Have you ever sat in front of a large poster depicting the human body without its skin? One muscle gets entangled into another, the precision and complexity of their web apparent in the areas that are most crucial for movement, but with the face on top of this transparent carcass looking very much alive.

The Cannes Première of Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s first feature since Dream of Light (1992) over three decades ago, was immediately followed by a minor controversy. Conspicuously absent from the film’s screening, Erice published an open letter at El País explaining his reasons for boycotting the festival, namely, a marked lack of communication—and an implicit lack of respect—from Thierry Frémaux and his programming team regarding his film’s inclusion in the Official Selection, not in Competition.

By Giovanni Marchini Camia Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore felt appropriate that Cannes would program…

At 81 minutes, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves was the shortest film in a bloated Cannes competition. It was also among the best, accomplishing more with less (and in less time) than any number of overwrought productions, a notion evidently shared by at least some members of Ruben Östlund’s jury, which awarded the film its namesake third runner-up prize, making this only the second honour Kaurismäki’s received from Cannes after winning the Grand Prix for The Man Without a Past in 2002.

A film of uncommon warmth and delicacy, Bas Devos’ Here confirms a newfound sense of style and maturity in the Belgian filmmaker’s work that first appeared in the finely tuned nocturne Ghost Tropic (2019). Like that clearly pivotal project, Devos’ fourth feature—which won the top prize in the Encounters section at this year’s Berlinale—finds the 39-year-old director levelling up by scaling down.

Interviews and Features Back to Zero: The Experimental Cinema of Jean Eustache by Michael Sicinski Life Belongs to Us: The Eternal Return of Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet by Christoph Huber Master at Work: Paul Schrader on Master Gardener by Will Sloan Pictures of Flowers: On Recent Small-Gauge Filmmaking in and Around Spain by Phil…

When a filmmaker’s body of work starts doing the rounds of the cinematheques and museums, it provides an opportunity for re-evaluation or discovery. Even for those of us who are familiar with the cinema of Jean Eustache, the current retrospective, which screens this summer at TIFF Cinematheque and other North American venues, is a substantial reminder that there’s a lot we still don’t know about this singular director.

Paul Schrader’s career has been eclectic enough to encompass biopics of Mishima Yukio, Bob Crane, and Patricia Hearst; adaptations of books by Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and Nikos Kazantzakis; genre films that meet the expectations of the horror, thriller, and romance forms; and star vehicles tailored to bring out the best in icons as disparate at Richard Pryor, Richard Gere, George C. Scott, and Lindsay Lohan.

I write this open letter with profound frustration and disappointment over the programming decisions made for this year’s Cannes. As a filmmaker who has poured my heart and soul into creating thought-provoking and artistically daring works, I cannot help but express my vehement opposition to the relegation of my film, Eureka to the Cannes Première section.

The Cannes Première of Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s first feature since Dream of Light (1992) over three decades ago, was immediately followed by a minor controversy. Conspicuously absent from the film’s screening, Erice published an open letter at El País explaining his reasons for boycotting the festival, namely, a marked lack of communication—and an implicit lack of respect—from Thierry Frémaux and his programming team regarding his film’s inclusion in the Official Selection, not in Competition.

Anatomie d’un chute is her fourth feature, and, like all of her work, it shows a keen interest in the chaos of interwoven movements both toward and away from others that humans somehow revel in testing and rearranging, as if unable to figure out the big picture—and in spite of the confusion they keep inflicting on themselves. Never before, though, has Triet displayed such analytical rigour in laying out the ramifications of her premise and reassembling them in a harmonious exposé.

Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the filmmaking takes place in a communist-governed nation like Vietnam, where capital operates (albeit sometimes uneasily) within a state-run system.

For some critics and film-cultural commentators, The Sweet East arrives to the Quinzaine smelling of something pungent: its credits list as an executive producer one Jimmy Kaltreider, as per Politico a top aide to Peter Thiel, who himself once upon a time helped another gifted, up-and-coming director make his own politically ambivalent feature debut (Thank You For Nothing, Peter). As Williams says below, treating The Sweet East like a kind of ground zero for right-wing patronage in the history of American cinema—independent or otherwise—is selective and ahistorical to say the least, but the strident liberal-baiting on display still warrants comment.

The Cannes audience has succumbed to the pressure of conformity, afraid to be the one dissenting voice amidst a sea of applause. It’s disheartening to witness the lack of discernment, as film after film is met with a standing ovation, blurring the line between true excellence and mediocre mediocrity.

“The content of my videotape involves documentary subject matter. The visuals combined with music are the attempt to create the mood of the community…in certain sequences light reflections create forms in space.” —Ulysses Jenkins, “Comment on Video Tape” (1977)

As a lifelong film buff who became a professional film critic in my late twenties, I’ve spent much of my life ever since trying to reconcile these two distinct and, in some respects, conflicting identities. Many of my colleagues seem to regard criticism and fandom as reverse sides of the same commercial coin—compatible and mutually reinforcing facets of the same impulses, sometimes blissfully fusing into a sincere form of advertising.

Though The Adults is at times diminished more than it’s enriched by its echoes of other texts about wayward children skulking back to their childhood home, as well as family narratives about faded talents with arrested development (including the same-named series wherein a teenaged Cera reads as precocious as he is dissipated here), the film has enough of Defa’s own peculiar, spiky tenderness to set it apart.

By Jay Kuehner The reassurance implicit in the coming-of-age story is that of things foregone, universal, known; the particularities of the passage are shorn of their severity and exigence. The subject is supposed, invariably, to have arrived, their journey ultimately delineated in retrospect. The entropy of heightened subjectivity is at last externalized and made legible.…