The Film Comment Letter

Mirror mirror: Marguerite Duras’s acclaimed classic India Song and her less well-known Baxter, Vera Baxter offer striking examples of her knack for colliding literary language with the audiovisual form

Straight, no chaser: Alain Gomis’s artful remix of a 1969 French TV interview with Thelonious Monk dissects the casual racism suffered by the musical genius

Binary systems: two Berlinale standouts, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography grapple productively with the boundaries between subjective and objective experience

Life spans: the Scottish artist discusses Berlinale highlight Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait, his experimental portrait of the great Orkney filmmaker

Field of dreams: the great director of form-bending classics like Freak Orlando discusses her penchant for breaking rules

On the grind: Mark Asch, Beatrice Loayza, and Devika Girish get together for an epistolary exchange about the thoughts and, yes, feelings elicited by Magic Mike’s Last Dance

Remote viewing: fest highlights like The Tuba Thieves and Gush reimagined the visual and sonic experience of cinema

Let there be light: in the radiant One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve conveys an auto-fictional tale of grief and new love with disarming and affecting sincerity

Now you see me: the standouts at this year's fest challenged the idea of cinema as an "empathy machine," offering us new ways to look and care

Look again: the first film from the Nobel–Prize winning author engages Ernaux’s career-long fascination with photography to tell the story of an disintegrating marriage