Rocky road: in addition to a strong retrospective program, this year’s edition was highlighted by understated Competition winners From You and There Is a Stone.
Smoke gets in your eyes: Robert Altman’s jazz-infused noir finds the late legend Harry Belafonte in a role that slyly inverts his public persona as a committed and compassionate activist
I Can Has Cheezburger: the artist duo discuss their latest mash up of pop-culture touchstones, a surprisingly perceptive analysis of the political and cultural moment
Good looking out: this year’s edition features an admirable range of work by major filmmakers, including Tsai Ming-liang, and emerging artists like Ayanna Dozier and Kimi Takesue
Casting spells: the stalwart of American experimental film, who passed away last August, left behind five decades’ worth of intimate, illusive, and ritualistic films
Time fades away: on the occasion of Shinji Somai’s ongoing retrospective at the Japan Society, critic Emerson Goo offers a primer on the director’s audacious, and enduring, filmography
Back to life: Evil Dead Rise, more than other reboots of the franchise, gets closer to squeezing real feelings out of the scenario without ever going soft on the gory trappings
Stormy skies: Laura Citarella’s uncanny epic, Trenque Lauquen, is not the kind of detective story whose secrets are explained by hard facts; rather, its pleasures are rooted in the very principle of investigation
Child’s play: Ari Aster’s latest living nightmare, Beau Is Afraid, stars Joaquin Phoenix as a stunted, paranoid mama’s boy, caught up in a roller coaster of horrors—and is not quite as interesting as one would hope
