Every month, Film Comment highlights some new (and old) films that we feel deserve a little extra attention.

The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio, 2019) by Molly Haskell

“Dense and brooding, but, like Scorsese’s film, vigorously told, The Traitor also unfolds under the looming shadow of mortality, of time running out for aging kingpins, and of debts coming due.”

 

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019) interviewed by Jordan Cronk

“Shot with customary rigor and an increasingly refined and unparalleled sense of space, light, and shadow, the film invests a tragic episode in its heroine’s life with an intimacy and grace that forges new dimensions in Costa’s cinema.”

 

I Was at Home, But… (Angela Shanelec, 2020) by Jordan Cronk

“Less slippery than the decades-spanning The Dreamed Path but just as splintered in its cubist construction, the film consolidates a small community’s worth of characters around the central family drama.”

 

Les Miserables (Ladj Ly, 2020) by A.G. Sims

“Between scenes of harrowing violence, Ly lingers on fleeting moments of pure, unadulterated joy experienced by the children, granting them a radical visibility—and also delaying the narrative-propelling action just a beat too long in the process.”

 

Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2019) by Michael Sragow

“Color Out of Space comes to the screen as a febrile, energetic phantasmagoria, shot through with Lovecraftian weirdness.”