Film Comment

SO LONG, 2010S—WE HARDLY knew you. I’m only half-kidding: one noticeable fact about the past 10 years is that they haven’t taken a precise shape in the minds of many moviegoers. They don’t seem to conjure the same ready-made (and admittedly reductive

OZU’S I WAS BORN, BUT… IMPRESSED ME LONG AGO. I don’t know any film title that is more beautiful. I Was at Home, But… feels for me like a modest, everyday variation. In the “But” are all the doubts, questions, everything, which seem impossible to sol

WINNER OF THE SPECIAL JURY PRIZE IN Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar, Albert Serra’s radical exploration of sexual pleasures Liberté will be released this year by Cinema Guild. I spoke with Serra at his company Andergraun Films’ headquarters in Bar

COMPOSER NICHOLAS BRITELL IS STEADILY SHAPING THE SOUND OF MODERN American storytelling, one project at a time. Britell is probably best known as the composer who scored Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which netted him Oscar nominat

Critic, Haaretz Top 10 Films (ranked) Holy Motors, Toni Erdmann, Girlhood, Margaret, The Act of Killing, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Moonlight, Get Out, Boyhood, Fire at Sea Best New Filmmaker Jordan Peele Filmmaker; Conservator, Smithsonian

Androids Assemble Proof that South Indian cinema could compete on the same level as Bollywood, this mind-bending sci-fi spectacular directed by S. Shankar, with stunt choreography by Yuen Woo-ping, is a robot-gone-bad Tamil blockbuster starring agele

Bong Joon Ho’s film explodes any lingering notion that great art must bear some relation to subtlety, as well as any presumption that unsubtle art is, by extension, uncomplicated. What might have served as subtexts of Bong’s diabolical class critique

FILM HISTORY IS VERY YOUNG—AS OLD AS TWO LIFETIMES, and not even particularly long ones at that. And year after year, living linkages to certain discrete eras in film history are snipped. What follows are brief eulogies to individuals, organized by y

Director: Levan Akin Country/Distributor: Sweden/Georgia/France, Music Box Films Opening: February 7 Levan Akin’s Swedish-Georgian co-production is a handsome, engaging, but predictable graft of familiar genres: the passion play of a young dancer, cr

Teorema Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1968; The Criterion Collection MARXIST POET/PLAYWRIGHT/FILMMAKER Pier Paolo Pasolini—who went through life with épater le bourgeois all but tattooed on his forehead—was a born provocateur whose loathing of conventi

By Leila Taylor, Repeater, $14.95 Leila Taylor’s first book weaves observations about the gothic and about black history through a memoir of growing up as a black goth, in both the white suburbs of Ohio and in the blackest of cities, Detroit. Initial

BOOKENDED BY TWO VERY DIFFERENT POSTERS FOR JANUS releases of 1970s television series by R.W. Fassbinder—World on a Wire and Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day—the past decade has seen an explosion of revival key art fueled by art prints and fan-created de