to be upended.

The Station, revolving around a gas station in Yemen run by women where men, weapons, and talk of politics are banned, is the first feature from Sara Ishaq, whose 2012 documentary short Karama Has No Walls was nominated for an Oscar. In La Gradiva, the first feature from cinematographer Marine Atlan (The Girl in the Snow), a Latin teacher takes a class of high school students on a trip to Pompeii.

Award-winning actor Aina Clotet directs herself in Viva as Nora, a woman recovering from breast cancer and facing a whole new world of possibilities. And Jess Jing Zou’s A Girl Unknown is a story told in three chapters, all centering on a Chinese woman with three names and three families.

Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, the first fiction feature from documentarian Bruno Santamaría Razo, flashes back to the early 1990s as a filmmaker sorts through memories of being eleven and his father being diagnosed with HIV. And Alexander Murphy’s Tin Castle is a nonfiction portrait of a family of Irish Travellers living in a rundown trailer stranded in the middle of a field.

Critics’ Week 2026 will run from May 13 through 21, and the short film selection will be announced on Wednesday.

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