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…

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?

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.

Across 50 years of avowedly experimental practice—“experimental” in the sense that failure is a welcome possibility—she has advanced and refined our understanding of the mechanics of film as much as anyone working today. Naturally, she remains relatively unknown in North America. Born and raised in the Andes, trained industrially on English editing tables, and residing in Provence since the mid-’70s, Lowder has sought, with singular focus, levels of expressive precision beyond the single frame.

The Fondation Chantal Akerman and Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, have made available a remarkable find: four early shorts by the Belgian-born filmmaker, produced in 1967 when she was only 17 years old, which are now being exhibited under the program title Chantal Akerman: Her First Look Behind the Camera.

Where for many filmmakers the pandemic discouraged production or curbed creativity, it only seems to have inspired Radu Jude. Always impossible to peg, the prolific 46-year-old Romanian director has grown especially wily and provocative in recent years, embarking on a new phase in his career in which contemporary image culture and the sociopolitical absurdities of our time have become both subject of meticulous analysis and object of equally attentive ridicule.

Born on the extreme margins of an industry that is still only barely interested in product that isn’t either a sequel, remake, or reboot, Williams’ Surge saga is a franchise befitting the current climate of arthouse filmmaking, wherein conventions of continuity, plot mechanics, and psychological clarity are increasingly being challenged, if not outright dismissed. We have no idea where we’re going, but we seem to be getting there fast.

This year, the ever-industrious Saïd Ben Saïd has commissioned Catherine Breillat—for the 75-year-old director’s first film since 2013’s autobiographical Abus de faiblesse—not to specifically reimagine the story of Phaedra à la her other literary adaptations, but rather to remake May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, in which a successful lawyer has an affair with her adolescent stepson.

Mademoiselle Kenopsia is centrally concerned with liminality—those spaces that oscillate between familiar and surreal, enduring in transitional stasis. The dimensions of transition can be temporal, as in sun-bleached plastic jungle gyms that evoke the passage from childhood, or spatial, as in secluded motels in the middle of road trip destinations.

As the set is transformed in plain sight, the meta elements dissolving into a concentrated fantasy, the filmmaker’s own voice replaces the actor’s. Unseen, Paul B. Preciado asserts that, in Woolf but perhaps in general, “the first revolutionary metamorphosis is poetry,” which he defines as “the possibility of changing the names of all things.”

Is Wim Wenders back? If he is, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing. Perfect Days, the tenth film by the German director to compete at Cannes, is a working-class yarn about the pleasantly banal routines of a toilet cleaner named Hirayama (Yakusho Koji), a beguiling loner with a beautiful soul who is harbouring a trauma that is never fully articulated by the film. Sound familiar?

“All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was recorded 30 years ago.

“Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wilde’s source play and the New Testament chapter before it, with the bloody decapitation of John the Baptist—as a primal scene for 20th-century music: a Grand Guignol collision of ripe classicism and atonal modernity that left geniuses and punters alike stupefied.

As one watches the films in question—in particular Luna e Santur (2016), (tourism studies) (2019), and his newest film We Don’t Talk Like We Used To—one of the impressions one draws is that Solondz is also turning the quotidian home space into something else. We might call it “savage domesticity.”