Interviews Workingman’s Death: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Jordan Cronk Outside In: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge 3 by Blake Williams The Phantom of the Opera: Atom Egoyan on Seven Veils by Adam Nayman Afterlife: Kleber Mendonça Filho on Pictures of Ghosts by Tom ..read more

One advantage to growing older is having more opportunities to reassess and reflect. This isn’t only a matter of understanding and/or judging what one sees: it’s also a matter of evaluating why one has seen certain films and not seen certain others. Why, for instance, did I never get around to seeing Billion Dollar Brain (1967)—the only Harry Palmer spy thriller that ever piqued much of my interest, because it’s also the first theatrical feature directed by Ken Russell—until recently, on a multiple-format Kino Lorber Classic release ..read more

His finest films—Cruising (1980), The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), To Live and Die in L.A.—are lotuses in the mung, gloriously efflorescent spores on the fertilizer of innumerable Z-grade genre formulas: the good bad cop, the haunted teenager, the thin line between law and fate ..read more

By Madeleine Wall Documentary filmmakers James Burns and Stevie Salas, who previously worked together on The Water Walker (2020), have again turned their camera to an Indigenous environmental activist. Serving as both audience and director proxies, Haudenosaunee activist Layla Staats is the structuring force of Boil Alert; her hero’s journey is to learn about the ..read more

By Michael Sicinski In all likelihood, Frederick Wiseman is already prepping his next project. He is indefatigable. But if it happens that Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is his final film, it would be a fitting capstone to a singular career. After spending most of his filmmaking life producing incisive documentary analyses of dysfunctional institutions and lumbering ..read more

By Michael Sicinski Godard’s first posthumous work could be taken as a suicide note for cinema itself. Throughout his career, Godard repeatedly aimed to “return to zero,” to unlearn the discipline of filmmaking and begin again. But certain axioms always persisted, such as images, motion, and temporal progression. Phony Wars goes back before zero, before ..read more

By Michael Sicinski Apolline Traoré’s latest film is direct, and in times of political strife there is undoubtedly something to be said for directness. Burkina Faso has become a hotbed of terrorism of late, with various factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara moving in from Niger and Mali. Meanwhile ..read more

By Gabrielle Marceau  Mladen Đorđević’s Working Class Goes to Hell wears its title more literally than the 1971 Italian satire, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, it references. While his protagonists don’t get led into the nether world à la The House that Jack Built (2018), Đorđević’s  slow-burn quasi-horror about a group of concerned citizens ..read more

By Meg Shields It’s time to reset the clocks: we’ve got a genuinely delightful American studio comedy on our hands. Rising above its “hmm” status as a direct-to-Hulu original, Quiz Lady is a charming, unpretentious cinematic equivalent of mac ’n cheese. It’s not going to surprise you. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The ..read more

By Adam Nayman In horror movies—as in life—rules are made to be broken. After learning that one of their fellow villagers has been infected with a demon, two ornery brothers—one a family man, one a wildcard, neither particularly bright—decide to transport the possessed party into the middle of nowhere: out of sight, out of mind ..read more