Portrait galleries: festival highlights like Once Upon a Time in Harlem, I Want Your Sex, and If I Go Will They Miss Me offered a balm for independent art
Field reports: films like Cover-Up, Landmarks, and The Voice of Hind Rajab pierced through the festival’s illusive bubble with lightning bolts of reality
Political world: the Iranian auteur speaks about his Palme d‘Or–winning latest, a typically ingenious meditation on the lasting effects of state repression
Hold fast: the Guadeloupean-French filmmaker, currently the focus of a major retrospective at MoMA, never compromised on her ideological and artistic commitments
Sweet dreams: there is something unsettlingly liminal about the Okinawan artist’s videos, which take place on thresholds like graveyards, fences, and national borders
Rise up: a special retrospective series at this year‘s festival captured the revolutionary promise of the historic Afro-Asian Film Festivals of the 1950s and ’60s
Look and see: a number of films this in year’s selection—including Atropia, The Stringer, and others—grappled with the ethics of making images of war, violence, and suffering
Hard questions: the documentarian discusses his new Sundance selection, a profound exploration of the ethical implications of medically assisted suicide for disabled people
Watch the stars: the photographer and filmmaker discusses his new adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel, the film’s compelling use of first-person point of view, and his interest in capturing what he calls “adjacent images”
How to save a theater: members of the La Clef Revival collective share key insights from their successful campaign to reopen their beloved Parisian cinema
Buy now, pay later: at this year's festival, films by Radu Jude, Courtney Stephens, and Wang Bing explored advertisements, infomercials, and the lives of factory workers in an attempt to pull back the veil of the market
Double vision: how long can we maintain the ruse of championing artistic freedom and civil liberties in cinemas surrounded by hundreds of cops and A.I.-powered cameras and staffed by underpaid workers?
Crossing the rubicon: the Italian filmmaker discusses his new Civil War–era period movie, which both restages a moment in America’s past and documents present-day Americans reflecting on the process of nation-making
Going home: Carol Mansour's documentary is a heist of sorts, depicting the ways in which exiled Palestinians, denied the right of return, keep their heritage alive
Dirty work: Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera unearths the contradictions at the heart of a brittle society where culture is yet another arena in which the wealthy exploit the poor
Sign up for the Film Comment Letter
Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.