The first words in Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten, a documentary about a Viennese primary school class, are spoken not by any of the film’s subjects, but by its 72-year-old director. In voiceover, against a colorful backdrop of children’s drawings, Beckermann reads the names of the 25 students and one teacher she spent nearly three years filming from fall 2020 to spring 2023. Among other things, this quasi-roll call is the first hint that the movie, despite being billed as a film by Ruth Beckermann, was made in full collaboration with the people we’ll see on screen – and further, that it will make no attempt to disguise the presence or perspective of the filmmaker.

Shot at the Volksschule Bernhardtstalgasse, Vienna’s largest elementary school, the film follows the class from second to fourth grade, during which time the students, largely children of Middle Eastern and North African migrants, learn a number of life lessons. Ilkay Idiskut, their thirty-something Turkish teacher, likewise undergoes life-altering changes while also dealing with the day-to-day issues plaguing the contemporary public education system, namely a shortage of teachers and a lack of resources to fill extracurricular positions.

While these matters dictate how the school operates, they’re rarely explicated – only once in a faculty meeting and brief moments when Ilkay converses with a parent or a colleague are they ever broached. Otherwise, the film focuses entirely on the relationship between Ilkay and her students, whose personalities shine through in sequences of youthful camaraderie and occasional fits of unruly adolescence.

As recent school-set movies such as Un Film Dramatique (2019) and Mr Bachmann and His Class (2021) have demonstrated, classrooms can act as near-perfect microcosms of society at large. Here, students are given crash courses in everything from religious diversity to gender politics. In an early scene, a male student touches the rear-end of a female classmate; Ilkay reprimands the boy, but it’s the girl’s response that breaks down the problem most succinctly: “Not all girls like that.” Later, the class takes a pair of trips to the city, where they excitedly visit a Mosque and a Catholic Church. In these moments, which speak to a sense of innocence and shared humanity, it’s difficult not to think about the absence of such acceptance in the adult world.

Where Favoriten differentiates itself from the aforementioned films is in its combination of formal and emotional complexity. At various points, Beckermann literally gives the movie over to the students, who film themselves and each other with a cellphone, lending a first-person intimacy to what could otherwise be a straightforward example of vérité cinema.

Instead, the viewer is given access to the children’s individual interests and curiosities. Some kids perfectly compose their shots; others take a more freeform approach. One student interviews Ilkay, who speaks about her siblings and husband. As fourth grade begins, Ilkay reveals that she’s pregnant and won’t be able to finish out the year. Her announcement, and the kids’ reaction to it, is as quietly moving as any fiction.

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With able assistance from the likes of regular composer Carter Burwell and the eclectic stewardship of production luminary “T Bone” Burnet, the cinema of the Coen brothers stands as a testament to the sublime partnership of music and film. It’s for that very reason we’ve decided to pluck and parse 10 platters that really mattered from the directors’ unique and constantly astounding oeuvre.

‘It’s The Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops from Blood Simple

Appropriately enough, an actual jukebox is showcased in the Coen brothers’ debut film, Blood Simple, though in a somewhat more flamboyant a manner than what we’ve now come to expect from the duo’s more overtly dramatic features. In an unexpectedly heightened flourish, we shadow a bartender as he strolls across a pub’s dank floor, watch him insert a coin and select ‘It’s the Same Old Song’ by soul quartet the Four Tops, then follow back along at his feet as he delivers some suave dialogue to a female patron. It’s a noticeably stylised moment, similar in spirit to what Quentin Tarantino would go on to perfect in the ’90s, but in an otherwise dark and moody noir it stands out as the Coen’s first successful attempt at pillaging the pop canon.

‘Danny Boy’ by Frank Patterson from Miller’s Crossing

The Coens have made it a signature of their period pieces to feature era-appropriate tunes alongside Carter Burwell’s traditional scores. Miller’s Crossing was their first recreation of a bygone epoch and thus their first opportunity to employ pre-modern music in their unique cinematic universe. They’re also masters of the incongruous gesture, often implementing contradictions in audio/visual presentation. These two techniques dovetail to thrilling effect in one of the film’s early sequences as a shoot-out spills from the bedroom of a mafioso into a suburban street as Frank Patterson’s rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ spins soulfully, ominously on the home hi-fi. The result is one of the most memorable set pieces in the entire Coen catalogue.

‘Let’s Find Each Other Tonight’ by José Feliciano from Fargo

Befitting their liberal approach to genre, many of the Coens’ most indelible musical moments are likewise adventurous in spirit. This accounts for their extensive use of covers and reinterpretations of American standards, but sometimes you’ve got to have a laugh at the expense of novelty culture, and the brief cameo by Puerto Rican lounge act José Feliciano in Fargo is one of the slyest, funniest bits the Coens ever dreamt up. As Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter entertains a hooker over dinner, Feliciano himself can be seen and heard in the background performing ‘Let’s Find Each Other Tonight’, the title no doubt a wink at both the scene’s developing transaction as well as at more perceptive viewers fully aware of the singer’s regrettably earnest tendencies.

‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’ by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition from The Big Lebowski

Perhaps no song is as associated with a Coen brothers character as ‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’ by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It certainly helps that this 1968 psychedelic classic is allowed to play out to near completion – a rarity for any film – but as the theme to the imagined adult film debut of the Coens’ ultimate creation, the Dude (Jeff Bridges), it has built in comedic capacity and even thematic correlation. Except Gutterballs is no ordinary bongo flick, in the mind of the Dude instead becoming a hallucinatory barrage of bowling and Roman iconography starring Adolf Hitler and Julianne Moore. Who did you think would provide the soundtrack? The fucking Eagles?

‘I’ll Fly Away’ by Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Another song the Coens allow to play in its entirety, ‘I’ll Fly Away’ by Alison Kruass and Gillian Welch, like “Just Dropped In” before it, provides musical accompaniment to a montage. The song’s theme of escape resounds in the plight of a trio of escaped convicts (played by George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson) whom O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows across the Mississippi Delta and which the Coens exploit for musical and comedic pleasures alike. The universal resonance of not only “I’ll Fly Away” but all the film’s attendant folk music helped the O Brother soundtrack became one of the biggest sellers of the modern era, proving the market for old sounds is as healthy as ever.

‘Suspicious Minds’ by Elvis Presley from Intolerable Cruelty

Elvis Presley’s last number-one single, ‘Suspicious Minds’, opens the Coen brothers’ 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, setting a darkly humorous tone for this screwball tale of infidelity and legal comeuppance. And from there the brothers pit an ensemble of zany characters against one another in an array of blackmail attempts, prenuptial scheming, and elaborate revenge plots. Everyone here, from George Clooney to Catherine Zeta-Jones to Billy Bob Thornton to Richard Jenkins, seems to be channeling unfashionable archetypes, playing up the inherent hilarity of romantic drama. But it’s Elvis’ velvet-voiced pleading, all but echoing in the recesses of each successive ruse, which continues to lace the proceedings with an aura of unassuming transgression, going some way toward grounding this film’s more flighty tendencies.

‘Trouble of This World’ by Rose Stone and the Venice Four from The Ladykillers

If the Coens’ remake of The Ladykillers can be said to have a theme song, it is, without question, ‘Trouble of This World’. Appearing in no less than three iterations between the film and soundtrack – which is otherwise comprised of an impressive swathe of gospel and blues music – the song can be easily read as a thematic comment on the criminal exploits of Professor Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr (Tom Hanks) and his ragtag band of misfit murderers. In updating the 1955 Ealing comedy of the same name, the Coens’ attempted to bridge the past and present in a unique, though not always productive, manner. But no matter their handle on the material, the brothers’ musical touch here remained true.

‘CIA Man’ by The Fugs from Burn After Reading

Most of the songs chosen for this feature were selected for their thematic relation to or utilisation within a given narrative. The Fugs’ ‘CIA Man’, however, is just a wildly unique song that, while it happens to tie in with Burn After Reading’s undercover intelligence plot, doesn’t seem to serve much function in the end credits except when heard as a meta cinematic grace note on an already self-referential film. I like to think that the Coens’ knew they wanted to use this track but had little idea how to use it. After all, there aren’t many instances in a movie where a proto-garage rock hoedown would prove appropriate, even in a film as off-the-wall as Burn After Reading.

‘Somebody to Love’ by Jefferson Airplane from A Serious Man

As you may have noticed, the Coens like to weave the disparate meanings of songs into the fabric of their films. But save for the Dude’s otherwise incidental love of CCR, there isn’t another example of a band becoming a de facto character in one of their films like the Jefferson Airplane in A Serious Man. The psych-pop legends are present throughout the film, not only on the soundtrack but also in the dialogue (“These are the members…of the Airplane!”, Rabbi Marshak proclaims at one unexpected juncture), while the uneasy couplet, “When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies,” from their most famous song, ‘Somebody to Love’, takes on grave consequence in the film’s closing moments.

‘Green, Green Rocky Road’ by Dave Van Ronk from Inside Llewyn Davis

For a duo as musically inclined as the Coens it seems inevitable that they would one day make a film directly about the industry. In that sense, Inside Llewyn Davis feels like the film they’ve been building toward, and the accompanying soundtrack appropriately flourishes within and apart from the narrative. While likely an amalgamation of identities, the dramatic arc of the title character has clear parallels with Greenwich Village folk journeyman Dave Van Ronk, and in a sort of spiritual nod to his perseverance, the Coens’ close out their newest film with Van Ronk’s ‘Green, Green Rocky Road’, a first person account of the artistic tribulations that one hopes will someday provide inspiration for even greater success – as they have here.

Hail, Caesar! is released 4 March.

Director Gaspar Noé’s reputation has been built on what one might generously deem the less dignified aspects of the human condition. If the Argentine-born filmmaker is by this point a “name” in international cinema, it’s in the most literal sense, as a headline-generating, controversy-stoking star of his own conception.

Having already pushed the boundaries of violence, misogyny, and drug abuse (among other delightful subjects) in such purposefully provocative films as 1998’s I Stand Alone, 2002’s Irréversible and 2009’s Enter the Void, it makes a certain kind of sense that Noé would not only one day arrive at a full-blown sex flick, but at a full-blown 3D sex flick. In light of such considerations, that Love – née Gaspar Noé’s Love – fulfils all the titillating tenets of said genre is unsurprising; that it’s as simultaneously tender, touching, and even tasteful as its title implies is, for this filmmaker, the most shocking development of all.

To be clear, Love retains many of the stylistic hallmarks that make Noé’s filmmaking so frustrating; this time, however, these same gauche aesthetic flourishes are tempered by a genuine sense of humanity and, most importantly, a heretofore unacknowledged sense of humour. The seeming irony of Noé making a 3D porno called Love is lost on absolutely no one, least of all the director, who goes to great lengths to prove just how unironically he views this story. The narrative, therefore, is equal parts earnest and enervating, tracking in flashback the romantic and sexual passions of a young couple from the throes of a breakup to their early days as star-crossed lovers.

We watch (and watch) as Murphy (Karl Glusman) and Electra (Aomi Muyock) make love with numerous people, in a variety of places and positions, the pair enjoying the strength of their youthful libidos even as their emotional bonds appear to grow evermore tenuous. Later, when Murphy turns a ménage à trois with their neighbour, Omi (Klara Kristin), into an ongoing sexual liaison, his infidelity results in an unexpected pregnancy and ill-equipped foray into parenthood.

If the plot sounds like bad daytime television, it is so by design – everything about the film seems to speak in the most base vocabulary possible. The performers – Glusman a working actor in his first significant role; Muyock and Kristin non-actors plucked by the director from a night club – while committed, seem as if they were selected as much for their unpolished qualities as their willingness to engage in unsimulated sex. Their dialogue manages to transcend any language barriers by conveniently returning to the viewer to a universally pubescent perspective. Likewise, Noé’s manner of visualising the film is, by his standards, rather conventional, shooting most of the expository scenes in medium-length two-shots, and the sex scenes in either static set-ups or from overhead angles emphasising the intimacy of the proceedings. For better or worse, few of the familiarly garish sequences or elaborately choreographed tracking shots of Noé’s past work are in evidence here.

All of which begs the question of why Noé chose to shoot the film in 3D. His less demonstrative formal approach, coupled with the stereoscopic lensing, occasionally lends a pleasing depth to the image, exploited most expertly in a neon-lit club sequence and a number of near-hallucinatory scenes set outside the confines of the bedroom. But otherwise the technology does little to deepen the sensory effect of watching these actors’ bodies communicate and commingle in uninhibited displays of eroticism.

It may simply have been the most obvious way to subvert expectations, which, thankfully, Noé only rarely gives into – most memorably with an inevitable “shot” pointed right in the face of the audience – instead opting to stress the film’s almost playfully self-conscious demeanour. The posters of controversial films (Salò, The Birth of a Nation) decorating Murphy’s bedroom walls, for example, are downright subtle compared to when he and Omi decide to name their newborn son (wait for it…) Gaspar. And if that’s not enough the director himself shows up as Electra’s sleazy ex-boyfriend, joining in on the fun with a silhouetted sex scene all of his own. Whether you find these flourishes indulgent or ingratiating will likely come down to your patience for Noé and his self-styled persona. At the very least it’s nice to see him finally having a little fun at his own expense.

As much as any filmmaker of his generation, the American-born, Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire appears fascinated by the cinema’s most fundamental component, namely that of the image and its role as an indexical marker in our conception of past events. That said, Baudelaire is drawn not to the documented or recorded so much as the unknown or undisclosed; in fact, the images he concerns himself with are oftentimes nonexistent. Over the course of four features and a pair of shorts, Baudelaire has quietly worked to reimagine both the essay film and its epistemological capacity for historical inquiry.

The material image itself is subjected to investigation in both 2009’s [sic] and 2010’s The Makes, two of the director’s early shorts. The former, a brief piece inspired by a trip through Kyoto, depicts a young woman in a Japanese bookstore systematically scraping art books of certain pictorial details. In Japan, this act of obscuration is known as “bokashi,” a preemptive measure against stimulating untoward sexual desire. Here, however, we see the girl take a small craft knife to images of nudity as well as architecture and landscape photography. Baudelaire’s comment on the subjective nature of obscenity and the damaging implications of artistic censorship are as carefully articulated as the woman’s work is precisely rendered.

The Makes, meanwhile, meditates on an alternate cinematic history, one in which the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni relocated to Japan to produce a series of films which today exist only as unrealized screenplays. Staged as an interview with critic Philippe Azoury, who discusses the films as if they’re recognised achievements while flipping through stills of famous Japanese actors, the film produces a intriguing temporal dissonance between disparate periods, places, and people, our knowledge and understanding of an unknown filmic era made manifest.

The experiential distance between these sources – between subjective and suggested notions of certain epochs or events – forms the basis of much of Baudelaire’s feature work. 2011’s In The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and the 27 Years Without Images, for example, the director investigates a chasm of personal memory and political amnesia with respect to the Japanese Red Army and their coalition throughout the 1970s and ‘80s with the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Through a combination of vintage film clips, newly shot 8mm footage of Beirut and Tokyo, and the voiceover reflections of May Shigenobu, daughter of the late founder of the JRA, and controversial filmmaker Masao Adachi, who set aside his artistic aspirations to join in the Palestinian cause, Baudelaire is able to cinematically reconstruct an era with no visual analogue for the atrocities that plagued a nation and continue to affect future generations.

A companion piece of sorts, 2013’s The Ugly One considers this peculiar cultural elision by not only enlisting Adachi once more to provide verbal recollections, but also by constructing a fictionalised framework to act as compliment to these memories. Interspersed amidst these ruminations are contemplative images of the Lebanese landscape, as well as the story of Michel and Lili (played by Rabih Mroue and Juliette Navis), whose seemingly idyllic lives are transpiring against a backdrop of violence. Their role in the various offscreen crises are dramatized through increasingly tense episodes of ideological turmoil, with Beirut acting as epicenter for their radical displays of discontent. If The Anabasis plays as a volley of autonomous addresses to an abstract recipient, The Ugly One communicates directly to the viewer by way of the most visceral of storytelling means.

Baudelaire’s most recent work, 2014’s Letters to Max, takes correspondence as its principal narrative device. Constructed as an exchange between Baudelaire and Maxim Gvinjia, with a selection of the director’s letters read aloud by the former Foreign Minister of the unrecognized Georgian state of Abkhazia, the film attempts the most ambitious of feats, conjuring a cinematic continuum for a country which for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist. Through a series of dialogues presented as onscreen inquiries and overheard answers, Baudelaire constructs a conversation which itself is constantly regenerating and renegotiating the extent of its own verisimilitude – Abkhazia is of nominal disregard, suggesting the inability for such a correspondence to feasibly transpire.

In questioning the very definition of delineation and the veracity of images as they pertain to an ostensibly invisible subject, the film’s reflexive construction effectively stages a discussion of ontological ramifications, with two friends acting as conduits for a literal and figurative state of cultural consciousness. And in that sense, Letters to Max may be both Baudelaire’s most inquisitive and lucid consideration yet of the image as a beacon of historical cognisance – events may be lost to time or memory, but art retains the ability to bring the past into direct discourse with the present.

A season of films by Eric Baudelaire will screen on MUBI

I fell in love with Chantal Akerman somewhere between East Germany and Moscow. Not literally, of course, though it may as well be, so evocative and transportive is her 1993 masterpiece D’Est.

Essentially a visual diary of the Belgian director’s travels across the former European communist bloc, the film (whose title translates as ‘From the East’) in many ways encapsulates the many modes and methodologies with which Akerman worked throughout the most prolific phase of her career (which this work could further be said to mark the end of). Composed primarily of meditative tracking shots captured as sequenced tableaux through unidentified urban and countryside locales, D’Est documents with an outsider’s eye a very specific moment of cultural transition, as the thaw of the Cold War opened to a newly liberated, modern iteration of Soviet society.

Like many of Akerman’s films, the politics of D’Est are embedded in the contextual details of its production, or felt in the margins of the narrative, rather than explicated in traditional storytelling terms. She’s one of the most political filmmakers I know, and yet not a single one of her films is about politics, or an overriding issue, or anything so blatantly topical. She approaches her subjects from a variety of (usually fixed) angles, often choosing to simply observe activities and the incidental development of the resultant dramas.

Her most celebrated film, 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is a three-plus hour domestic diorama wherein the title character, a single mother, attends to routine household duties while prostituting herself between tasks to provide for her and her son. Nothing much is made of these circumstances – not the peeling of potatoes, nor the servicing of local businessmen – and even less is pronounced in the film’s rigorous mise-en-scène. And yet few films carry such cumulative impact or offer such a pointed, nuanced articulation of feminine autonomy.

Akerman’s style is modernist in its temporal conceptualisation yet somehow almost classical in its negotiation of physical and geographic space. A number of her films – including 1972’s Hôtel Monterey, 1977’s News from Home and D’Est – are about actual places, and as such stand as uniquely first-person meditations on public environments. But if the formalist frameworks and mundane nature of her chosen settings seem to suggest static cinematic experiences, Akerman’s best work manages to generate an internal dynamism wherein narrative and aesthetic economy work toward locating a nascent power in the actualities of our everyday surroundings.

Whether working in fiction or documentary, this elemental strategy elicits similarly involving, lingering effects. Thus, an essay film such as News from Home is rendered of equally intimate, perspicacious vision as the nostalgic coming-of-age chronicle Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels – and is just as personal as a result. Akerman hasn’t been as been as productive in recent years, producing only a single feature, the sterling 2011 Joseph Conrad adaptation Almayer’s Folly, in the last decade. But as that Malaysia-set, ’50s-era psychodrama re-attests, when she does return, it will be with a fully realised sense of time, place and self-possession.

This article originally appeared as part of our focus on women filmmakers in LWLies 60: The Eden issue.

Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, the Portuguese filmmaker’s first fiction feature in over eight years, crescendos with an intensely cerebral 20-minute sequence set inside an elevator in which a flood of dialogue works to collapse an entire history’s worth of personal and political tragedy in one virtuoso display of accumulated aggression. Undeniably bracing, the scene – a slightly reworked version of Costa’s 2012 short Sweet Exorcism (originally featured in the Centro Histórico omnibus film) – is but the final and most violent example of the film’s foremost allegorical conceit, that of indoor space as physical manifestation of repressed cultural memory.

In Costa’s cinema, the act of representation is an act of exorcism in itself – or, as he put it in an interview with Cinema Scope magazine, a means to fully leave the past behind: “Some people say they make films to remember. I think we make films to forget.” It’s a declaration as weary yet sober-minded as this film is unsurprising, especially in light of Costa’s intimidating oeuvre, which carries the weight of both cultural and cinematic history in every deeply felt frame. Starring Ventura, the real-life Cape Verdean lead of this film’s loose predecessor, 2006’s Colossal Youth, as a lightly dramatised version of himself, Costa’s latest follows his ever-enigmatic collaborator through a succession of scenes and settings with an air of the purgatorial – a sense which the director encourages and exaggerates by way of abstract narrative chronology and highly symbolic depictions of institutional spaces.

When we meet Ventura, he’s lumbering down a dimly lit, cave-like corridor in his underwear, before awakening in a hospital bed surrounded by infantrymen who speak of the violence transpiring just beyond the walls of this unidentified sanitarium. Ventura is visibly sick. His hands shake, he struggles to walk. When he speaks he often returns to the memory of a horrific 1975 knife fight, from which he still bears physical and psychological scars. From here he proceeds to encounter many mysterious figures, each an apparent manifestation of a past friend, acquaintance, or colleague. The most striking of these is Vitalina, a fellow Cape Verdean transplant who has arrived for her husband’s funeral, an event we never see but which is deliberated upon at length when she and Ventura meet on a rooftop in the dead of night, the only light emanating unnaturally from the windows of an adjacent apartment building.

It’s evident in its elliptical presentation and somewhat episodic construction that Horse Money’s narrative transpires in a realm beyond traditional notions of reality. The film could thus be read any number of ways: as a portrait of the afterlife, or a death rattle hallucination, a vision of Ventura as he passes from one existence to the next, or as a waking nightmare precipitated by years of unrelenting trauma. Whatever the interpretation, Ventura’s journey feels inexorable, proceeding through a succession of spaces that are recognisable yet gutted of any tangible associations. Hospitals, catacombs, forests, warehouses – they functionally correspond to everyday conceptions of a troubled psyche, but fail to offer even the coldest of comforts.

The film’s largely nocturnal settings and stark, chiaroscuro lighting design, coupled with the actors’ ghostly incantations and generally defeated demeanours, suggest characteristics of the horror genre. Costa’s affinity for the style’s more outré practitioners – Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G Ulmer, Charles Laughton – has long been apparent (his debut feature, O Sangue from 1989, set its tale of sibling struggle in a monochromatic wasteland that could have easily been shot on midcentury studio sets). With Horse Money, however, such aesthetic inclinations reach new heights of expressionistic elegance. Costa frames each shot like a static mural, draping figures and objects in gulfs of darkness which spill forth from beyond the measure of the frame. These digital images, beautiful and grotesque, conjure a sense of apocalyptic grandeur at eye level, capturing dilapidated interiors at impossible angles and moonlit clearings with disarming austerity.

It all builds to the final encounter in the hospital elevator, in which an unknown, undead, unmoving solider – a kind of living statue – speaks to Ventura through the voices of the dearly departed. A ghost of the Carnation Revolution and a cipher of Portugal’s post-war industrial decimation, the soldier stands at the literal and figurative threshold of Ventura’s spiritual transference. Where he’s arrived and to where he’ll proceed at the film’s end is unclear, but the startling final image, in which Ventura and the weapon which so painfully haunts his memory find themselves stacked within the same cramped frame, suggest the wounds are far from healed.

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, has cast a long, lingering shadow over both the career of its creator and the discipline of documentary filmmaking in its entirety. In the 30 years since Shoah’s release, Lanzmann has continued to devote himself almost solely to the excavation of not only the histories of the Holocaust, but to the mountains of footage he himself shot over the 10-plus years of the film’s development. It’s clear that the impetus behind Shoah, along with the now four subsequent films he has created from the same reserve of original material, is less a one-off project than an ongoing ideological and artistic concern.

Such a continuum is appropriate considering Lanzmann’s dedication to the restoration and reanimation of past events for the present day. And in that sense, The Last of the Unjust is another monumental unveiling of a shrouded episode in world history, as well as a crucial reconciliation of the tenets of memory and morality though the most catastrophic prism imaginable. Structured around a handful of interviews conducted in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the final president of the Jewish Council at Theresienstadt and the sole surviving “Jewish Elder,” a succession of Nazi-anointed administrators who helped govern various concentration camps during the war years, the film is told largely through the written and verbal recollections of its eponymous subject, presenting this most controversial of positions as a burden of contradictions pitted at the very crux of betrayal and benevolence.

Again using no archival footage, Lanzmann manages to seamlessly situate the film within multiple time periods, contrasting and commenting upon his conversations with Murmelstein and their discussion of his role in the embellishments of this “model ghetto,” with present day visits to Theresienstadt where the director reads aloud from the rabbi’s 1961 book, ‘Terezin, il Ghetto Modello di Eichmann.’ For Lanzmann, the past is not a closed conversation, but instead an ongoing dialogue, attaining new resonance with the accumulation of time and the addition of new perspectives.

For his part, Murmelstein is a dazzlingly sharp and involving storyteller, weaving first-hand details of working under the domineering hand of Adolf Eichmann with, at times, disconcerting defences for his own actions (“Perhaps I thirsted for adventure”). Much of the interview is given over to semantic debate (the categorical classifications of Jews, “East” as a pretence for Auschwitz, the marked distinction between martyrs and saints), but Lanzmann just as sagely allows his images to accrue an existential gravitas, formulating at once an inquiry into the capacity of our moral constitution and an aesthetic hypothesis for the dimensions of memory itself. As such, Lanzmann’s cinema remains less document than testament, one of immense power and integrity – a legacy of legacies.

Considering the breadth and intellect of Frederick Wiseman’s filmography, it feels somewhat inevitable that he’d one day take as his subject the province of academia. His second feature, 1968’s High School, first betrayed an interest in educational ethnology and scholastic infrastructure, and he would follow it up with a sequel over two decades later. It has taken until his mid-’80s, however, for the direct cinema pioneer to look toward the domain of higher education. At Berkeley, one in a string of ambitious late career works, at once interrogates the pedagogic/ideologic institutional divide as well as the principal tenets of Wiseman’s cinema itself.

Extending the filmmaker’s greater project of observational inquiry and assimilation, At Berkeley arrives at the Bay Area public research campus with little if any measurable objective, opting to aggregate faculty and student impressions, opinions, and assessments regarding the constitutional integrity of the university rather than probe or proceed from any pre-established narrative perspective.

This is Wiseman’s customary methodology, but in this instance, documenting as it does such a labyrinth-like communal environment, his film feels especially relaxed and receptive to happenstance and incremental discovery. In the process, Wiseman – always a conscientious presence in his work despite his vérité sensibility – highlights contradictions and parallels within a dogmatic scholarly continuum which, by its very nature, necessitates cultural, historical, and institutional regard.

Shooting in his simultaneously detached yet inquisitive style, Wiseman maps an expansive topographical index of the grounds between UC Berkeley’s borders. Moving fluidly from indoors to outdoors, from halls to haunts, from classroom to common areas, the film comprehensively accounts for the many personalities and professions which energise and exemplify the school.

Wiseman allots healthy portions of the film to the organisational and, by extension, philosophical operations of the university – how it’s perceived, how it functions in relation to its Ivy League alternatives, and how it defines itself within a politically progressive past and present. Such topics prompt discussion and debate amongst the administration, a process of deliberation which Wiseman carefully correlates with lengthy lecture scenes which frequently devolve into disputes amongst students.

At just over four hours in length, At Berkeley takes its time surveying campus life and its everyday idiosyncrasies. More so than even some of Wiseman’s other circumscribed cinematic frameworks, individual interest in and insight into this film’s subject may vary based on a number of unquantifiable factors, tolerance for collegiate verbal contention and sympathy for liberal demonstration foremost amongst them.

And when compared to the other more visually stimulating films Wiseman’s made this decade, such as 2011’s Crazy Horse or 2014’s National Gallery, At Berkeley can’t help but appear the more modest endeavour, despite its scope and topicality. That being said, this is a highly articulate and engaging film, and one that benefits greatly from its creator’s wisdom and democratic approach.

Director Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York opens with a pre-credits interview which doubles as both an act of disclosure and discretion. In it, star Gérard Depardieu (as himself), acknowledges a common discrepancy in the art of acting: namely, that while he portrays an unsympathetic character — or in this case, via an unsubtle dramatisation of France’s former financial ambassador Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a rather vile one — he doesn’t condone or endorse his subject’s actions.

Coming from another director, this preamble could play as an attempt to preemptively diffuse allegations that the film may in fact be celebrating such behaviour. But from Ferrara, one of the most volatile and uncompromising of American auteurs, it further functions as a meta-cinematic comment on the performances which, at one point or another, we’re all inclined to indulge.

Further suggesting a kind of universal depravity, Ferrara opts not to contextualise his film. Indeed, the entire narrative of Welcome to New York unfurls over the course of a few evenings, from the arrival of Devereaux, our Strauss-Kahn surrogate, in Manhattan to his subsequent house arrest following the attempted rape of a hotel maid. For Ferrara (and by extension, Depardieu) there’s nothing but the animalistic drive of this man — no explanations, no psychology, no remorse. The film is likewise singular in its depiction of Devereaux’s pleasures and perversions. Beginning with what can discreetly be described as a 30-minute compendium of sexual liaisons, it is, in actuality, an orgy of indeterminate identities, a veritable overture of consumption and consummation — of limbs, liquids, liquors, and all things lascivious.

Following Devereaux’s initial detention, a series of scenes detailing his incarceration unfold in near-real time. There’s a pointedly procedural sense to these sequences; set inside a New York penitentiary, we watch as Devereaux is stripped naked and searched thoroughly, before being placed in a holding cell. In one of the film’s few genuinely hilarious (rather than tensely humorous) moments, Ferrara’s camera holds close on Devereaux as he paces back-and-forth in the cell, literally growling at his fellow inmates as they — and he in turn — attempt to intimidate.

The only break in the film’s elemental focus transpires in a late montage as Devereaux reflects, in voiceover, upon the preceding events while overlooking the city’s skyline. “I don’t have feelings. I don’t feel guilty,” Devereaux announces as he awaits trial, while his wife, Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) — privy to her husband’s indiscretions but without imminent claim to recourse herself, lest she damage her own political plans — exasperatedly chastises his behaviour. Ferrara continues to excel in his depiction of such moral grey areas, and Welcome to New York proceeds to end on an appropriately ambiguous note — slyly appropriate, that is, as the film has long since handed out its verdict.

If, as the saying goes, home is where the heart is, then in Exhibition it is also sanctuary to the mind, body and soul. Uncommonly attuned to gradations between cognitive existence and physical experience, British director Joanna Hogg’s third feature turns aesthetic determinism into a narrative framework by which action directly corresponds with the surrounding environment.

The film’s simple story, concerning a husband and wife in the process of selling their home of many years, is rendered complex by an internal compositional logic which reflects tremors among the couple and their modernist surroundings alike. In Exhibition, architecture translates as the physical, psychological and emotional infrastructure of its characters – one seemingly cannot advance without altering the material identity of the other.

The film opens and closes in curiously similar fashion, with the character of the wife, known only as D (played by Viv Albertine of British post-punk legends the Slits), contorting herself around inanimate constructions throughout the house. Her husband, H (Liam Gillick), seems the more pragmatic of the two, accommodating brokers (including one played by Tom Hiddleston) and working diligently as a conceptual artist in his home office.

When not folding herself around various objects, D, also an artist, spends her time working out performance pieces which invariably devolve into either exhibitionist displays for her neighbours or exercises in personal pleasure. She’s frustrated – sexually, professionally and emotionally. She shuts down H’s intimate advances only to satisfy herself as he sleeps quietly by her side. Her life appears to be one elaborate artistic display, except there’s an unsettling hollowness to her gestures that suggests an unspoken longing.

Hogg doesn’t disclose much regarding the motivation of her characters. She instead reflects the dynamic (or lack thereof) of the central relationship in formal shorthand. Consistently static, askew and carefully diagrammed, her compositions carry a simultaneously elusive and expressive quality. In Hogg’s hands, every surface is both a literal and figurative mirror; space is expanded in many instances by reflections in glass, marble, and aluminium façades.

More is said in Hogg’s impressively precise visual style than in any of the dialogue, which is as sparse as the film’s interiors. Few recent films have approached matters of anatomical and psychological integrity as democratically as Exhibition.

But what of all this aesthetic dedication – to what ends is Hogg working here? Formally, Exhibition has much in common with works of classic formalism, particularly Rossellini’s films with Ingrid Bergman in the early 1950s (Stromboli, Europe ’51, Journey to Italy) and Antonioni’s output during his structuralist period (La Notte, L’eclisse), but it lacks the gravity acquired by those films as they subjected their characters to volatile new environments.

Exhibition is thus perhaps more reminiscent of the ongoing Greek New Wave, in which films such as Attenberg, Alps and Miss Violence utilise compositional austerity to actualise the severe internal makeup of their characters. Unlike many of those films, however, Exhibition is able to locate a vital human warmth in its precision. The consequences of their impending transition may be left just out of the audience’s purview, but the characters in Exhibition, like all of Hogg’s output thus far, leave one intensely curious for more.