The Film Comment Letter

Blast off: This year's edition of the North Carolina festival demonstrated a robust hunger among post-pandemic audiences for challenging experimental film, video, and performance work

Blurred lines: Mark Jenkin’s mind-bending slice of purgatorial folk horror vividly depicts the psychological dissolution of a woman living in isolation on the windswept moors of a tiny Cornish isle

Get religion: Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary, In viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis is the latest entry in the canon of the cinema du pope

Collective memory: Mohanad Yaqubi archival collage of emphasizes cinema’s capacity to provoke viewers’ empathic imagination and spark solidarity

Nightlight: C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s new feature is a black-and-white West African folk tale in which the actors glow against a backdrop of ocean and forest

Home life: a revelatory program of evocative films by Robert Beavers daisy-chains memories, dreams, and desires across continents and decades

Born again: the French filmmaker discusses her epic documentary about a women’s health clinic, one of the standouts at this year’s Berlinale

I'm on a boat: Noah Teichner’s Navigators and Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme share curious resonances, not least of which is the looming specter of real-life catastrophe

Oceanic feeling: the German filmmaker talks about his latest, a slyly comedic chamber piece, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at last month’s Berlinale

Undercurrents: this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week focused on “sur-realism,” a mode of Latin American filmmaking that doesn’t imagine an escape from reality but instead is fully, vividly, nightmarishly of it.