‘It is what it is,” says the union boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) during a tense pow-wow in the forthcoming gangster drama The Irishman. To which the mildly perplexed crime boss Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham) replies: “What is it?”

The same question might well be asked of Netflix. On one hand, the streaming service has stumped up the readies to enable some of the world’s finest film-makers to work without cuts or compromises: not only Martin Scorsese, who couldn’t get the $160m needed to make The Irishman from anywhere else, but Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), David Michôd (The King) and Fernando Meirelles (The Two Popes). But then Netflix goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like: “Who has time to watch movies anyway?”Advertisement

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Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodóvar on the set of Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

In his feature in the September-October 2019 issue of Film Comment,  Michael Koresky writes: “Pedro Almodóvar leans into the pain with his new film Pain and Glory, his most autobiographical to date. Structurally, the genre is a no-brainer, perhaps, for a writer-director who has long preferred to tell stories centrifugally, spiraling out from a revelatory center rather than having finite beginnings and endings. Almodóvar’s movies of the 21st century especially, such as Bad Education (2004)—with which this film shares a strong kinship—Broken Embraces (2009), and The Skin I Live In (2011), have consistently moved away from linearity, as though coasting on the waves of memory...

Images from Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, 2019)

After saving Elena Orsini’s (Jessica Cressy) brother from a beating, Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) is invited for lunch at the siblings’ posh family estate. That’s where he makes his first mistake. Though the fact that Martin is unafraid to throw a punch is appreciated, his brawny physicality becomes a liability with a bowl of pasta in front of him; elbows on the table, a nervous smile on his face, he eats with an animation that Elena’s mother notes with alarm. “Education is important, is it not?” she asks him pointedly. To which Martin responds, grabbing a piece of bread and sopping up the tomato sauce on his plate, “If education is the bread, then the sauce is poverty...

At the Cannes Film Festival, where Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the director asked critics not to reveal anything about the film past the initial setup. One of the joys of going to festivals is that you can discover movies without noisy criticism getting in the way of your own first impression. So fair warning: if you want to replicate that experience, don’t read this piece until you’ve seen Parasite, because I’m going to give a great deal of the game away. It’s too extraordinary a film to dance around.

Late in the twisty, class-warfare family tragicomedy that is Parasite, Ki-taek, the head of a family of four that never had much and now has lost every bit of that, is lying on his back on the floor of a crowded shelter, next to his wife, Chung-sook; his son, ...

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976)

The first time I saw Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was years ago in a packed theater in Chicago. The film came weighted by its own reputation. I went in intimidated (I had found much of the writing about it to be incomprehensible, albeit intriguing). I have seen the film many times since, but when I think about the first time I remember one thing and one thing only: when Delphine Seyrig, busy in her cooking routine, dropped a fork, a woman a couple of rows away from me, who was also probably seeing it for the first time, gasped in terror...

In this biweekly column, Michael Koresky looks back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay.

Images from The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)

She appears from the dark or she comes in mist. She’s out of the past or here from lands unknown. She’s not of this earth anymore, yet she has a distinct effect on the material world. The attraction-repulsion she instills is born of sensuality as much as fear, and her threat almost always descends upon a living woman. Who is she, or who was she? These are the basic questions for a strange subgenre of horror movie that materialized in ’40s Hollywood.

The representation of women on screen was changing generally...

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019)

In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s new film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, an elephant’s tusk becomes an object of dramatic intrigue. Furthering the Argentinian-British artist-filmmaker’s interest in nature, zoology, and the art of preservation, this globetrotting work of creative nonfiction—Rinland’s first feature following a decade of formally adventurous short and medium-length films, gallery work, and photography—skillfully traces the production of a replica pachyderm tooth dating from the late 19th century...