Features

Past flames: the Nitrate Picture Show isn't an exercise in fetishism or nostalgia; instead, its emphasis on format shifts attention to history—to the life of a print, which is visible in scratches, warping, and clipped frames

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?

Look again: in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films, reality is remade, subtly but radically, so that the world eventually becomes its own doppelgänger

Running on empty: Furiosa boasts all the spectacle and speed of Fury Road, but little of the story momentum, little of the surprise

National pastimes: as the festival enters its waning days, standout films like Roberto Minervini's The Damned, Carson Lund's Eephus, and Tyler Taormina's Christmas Eve in Miller's Point investigate how we make meaning out of the past

Things have changed: Beatrice Loayza reports from the festival's midpoint, offering reactions to Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides, and Patricia Mazuy's Visiting Hours

Refracted light: Jerome Hiler’s Cinema Before 1300 is a discursive exploration of Gothic cathedrals’ luminous stained glass and a crucial part of a retrospective at MoMA

Window on the world: incarcerated journalist Phillip Vance Smith, II delves into how people in prisons watch movies—the streaming devices available, the viewing options, the costs of renting a film, and more

Smackdown: Doug Liman’s Road House remake and Dev Patel’s the vigilante thriller Monkey Man, two exemplars of the Action Movie, balance style and substance to different effect

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