The Film Comment Letter

Lush life: the director discusses her debut feature, the particularities of portraying Black motherhood, how she eschewed social-realist tropes, and what her (many nonprofessional) actors taught her about empathy

It belongs in a museum: the latest big-screen adventure featuring Harrison Ford’s grizzled archeologist only faintly recalls the streamlined pleasures of series highpoint, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Social media: programmer and producer Tom Luddy, who passed away last February, exerted a major influence on Bay Area and American film culture equal to that of the great critics or directors of his generation

Another green world: with its pop imagery, sonic dissonance, and vision of life after Armageddon, Marco Ferreri’s 1969 dystopian fable brings to mind a film by George A. Romero remade by Jean-Luc Godard

Strength in numbers: the duo discuss their latest drama about the local effects of global capitalism, which sees working-class Northern Englanders clashing, and finding common ground, with Syrian refugees

Screen time: multimedia artist Josh Kline’s sprawling exhibition at the Whitney Museum attempts to untangle climate change, consumerism, and the function of art in the face of catastrophe

Truth content: the latest from Nicole Holofcener, You Hurt My Feelings, expands on the director’s women-centric inquiries into marriage and its complicated demands of candor and companionship

Reaching out: the trio of filmmakers on their new collaboration, a hybrid film that turns a series of video letters into a meditation on loss, isolation, and connection

Sunrise: Pietro Marcello’s latest, Scarlet is a tender, sumptuous fairy tale which exemplifies the director’s deft straddling of documentary and fiction, realism and illusionism

Finest worksong: documentarian Wang Bing discusses his two Cannes entries—the typically expansive Youth (Spring), and Man in Black, a briefer, but equally dense portrait of a composer