The Film Comment Letter

Smile through it: a trilogy of early features by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris explore the misogyny constraining women’s everyday lives—and their acts of disobedience and rebellion—through complex, provocative narratives

Together and apart: the two directors discuss the making of their award-winning documentary, their transition from journalism to cinema, and finding the right balance between images of incontrovertible violence with those of resilience and life

Look back in anger: the Polish filmmaker is perhaps best known for the proto-psychedelia of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript, but much of his formidable filmography consists of realist dramas that explore lost innocence and doomed love

Great expectations: the Romanian filmmaker discusses his madcap latest, an unpredictable, funny, crass, and erudite that speaks to a wide variety of concerns—totalitarianism, neoliberalism, and the corrosive role of media—with extraordinary verve

You can’t go home again: the filmmaker and writer delves into the themes that span her new book, including Hong Kong cinema, reflections on diaspora, the unresolved questions of the postcolonial present, and history as a “collective haunting”

Open wide: Mary Helena Clark’s solo show invites us to confront language as an illusion which tricks humanity into conceiving itself as other than animal

Looking back: at the annual nonfiction showcase in Columbia, Missouri, the standout films all reanimated lost or repressed pasts and offered galvanizing visions of the future

Urban delights: two new programs at MoMA spotlight the distinctive city symphonies of Ernie Gehr and Max Fleischer

Watching the river flow: set in a cold, provincial winter, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest traces the downward spiral of a misanthropic teacher with the Turkish filmmaker’s customary novelistic realism—though with a late formal break new to his oeuvre

Every grain of sand: Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster remains, for all its bombastic bricolage of religious and cinematic iconography, a stolidly professional and surprisingly unimaginative adaptation of the sci-fi classic