Recognizing the forces and facts in play pushes the audience to look beyond Apocalypse Now’s canonical idolization and instead critically and empathetically re-evaluate the historically and politically befuddled landscape in which Coppola’s auteurist aesthetics operates.

When it comes to falling asleep normally, I am already deformed. Watching La Belle Noiseuse evokes a reversal of this sentiment, wherein the film makes me feel whole. It relaxes my posture, calms my mind, puts every bit of myself into a restful totality, and sees me off to slumberland.

Per Derrida, “The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” A Museum Sleeps then rethinks narrative as a kind of séance that consists, not of causal plot points, but of Feuillade-esque chance images, random encounters, and a sense of games. Perhaps this is the best strategy to reconstruct a city and its ghosts. In my lockdown viewings, I saw my flâneuse past. In A Museum Sleeps, I glimpsed my future, and a return of a freewheeling urban phantasmagoria.

When the name Alberto Lattuada comes up in film criticism, even back when the director was still making movies, the general sentiment seems to be a kind of confusion. Not so much about the quality of his works which certainly have been championed—the French film magazine Positif once dedicated an entire issue to his filmography—but rather the sensibility of Lattuada’s oeuvre and how it straddles Neorealism and melodrama, social critique, and erotic sleaze.

Two films epitomizing perceptions of conservative "Frenchness" in fact embrace artisanal labor, ephemeral beauty, and artistic legacy.

On Helga Reidemeister's 1970s documentaries.

A look at the explosive debut of Tang Wei.

On Sylvia Kristel’s iconic role.

On Ella Raines and the enigmatic queerness of Phantom Lady.