The Film Comment Letter

Physical graffiti: the American filmmaker speaks about his latest, a travelogue and detective story offering insights into bureaucracy, xenophobia, and political polarization in modern-day Croatia

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

Gather round: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1989 film is a mellow, neorealist true story about a greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo who took a troop of poor Chinese exchange students under his wing in 1987

Get on board: the director of Tabu and Arabian Nights discusses his latest, a feat of disjunctive and suggestive montage that never stays still

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

Time out of mind: the Iranian filmmaker and producer discusses her work with the late French-Swiss maverick, including her documentary See You Friday, Robinson as well as Godard's final two shorts, which premiered at this year's Cannes

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

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