The view from the top: Eric Newman and Annie Berke, editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books, join to discuss, debate, and dismantle this year’s nominees, from Oppenheimer to Killers of the Flower Moon to The Holdovers, and more
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
The final frontier: the French director discusses his latest, The Empire, which polarized critics at the 2024 Berlinale with its blend of doofy Star Wars references and ambitious formal finesse
Smoke gets in your eyes: this year's edition included titles like Direct Action, exergue – on documenta 14, Favoriten, and Dahomey, all of which probe, in very different ways, the responsibilities of civic and cultural institutions
Alles gut: Ela Bittencourt and Frédéric Jaeger join to discuss German cinema at this year’s edition, along with films made by women, including Helke Sander, Christine Angot, Eva Trobisch, and others
Translation problem: Jonathan Ali, Frédéric Jaeger, and Antoine Thirion to talk about Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’s Pepe, Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs, Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton, and more
Reading history: this year's edition tips the scales toward ideas about documentation and bearing witness with films like Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs, and Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton