Mistress America

Noah Baumbach’s screwball update Mistress America is our July/August cover story—and fellow filmmaker Alex Ross Perry is on hand to do our in-depth interview about Baumbach's films, getting them made, and cats. Amy Taubin hails the sexual revolution of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s book. Kent Jones marvels at the fine-grained social portraiture of Pedro Costa’s Horse Money. Jonathan Romney journeys into the past, and the undead present, portrayed in Christian Petzold’s unnerving oeuvre, up to and including his latest, Phoenix. Plus: career-spanning considerations of Richard Lester by Richard Combs and René Clair by Philip Kemp; and slow-motion gets its close-up in Paul Schrader's latest essay.

This issue also features our Cannes showcase, with extensive coverage of the festival’s highlights by Kent Jones, Laura Kern, Dennis Lim, Gavin Smith, and Amy Taubin (who also files a report on the Tribeca festival). You’ll also find Chuck Stephens on The Decline of Western Civilization and character actor Charles Napier, Alex Cox on the Panama invasion, Matías Piñeiro on Marie Rivière in Eric Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife, Nicolas Rapold on a special find from Cannes, and our takes on the mind games of Inside Out, the latest Woody Allen iteration, and the David Foster Wallace road trip The End of the Tour.

View the full Table of Contents for July/August 2015, with links to articles. To subscribe to FILM COMMENT, click here.