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

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles), interview by Ela Bittencourt

“Bacurau—like the American westerns of Ford and Hawks—brims with moral complexities because of its embrace of genre, not in spite of it. To see its protagonists exalted in widescreen—a sweeping canvas of diverse faces, bodies, skin colors, and textures—is to feel the innate strength but also the inherent contradictions of the backcountry.”

 

First Cow (Kelly Reichardt) by Clinton Krute

“With First Cow, Reichardt has managed to weave together the various concerns—social, philosophical, economic, and cinematic—that have haunted her films to date, producing a work of remarkable beauty and startling complexity.”

 

EMMA. (Autumn De Wilde) by Phoebe Chen

“It’s the sense of hermetic idyll that makes EMMA. feel so thoroughly of-the-moment, the Instagram algorithm’s hall of mirrors switched out for a tight circle of bonnet-sporting sycophants. Doubling down on this aesthetic, de Wilde has made a film that knows it charms and amuses with just how much it crowds its perfect frames.”

 

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach) by Steven Mears

“Loach—who’s been telling versions of this story for more than 50 years (often with screenwriter Paul Laverty)—tempers his outrage with a deep well of regret for the dehumanization inherent to the gig economy.”

 

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan) by Yonca Talu

“Set in the bustling metropolis of Wuhan—the currently quarantined epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak—Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake probes the cracks and fissures of contemporary Chinese society through the noir-tinged story of a fugitive gangster and the prostitute who accompanies him on his journey toward self-sacrifice and redemption.”