Over the two decades of their collaboration, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger emerged as the working out of a love affair with Britain and Britishness.
And so, in the dream-logic of this particular shade, the express train in Brief Encounter is called the express not only because it doesn’t stop, but because, in its not-stopping, it expresses the shy heart of Laura Jesson.
This, too, is the condition of festival-speak. I pick some films over others because the framework of my experience is not experiential; it is exegetical. I organize myself around opinions I am going to have about things I have not yet seen.
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.
Lucrecia Martel’s new documentary feature Nuestra Tierra is a portrait of a particular community on a particular plot of land in a particular municipality, but it opens in the non-descript vacuum of space.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective. Though their circumstances are worlds apart, their stories expose the history of America.
"Because success was nowhere in sight, we kind of couldn't fail. There were no expectations; nobody was going to do anything for us. We could complain, but who would listen? You just had to make something. So we did! We made our own cafés, our own bands, our own record labels, our own movies, and it was great."
The world won't be the same without Tony Stella in it, but his spirit, integrity, and passionate love of movies lives on in the work he left behind.
So many of the movies I saw at this year's True/False Film Festival were concerned with human perceptions of time, memory, and legacy. In a world where reality is warped by fascism and generative AI, telling imaginatively true stories about real people seems especially important.
By developing subtle techniques for depicting loneliness, Different from the Others (1919) moves beyond sentimentality; instead of simply asking us to feel sorry for Conrad Veidt's character, it invites us to understand the ragged texture of his day-to-day life.
Spend enough time within the minimalist aesthetics of Hong Sang-Soo's cinema and it can be difficult to leave the respite it provides. His films are slower than slow, quieter than quiet—yet completely absorbing once their rhythms take hold, lulling one into a kind of contemplative state increasingly difficult to occupy in a world overcrowded with headlines, hot takes, and computer-generated graphics.
The Name of the Rose is a period piece that doesn't cannibalize the context of its setting to make cheap polemical observations—opting instead for genre fiction’s agility and palpability of feeling—which makes it instructive and pleasurable viewing in the strange woggle space between 2025 and 2026.