The compositional tropes of various high modernists, Bresson above all, loom large. Schanelec’s invention, instead, is tonal, a chording of irony and earnestness which allows her to handle the hottest emotions without ever being burned. Taken in other terms, this too looks more like refinement than invention: she is alone among her contemporaries in her capacity to reconcile the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Matt Johnson and Matt Miller on BlackBerry, Sentimental Education: Christian Petzold on Afire, The Nameless World: Bas Devos on Here - and more

Howerton’s 40-proof, rageaholic performance skirts caricature but comes out the other end as a psychologically deft tour de force. This loosely fictionalized version of Balsillie, whose seething, pent-up contempt for partners and competitors alike emanates from some darker place (maybe even subconscious solidarity with his geeky new underlings) is a memorable and malevolent creation—the closest thing Canadian entertainment has had to a Gordon Gekko since the glory days of Traders.

Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homosexual love or something like that. I’m not very professional sometimes.”

The film’s promotional material refers to it as “freely inspired by the myth of Oedipus,” and so it is. Compared with the incidental narrative constructions of the prior two films, this ordering use of myth ensures that however opaque an event may seem in the moment, its place in the logic of the story is equally present, rather than graspable only upon reflection.

Last Things, the latest work from Deborah Stratman, participates in a small but growing trend in experimental filmmaking. Following certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy, Last Things attempts to communicate a radically non-anthropocentric view of existence.

To begin with, an update on the current situation of things, which hasn’t changed substantially since the last editor’s note. But as I write this in between minor mental breakdowns, you’ve caught me in a calmer state of mind, which should not be mistaken for a lack of desperation.

Claire Simon’s Notre corps—which captures the visitations and procedures in the gynecological ward of Paris’s Tenon hospital, a public institution located a few blocks from Père Lachaise—understands this compromise, but offers a rebuttal as well: it honours the body’s possibilities and delicate particularities by expanding that gaze to encompass the lives beyond the bodies, the unique frictions engendered by supposedly objective methods.

“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone immediately told me about his death.” This fragment, the 421st of the 450 that comprise Ian Penman’s engaging new book Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, strikes me as something much more than a “where were you when…” sort of anecdote.

Who could it be at Vinegar Syndrome Films in the US and/or Powerhouse Films in the UK who decided I was an aficionado of Mexican and/or Canadian wrestling? I haven’t been able to discover if Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse are distantly or closely related to one another—or if, on the contrary, separate publicists at each company arrived independently at the notion that I was an actual or potential wrestling buff.

The three inaugural releases from Black Zero, a new archival label dedicated to Canadian experimental cinema, are unified by their mystique and uncompromising, adventurous spirit.

...there are instances where autofiction permits storytellers to forget the structural demands of narrative, a fate which befalls the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve in her latest feature, Un beau matin,whose pat ending doesn’t suit her characters so much as her own memory.

There are few sights more imprinting than Alexander Skarsgård, nearly nude and with a silicone cap and cheek retractor, pouring himself feet-first into polychromatic sludge. He’s almost unrecognizable in his starkness, eyeballs positively juddering with fear as the room fills with liquid, all so he can elude capital punishment. As with fidelity and morals, the legalities within Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool are elastic.