Film Comment

THE SUMMERTIME BLUES CAN strike when you least expect it—or actually, fairly reliably, if you lock eyes on the numbing parade of franchise product that saturates movie theaters and marketing airspace. It goes without saying that Film Comment continue

WHEN I WAS APPROACHING THIS VILLAGE AND BUILDING this community, I was doing a lot of research into theosophy and anthroposophy. I was staying far away from paganism and thinking spiritually about this place. I was looking at a lot of theosophical ar

THE WHISTLERS FOLLOWS A POLICE INVEStigator (Vlad Ivanov) who ships out to the Canary Islands and gets embroiled in dirty business—which happens to involve a long-distance language consisting entirely of whistles. I talked with soft-spoken filmmaker

On the eve of the Cannes premiere of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino implored the press not to give away the surprises of his latest film. “I only ask that everyone avoids revealing anything that would prevent later audiences from e

WHEN HE WAS 9, FILMMAKER Terence Davies went to the movies to see Doris Day in Young at Heart; “That’s when I first fell in love with her,” he says. It’s a love that would last a lifetime. When offered a chance to meet her later in life, however, he

Director: Roberto Minervini Country/Distributor: Italy/USA/France, KimStim Opening: August 16 “Every word they spoke, I ate it with a spoon,” says Judy of her elders in What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?. Judy, the owner of a struggling bar,

Director: Richard Billingham Country/Distributor: UK, KimStim Opening: July 10 A memoir in reen-actments, Richard Billingham’s long-gestating feature debut unfolds in the Black Country council flat (west of Birmingham) where he was raised, and to whi

Director: Riley Stearns Country/Distributor: USA, Bleecker Street Opening: July 12 With The Art of Self-Defense, Riley Stearns strives for a dark comedy intoned in Yorgos Lanthimos deadpan, but instead of pushing the absurdity of his uncanny-valley u

Director: Julius Onah Country/Distributor: USA, NEON Opening: August 2 Julius Onah’s Sundance-feted adaptation of J.C. Lee’s off-Broadway play wrings an intriguing variation on the witch-hunt trope, for an era of identity politics. Eritrean-born Luce

Director: Rick Alverson Country/Distributor: USA, Kino Lorber Opening: July 26 In the 1950s-set road movie The Mountain, Rick Alverson, whose films anatomize American spiritual malaise, uses that most frontal of metaphors: the lobotomy. Tye Sheridan,

• DVD/★ DEBUT • BLU-RAY/★ DEBUT ▶ STREAMING ▶ EXCLUSIVE TO VOD Where Is the Friend’s House?, 1987; And Life Goes On, 1992; Through the Olive Trees, 1994; The Criterion Collection IN THE LATE ’80S AND EARLY ’90S, THE FILMS OF THE KOKER trilogy—Where I

The Criterion Channel Streaming Service SINCE THE CRITERION CHANNEL’S FIRST announcement, it was clear that its success would be measured against that of Film-Struck—the streaming service started by TCM, which abruptly, regrettably shuttered last Nov

Edited by Shanay Jhaveri The Shoestring Publisher, $34.99 A generously illustrated, wide-ranging selection of essays on American films helmed by non-American filmmakers, America: Films from Elsewhere is, as editor Shanay Jhaveri writes, “equally inte