The Film Comment Letter

Hands up: it’s been a feeble year for horror, and a batch of high-profile summer releases—A Quiet Place: Day One, MaXXXine, and Longlegs—offer scant remedy

Born to film: in their openness and DIY approach, Danny Lyon's films resist the streamlined, polished professionalism that The Bikeriders movie adaptation epitomizes

Sing me back home: Angela Schanelec's Music is a hypnotic reverie about hands and feet, landscapes and bodies, gazes and gestures, and people suddenly lifting their voices in song

Luminous zones: the undersung avant-garde filmmaker reflects on a lifetime spent exploring light, dreams, and the art of seeing

Female trouble: at this year's festival, women were driven mad on screen—from Iran to Manila, from Chicago to Czechoslovakia

Cloudbusting: the magic of the Canadian actor, whose screen career spanned over six decades, lay in his unique commingling of whimsy and vitality

Spiritual unity: the recently released soundtrack pulls from avant-garde jazz and traditional Persian music to create a new audio work just as madcap, ambiguous, and avant-garde as the original film was, almost 50 years ago

Fable or foible: Yorgos Lanthimos’s triptych applies his bloodless style and bloody fixations to the Aesopian form

Summer's end: Annie Baker's filmmaking debut locates poetry in the interstices, inviting the viewer to experience the passage of time in company with her characters

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