The Film Comment Letter

Exile on main street: the movies Luis Buñuel made in exile, the subject of a screening series at the Museum of Modern Art, combine his avant-garde roots with the commercial demands of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema

Let's get physical: the narrative highlights of this year's festival included Kneecap, A Different Man, Handling the Undead, and more

Born again: Phạm Thiên Ân’s hypnotic debut feature Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a formally breathtaking meditation on faith—and a testament to cinema as a vehicle for miraculous transformation

Walking on water: A selection of newly restored films make clear the continuing relevance of the work of Lorenza Mazetti, a long-unheralded artist whose influential work is finally getting its due

Don’t look away: the director discusses his debut feature, a disquieting critique of the colonial history of Chile by way of the grand cinematic idiom of the Hollywood western

Gut check: the latest pair of films from Soi Cheang, a Hong Kong genre master little known in the U.S., demonstrate the sleek blend of existential bleakness and technical wizardry that characterizes his cinema

A circle is a wheel: after the film’s orchestral flood of images, a withdrawal into contemplative sound ruptured any possibility of narrative closure

Crossing lines: one sequence captures, through the language of cinema, something fundamental about the banal violence of borders and bureaucracy

Out of the past: in this recently unearthed interview, the master filmmaker shares his thoughts on working with actors, adapting fiction, the debatable necessity of originality, and much more

Home viewing: the director discusses his latest highly personal documentary, his fascination with home movies, and his decision to withdraw his film from last November’s IDFA in protest of the festival’s response to the war in Gaza