This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Factory dreams: the artist-run collective L’Abominable imagines a future for the film laboratory in the ruins of the ...

(Yojiro Takita, Japan, 2008)The members of the Academy who gave Departures its Oscar must be feeling their mortality. The movie tells the story of a second-rate cellist who loses his job when an ...

Outer LimitsMysterious and soulful, Virgil Vernier’s debut fiction feature has its eyes on the night skies and its feet firmly planted on concrete. Somewhere in a Paris banlieue backcountry of ...

(Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2008)Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified ...

(Takashi Miike, Japan, 2010)Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is bound to be regarded by some as its director’s most mature film to date—mistakenly so. It’s true that particularly in its truncated, ...

(Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia, 2007)For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated ...

1. Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 2. Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 3. Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 4. Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 5. Muriel Alain ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

First glimpsed pitching a Midwestern drive-in owner on a multi-mixer (arguing that his demand for shakes would be higher if he could supply more), Kroc (Michael Keaton) drives cross-country to San ...

1. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Sam Peckinpah, 19742. Claire’s Knee Eric Rohmer, 19703. Faces John Cassavetes, 19684. Eyes Without a Face ...

Within moments of meeting a woman on a train, Norman Oppenheimer offers—unsolicited— to introduce her to three prominent people. That’s how Norman operates: he’s a “fixer,” a seemingly well-connected ...