Fictional characters: Hong Sangsoo’s latest, The Novelist’s Film, is a work of deceptive minimalism, inflected with themes of aging, mortality, and the high stakes of art-making
The good old days: in Armageddon Time, James Gray offers a new, messily autobiographical spin on his career-long preoccupation with the complexities of family and the quest for autonomy
Through the looking glass: Jafar Panahi’s No Bears offers a timely story about the real and imagined borders—national, social, religious—that constrict the freedoms of Iranians
Multi-tasking: Edward Yang’s 1994 ensemble piece, A Confucian Confusion, wryly weaves references to the ancient philosophy into a relentlessly busy big-city network narrative
Tick-tock: the Swiss director discusses his anti-nostalgic approach to historical narrative, summoning an everyday sense of the past, and the central place of objects in his film, Unrest
Truth claims: the French-Senegalese filmmaker discusses the real-life roots of her fiction debut and what it means to embody universality in a Black woman
It takes two: the Portuguese auteur discusses how his latest, an innuendo-filled sci-fi musical fantasy, parlays past injustices and present-day anxieties into a euphoric vision of the future
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