The Film Comment Letter

Physical graffiti: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, starring Emma Stone as a reanimated dead woman, is a ribald, expertly designed, steampunk vision of feminist wish fulfillment—but is it any more than that?

Bird’s-eye view: the Studio Ghibli cinematographer discusses the melding of analog and digital technologies in Hayao Miyazaki’s lushly animated epic

Worlds apart: the Japanese auteur discusses his Cannes Queer Palm–winner Monster, a clever, multiperspectival drama about the inner world of children that adults cannot—often to great detriment—access or comprehend

Seeing is believing: a clinical approach to sound and spacial construction in Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, opens up important questions about the ethical implications of aesthetics

Smile through it: Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s new series, The Curse, is a black-comedic minefield of mirrors, especially the metaphorical kind

Big plans: the latest from Ridley Scott, trailblazing auteur–turned–late-career journeyman, is an epic biopic of the war-mongering emperor that turns out to be a bit weirder than it initially seems

Perchance to dream: a satire on celebrity and cancel culture, Kristoffer Borgli’s new Nicholas Cage–vehicle, Dream Scenario, treads the thin line between critique and caricature

Material history: Dominik Graf discusses his latest documentary, an investigation of the numerous German writers and artists who collaborated (often quietly) with the Nazi regime

How Soon Is Now? The Killer, David Fincher’s latest entry in the canon of cinema du sociopath is a sleek, meticulously assembled film lives up to its punny tagline: “Execution Is Everything.”

Boo: premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema is often called the ghostliest of mediums, haunted by phantoms since its beginnings