Saint Laurent Bertrand Bonello

Saint Laurent

Our March/April 2015 issue arrives nattily dressed in the very height of fashion: Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is our cover story. Nathan Lee explicates the textures and ideas of the film and its fashions, calling it “one of those biopics engaged with creative genius, like Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch or Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, whose integrity is wholly independent of its biographical dimensions.”

Inside, Howard Hampton scales the rarefied heights of Olivier Assayas’s beguiling Clouds of Sils Maria, and Kent Jones confronts film criticism’s ongoing struggle to do justice to acting. Our latest Hot Set takes you inside the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s bold new film. Beverly Walker writes about actor, director, producer, and festival founder Robert Redford, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2015 Chaplin Award honoree. And Paul Schrader’s technological history of film continues with the ups and downs of camera movement.

March also means that it’s time for our annual Grosses Gloss: who made what, and how on earth did they do it? In the 40th edition of our industry wrap-up, Donald Wilson evaluates new VOD/theatrical models and Roger Smith shakes his head over Hollywood’s sluggishness in changing times. Meanwhile, audiences picked the cream of the crop in our annual Readers’ Poll.

Plus: Peter Strickland’s Guilty Pleasures; reviews of White God, While We’re Young, Merchants of Doubt, and True Story; Graham Fuller on John Boorman and his final film Queen and Country; Nicolas Rapold on John Waters’s Kiddie Flamingos; Scott Eyman on Dalton Trumbo; J. Hoberman on a book about North Korea’s unorthodox film industry; Marc Walkow on Japan’s Roman Pornos; and festival coverage of Sundance and Rotterdam by Amy Taubin, Laura Kern, and Gavin Smith.

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