I have so much strength inside of me. You have no idea. I have the Washington Review of Books in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine. I would say that’s that, mattress man.
Links:
In The New York Times Magazine,
on watching comedies in theaters:Take The Naked Gun (2025). The original spoofed cop shows and films noir, delivering outrageous sight gags in a hard-boiled deadpan. This year’s version channels a different set of touchstones—it’s lit like a Tony Scott movie—but the love of sight gags remains. There’s a fight scene tallied by a “Take a number” sign. “Cold cases” are wheeled out of a literal walk-in freezer. Some of these jokes sit in the center of the frame, but many are tucked slyly into the background—exactly the sorts of jokes you might miss if distracted by your phone.
Each time I saw the film, I watched the same moment transpire: Certain viewers would be first to catch a background joke, and their laughter would make everyone else search the screen for whatever they had missed. We were, delightfully, being asked to pay attention to the film, and to one another. One room cracked up at a vulgar joke about a woman’s behind, while another went for an outrageous and surreal midfilm montage—but each bit was made genuinely funnier by the dozens of people gasping and wheezing over it.
[I experienced something similar when I went to see The Naked Gun, although having it put as bluntly as “this is a film that asks you to pay attention to it” is pretty shocking. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri on Luchino Visconti:
Like all biopics [Ludwig (1973)] compresses a life into a coherent line, yet it becomes a portrait of a mind that cannot reconcile history with meaning. Ludwig is both sovereign and prisoner; free of ordinary constraints yet trapped in a system he neither controls nor understands. His fate lies not in insanity alone, but in the impossibility of living as though civilization were still whole. The pacing is novelistic, built from images, pauses, and reported actions, with the sense that history now proceeds without its actors. Ludwig stands as a symbol of cultural ambition magnified to the point of fragility. The other main characters, Queen Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider) and Wagner (Trevor Howard) fix the drama’s axis.
Again, by degrees, the main character’s story becomes a metaphor for the psychological condition of European civilization in decline. In The Damned (1969) Visconti had shown how the distance between cultural aspiration and political reality could produce a wholesale perversion of spiritual values. Ludwig returns to an earlier moment in that descent, when the ideals of Romanticism still held sway yet were beginning to collapse under their own contradictions. The king’s retreat into aesthetic fantasy embodies a paradox: that of art elevated to religion as belief in a civilization that has begun to falter. Nowhere is this clearer than in his devotion to Wagner, whose music he worships while ignoring the man’s opportunism and vulgarity. It is not only that the king cannot see Wagner clearly, but he cannot bear to.
[Death in Venice (1971), which also comes up in this piece, is the story of a man who cannot see himself clearly because he cannot bear to. —Steve]
In ,
on the Ranown westerns directed by Bud Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott:[Scott’s] physical affect drives commentators to reach for deific adjectives. His stony face, André Bazin wrote, “irresistibly recalling William Hart’s right down to the sublime lack of expression,” with a detachment, Paul Schrader mused, akin to that of a “Pantocrator looking down from a Constantine dome” who “increasingly . . . refers to himself in the third person.”
Schrader may be onto something when he compares Scott to an austere deity. Scott’s hero in Seven Men from Now (1956) drops offhanded comments, judgments by implication. He uses them to subtly undermine the weak and corrupt men around him. Schrader dubs it a “crackerbarrel Socratic method: questioning, teasing, suggesting.”
Other characters chatter themselves into corners, imagining the silent Scott is along for the ride, only to be brought up short with a simple contradiction. A cavalry officer scornfully describes a Chiricahua uprising and too late realizes Scott isn’t echoing his sentiments. Scott comments that the natives are hungry, which makes them dangerous. “Then we agree,” the soldier prompts.
“Do we?” Scott responds.
Two in The New Yorker;
Justin Chang profiles Richard Linklater:
Linklater described Blue Moon (2025) as “this sad little howl into the night, of an artist being left behind,” whereas Nouvelle Vague (2025) throws off a youthful spirit of creative vigor. Hart had a brilliant but too-short run; Godard outlived nearly all his contemporaries and became one of the world’s most important filmmakers. What unites the two men in Linklater’s vision is a suspicion of traditionalism and a hatred of complacency. Hart dismisses Oklahoma! as pandering sentimental claptrap, impressively engineered but lacking in humanity. With Breathless (1960), Godard turns filmmaking into film criticism, all but weaponizing the motion-picture medium against itself. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon both circle the same question: Is it better for an artist to satisfy or challenge an audience—and must the two be mutually exclusive? Also: What happens when a great artist is also an impossible human being?
Both films took more than a decade to get off the ground, a situation that isn’t unusual for Linklater. He is, by his own admission, “a slow thinker,” and always has various projects on various back burners, a metaphor that he drew on often enough in our conversation that I began to wonder about the exact size of his stove. “I appreciate years of making the film in your head, a lot, so then, by the time you’re really making it, your instincts are honed,” he said. “I wouldn’t like being thrown into something I haven’t thought out.” Paradoxically, the payoff of this slow-thinking approach has been an extraordinary level of productivity.
Anthony Lane on Il Cinema Ritrovato:
My first port of call was a workbench commanded by Marianna de Sanctis, who wore white gloves, like a conjuror or a croupier. In front of her were two rotating spools, the size of paella dishes, fixed flat upon the bench; by turning a wheel at her side, she wound a reel of negative film from one spool to the other, pausing to examine its condition. The scrutiny was made easier, here and there, by placing the strip of film on black velvet, against which the negative showed up as positive. And, oh, the thousand natural shocks that film is heir to! Scratches, tears, and “perforation loss”—sprockets missing on one or both sides of the frame. Some injuries could be treated with tape, including a special perforated kind. “Of course, we have to put the tape on without any bubbles or dust,” de Sanctis said. “Repair is important, but also we have to try to avoid too much intervention,” she told me. “The less we do, the better.”
The film that she was attending to as we spoke was Bitter Rice (1949), which was due to be screened at the festival, in June. Starring a teen-age Silvana Mangano as one of a host of women who are dispatched to the rice harvest in the valley of the River Po, the movie is a near-mythological item in the resurgence of Italian cinema after the war. At the laboratory, multiple reels of the film, each in an old metal can, were piled in stacks. Labels stuck to each can indicated, in English, the state of the contents. The one for the reel on which de Sanctis was working, for instance, told a sad story of degradation. An “X” was inked in the last of three little boxes: “Slight/Physical Decay,” “Average Decay,” and “Strong Decay.” Another box marked where on the reel the trouble lay: “Head,” “Centre,” or “Tail.” If only mortal decline could be registered with equal efficiency, we would all be saved an awful lot of fuss.
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Thames, Michael Wood reviews Highest 2 Lowest (2025):
Now the film begins to reveal its method, which is to allow each story to be hijacked by another before it’s settled in. An invitation to this method can be found in Lee’s predecessors; the film is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom (1959). But Lee turns it into a genuine scamper, where the scampering becomes the point. This is one of the recurring pleasures of his films. He likes to mix genres and return to places and people. I’m thinking now particularly of Da 5 Bloods (2018), but similar effects occur in much, perhaps most, of his work. Kurosawa’s film also opens with shots across a river and a conversation in a penthouse. But the business being discussed is shoes rather than music, and while remaining faithful to much of the plot, Lee has made a quite different movie, marked by elegant allusions rather than debt.
In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri reviews Megadoc (2025), a documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024):
In that early footage, we also see Virginia Madsen playing Wow Platinum, the gold-digging newscaster memorably played in the finished movie by Plaza. Again, two completely different performers, two presumably quite different interpretations of a singular role. The uniqueness of Coppola’s approach clearly attracted Plaza to this picture; she seems to thrive on the uncertainty. “This is a nightmare,” she says she told Coppola when she first read the script, but she means it in a good way. One of Coppola’s preferred ways of trying out his actors is to have them say a particular line over and over again with a totally different intonation each time, and we can see Plaza’s eyes lighting up at the opportunity; she embraces the mischief and the lunacy. Watching her throughout Megadoc, it seems as if she has found a kind of happy place. Honestly, she might be the best thing in both films.
Figgis, himself an Oscar nominee and once a major figure in international cinema, is a curious choice to make a movie like this. As he notes himself, he’d never seen another director at work before. At 77, he might not be the household name Coppola is, but over his career he has been no less formally ambitious: This is the man who made 2000’s Timecode, a fiction feature consisting of four intersecting long takes that played simultaneously in a four-way split screen. (He repeated some of those ideas in 2001’s more successful Hotel.) Figgis’ experimental streak isn’t evident in Megadoc; he seems more content to sit back and observe. Maybe that’s because he realizes he doesn’t have to intervene, that what’s happening before his camera is interesting enough.
[There is an interview of Agnes Moorehead on The Dick Cavett Show where she describes how Orson Welles prepared her for a scene in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) where her character breaks down: he had her rehearse it eleven times with wildly different characterizations—girlish, insane, drunk, and so on—so that the final performance would have pieces of all of them in it. —Steve]
N.B.:
An interview with Jim Jarmusch.
People are mentioning A24 in their dating app profiles.
Robert Redford died on Tuesday, September 16. R.I.P.
The quest to figure out where his blazer in Three Days of the Condor (1975) came from.
Claudia Cardinale died on Tuesday, September 23. R.I.P. [After Alain Delon’s death I discussed The Leopard (1963) in WRB—Sept. 2024 Film Supplement, with an eye towards how beautiful he is in it. But any discussion of beauty in that film, as mine did, will eventually come around to how beautiful Cardinale is in it as well. —Steve]
Movies across the decades:
Punch-Drunk Love (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
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