Courtesy of Janus Films.

Courtesy of 1-2 Special.

Resurrection/狂野时代/Kuáng yě shídài

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bi Gan

Dracula

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Radu Jude

Part of a director-focused critic’s duty is to catalogue the development of one’s auteur fétiche, a task which naturally becomes exponentially harder when the director is very much active. As every film appears to bring new developments, it can be easy to either embrace unexpected leaps forward in style and thematic material, or to castigate what feels like a failed experiment, and the possibility of misreading or giving too much leeway to a passing fancy or the embryonic form of a grand new stage in the director’s oeuvre is very high. Regular readers will no doubt correctly note that I tend towards optimism, but the experience of watching such daring films is more often a roller coaster than might be guessed.

Such is the case with two films by major protean talents: Bi Gan’s Resurrection and Radu Jude’s Dracula, which might be an even less logical pairing than normal for me. But to lay out a few baseline similarities: both are films that approximate an anthology format, using many different aesthetic and narrative modes across close to three hours, and both happen to feature vampires and cardboard cutouts as extras in some capacity. Additionally, though this is much more true of Dracula, there is a certain degree of dissent that’s not uncommon with regards to assessments of their work, but feels significant in the face of what might prove to be a new stage in their respective bodies of work.

Of the two, it’s safe to say that Resurrection has been much longer in the making and (with all respect to Jude) more fervently anticipated. Bi Gan’s short career has yielded no fewer than three of the signature films of the century so far, with his debut Kaili Blues (2015) and follow-up Long Day’s Journey Into Night acting as something of a conscious, discernible evolution in scale and technical accomplishment, wedded to a clear cinephilic temperament and intuition for how to incorporate a mélange of influences into his explorations of memory and dreams. Though Long Day’s Journey Into Night received its share of skepticism over a perceived repetition and emptying out of meaning (a sentiment that has only intensified with Resurrection), such a reading leaves out the ineffable nature of its emotional undertow and strange, unplaceable figures, where the experience of adriftness is articulated with astonishing beauty.

In that sense, Resurrection isn’t too far a diversion, though in most other respects it registers as a startlingly new tack for Bi. Instead of the fairly neat halves of his previous two films, it takes place over five (or six) parts, each corresponding roughly to a different time period and filmmaking style across China in the 20th century and named after one of the senses. The plot, despite its already earned reputation as abstruse, is skeletal when viewed from a macro vantage point, though Bi’s revisions to the film after its Cannes premiere don’t make things any easier. In a future where people are able to stave off death by not dreaming, a few people—called Deliriants, though they were previously referred to as Fantasmers in the Cannes translation—refuse to do so, with one in particular (Jackson Yee) hunted by an entity known as the Big Other (Shu Qi). Once she finds him in a 1920s-fashioned silent film setting (vision), the Big Other takes pity on the Deliriant, allowing him to relive a few more memories: a wartime film noir (hearing), a 1970s-era haunted temple (taste), a 1990s slice of neorealism (smell), and an end-of-the-century long take (touch) akin to Bi’s previous feats. After that, she seals him away in a coda that, like the others, does not have an onscreen title, but is referred to in the credits as consciousness.

While Resurrection is perhaps too unruly to achieve the crystalline beauty of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I say this without hesitation: the first twenty minutes form one of the greatest sequences I’ve ever seen in a film. The inspiration is unmistakably Méliès, with a marked hat-tip to “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” thrown in, but it seems to incorporate Feuillade, Murnau, and even a distant magician like Raúl Ruiz into its endless series of tricks, sleights of hand, and raw artifice. Not coincidentally, it’s also the sequence featuring Shu Qi, who is otherwise mostly present during voiceover interstitials between chapters and the coda; no disrespect at all to Jackson Yee, who is phenomenal in the film and adeptly embodies each of his wildly different characters, but his already significant star power does not compare to the wealth of film history Shu brings to her part. In a pivotal moment, it is her gaze that simultaneously vanquishes and frees the Deliriant, in a moment that can genuinely stand up to Vertigo‘s opening credits. Bi incorporated some of the same silent film grammar into his excellent short “A Short Story” (2022), but the awe inspired here, all impossible locations and novel staging, is something else entirely. The only thing holding me back while watching was the nagging thought: “There’s no possible way this can be sustained.”

Indeed, Resurrection doesn’t attempt to stay in this vein, and yet the film only becomes more cryptic the more it goes along. At a Q&A I recently moderated with Bi, he intimated that his interest was in the time periods first, fitting the aesthetics to be appropriate for the eras rather than the other way around, and that only makes the purposefully off-kilter execution of aesthetic styles more fascinating (no doubt accentuated by his exclusive use of digital). The film noir section almost feels like a one-upping of Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, taking that film’s nearly monochromatic palette in more expressive sections, while the haunted temple seems to resemble a then-contemporary iteration on King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain (1979) in its matter-of-fact depiction of a spirit. The most straightforward and longest section is perhaps the most complex, as the story of a sometime pickpocket and the orphan girl he takes under his wing seems to meld the styles of both Fifth and Sixth Generation films, featuring a certain commitment to their more straightforward narrative mores that nevertheless doesn’t fit easily into either category, though Jia Zhangke’s debut surely was on Bi’s mind. And the long take, which Bi says was not meant to shot in that form, of course could not have been achieved in anything close to its present form pre-Y2K. It differs from its forebears in terms of its distinct inhabitation of several predecessors, even utilizing a red filter at certain points to decisively break away from Yee’s perspective, and its sense of time is more unified even as it breaks that rule in one, truly dazzling moment.

The coda might be the most mysterious element of a film overflowing with shadowy aims and glorious murk, and it’s once again worth considering Resurrection‘s Chinese title, which translates to “Savage Years.” Despite the final images, a truly heartbreaking and keening evocation of all that might be lost without the cinema as a place and an ideal, Resurrection is not at heart a film About Cinema; in some ways Long Day’s Journey Into Night‘s astounding 3D transition better gets at that ideal. Instead, it’s a reflection of a series of changes, fundamental shifts in perception that require radical alterations to capture them in imagistic form. While it might be a mad thought to want to inhabit those worlds once more, they can offer such wonders, grounded and otherworldly alike, that Bi is capable of delivering with aplomb.

If Bi’s aims can be often productively hidden, Radu Jude’s are more open than ever with Dracula, an explosion of excess in the form of roughly fifteen chapters of wildly unequal lengths, all dealing in some way with the legend of the vampire and the tyrant that inspired him. Putatively, they are the creation of an unnamed director—Adonis Tanţa, who appears to be doing a quite accurate vocal impersonation of Jude’s own high-pitched voice—who, tasked with making a commercial Dracula film and out of ideas, decides to ask an artificial intelligence named Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0 for ideas, which frequently involve some degree of sexual or violent crassness. Between all these segments runs a story that the director is particularly invested in, involving two performers in a Dracula-themed cabaret who decide to leave their poor working conditions, only to be hunted across Cluj by a horde of angry spectators and employees.

It would be easy to dismiss Dracula for a host of reasons: its heavy use of artificial intelligence, albeit never for photorealism; the sometimes lugubrious pacing, such as in an adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novel which runs a good uninterrupted 40 minutes by itself; the idea of the AI generating stories and images as an excuse for sloppiness (like Kontinental ’25, this was also shot on an iPhone, often in more low-light conditions. But, as is increasingly the case with Jude’s work from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn on, he seems to defy traditional qualitative standards, something signposted by his frequent citation of Ed Wood in relation to this film. Wood is not mentioned, though Murnau’s Nosferatu and Coppola’s Dracula both get individual send-ups, mixed into a stew of citations including critic Neil Young appearing as a British tourist who keeps bringing up films while chasing down the performers.

What might be most instructive in discerning Dracula‘s considerable qualities lie in the two sections that most deviate from the film. One is an adaptation of a classic Romanian romantic novel that is played almost completely straight, including an abrupt tragic ending, were it not for the obvious AI images meant to show the passage of the seasons. The other is a coda where the director asks for a dramatization of a news story representing modern times; the AI responds with the story of a garbage worker trying to attend his daughter’s participation in a school event. Both of these segments could likely be the basis of other more mediocre works, but placed into the same conversation as considerably more vulgar objects inherently leads the viewer to question the methodologies by which one perceives the value of a particular art or story. Jude takes shots at a whole host of issues, including the nationalistic undertones of Dracula’s Romanian identity and capitalism’s (here literal) bloodsucking of its worker’s labor, and yet it all sums up to a much wider appraisal of myth as a vehicle for entirely unexpected sociopolitical forces. Much, much messier than Jude’s other recent work, Dracula nevertheless finds insight in its own madness, mirroring the wild world we live in, whether we like it or not.

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Courtesy of Netflix.

Blue Moon

Rating **** Masterpiece

Nouvelle Vague

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater represents a curious outlier in the modern American film landscape. For over 30 years, he has worked steadily, never going more than a handful of years without releasing a feature film, and in the process turned out a landmark stoner answer to American Graffiti, one of the most beloved cinematic trilogies ever crafted, and a still-daring experiment that would have garnered him multiple Oscars were it not for one man-sized bird. But between those works and his roughly nineteen other films lies a vast chasm of critical and cultural consensus (not that Boyhood itself doesn’t remain a contentious movie to this day), one marked by odds and ends that sometimes garner praise yet appear linked by only the most tenuous artistic tendencies. From my vantage point, Linklater has never truly left or been totally out of fashion: every time he’s made a few films in a row that failed to connect, he’s directed a Waking Life, Before Sunset, or Bernie that restored some level of trust in him as a continually vital artist.

Nevertheless, it feels as if, after a run of films inaugurated by the unfairly dismissed Last Flag Flying where few people felt seriously inclined to keep up, we’re in the midst of a Linklater renaissance, with Hit Man (2023) reversing a steady decline in viewership and possessing the magnetic screenplay and pair of lead performances that his recent films had lacked. Now, 2025 has found Linklater at back-to-back big festival competitions, with two films so congruent in their aims that it’s easy to forget that it’s the first time in over twenty years that he hasn’t written the script for consecutive films he’s helmed.

That being said, both scripts come from familiar sources, after a fashion. Blue Moon was penned by Robert Kaplow; though it’s his first screenplay, he wrote the novel that Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008) was based on, and this film correspondingly also takes place in roughly the same period on Broadway, in the orbit of another legend at a very different point in his life: lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), found on the evening of March 31, 1943 in the middle of a professional spiral as his former creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) is premiering his new musical Oklahoma! to rapturous acclaim. Leaving early out of artistic disgust, he decamps to the restaurant Sardi’s, where the alcoholic attempts to resist the urge to drink while engaging with Rodgers and his afterparty’s coterie of new collaborators and admirers, bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a young art student who the “omnisexual” Hart has fallen madly in love with.

Unfurling over 100 minutes, 93 three of which appear to be continuous, Blue Moon uses what could be standard biopic trappings as a container for one of Linklater’s most potent explorations of time, here yoked to the dilating tendencies of a particularly strong-willed person. While Hart is presented here in a fragile state towards the end of his life—as seen in a misterioso prologue, he collapsed in a rainy street and died of pneumonia seven months later—Hawke, in conceivably the greatest performance of his storied career, summons every ounce of magnetism and cockeyed grace possible to rattle off long monologues, only occasionally interrupted by interjections from Eddie or enlisted pianist Morty, that convey the lyricist’s profound depths of feeling about art, Elizabeth, and his professional jealousy. Playing a man much balder, ten inches shorter, and seven years younger than himself, he is able to fully inhabit a wreck of a man, the most inviting black hole imaginable, whose rapid shifts in intonation, quick wit, and penchant for impassioned disquisitions on what beauty truly means repel and compel in equal measure. Early on, Eddie offers the idea of life as a play where 99% of the people in it are mere mute extras, and while Linklater and Kaplow don’t surround Hart with blank slates by any means, the pull that he has over all in his presence, and over the viewer’s perception of time passing, is so formidable as to make it seem that way.

The only person truly able to resist, naturally, is Rodgers, who Scott portrays across a series of three intense conversations with a politeness that belies the pain that comes with seeing a loved one gone to seed. His attention is pulled in a hundred different directions, but the emotion that simmers just under the surface, proud of his work and exasperated bordering on cruel yet always with an eye for his former colleague’s wellbeing, is tremendous, the ideal bounce-board for Hawke’s disintegration. Blue Moon above all else is a portrait of an artist stifled by himself and others, where emotions and compulsions have run roughshod and better put-together people are waiting in the wings. Even some positive notices for the film have lamented the unsubtle appearances of George Roy Hill and a young “Stevie” Sondheim, along with the resolution to a subplot involving E.B. White, but they make sense in the conception of Hart as, in his final days, unable to actualize his own work yet still incapable of not giving every part of himself away. What he’s ultimately left with is the good company that he’s always had, and the reminder, courtesy of the title song, that it’s not always the things you’re proudest of that will define you, and that it’s not the worst thing in the world to embrace it.

The subject of Nouvelle Vague probably knew a thing or two about that sense of legacy. The more contentious and unexpected of Linklater’s films this year, it follows (with much more alacrity) the making of Breathless, which I still hold as cinema’s Anno Domini. Trading in the stately widescreen and lush haziness of Blue Moon for handheld black-and-white, filming on celluloid for the first time since Boyhood, Linklater captures the time period from an early screening of Jacques Dupont and Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La Passe du diable (1958) to a test screening of the film that would define a movement, mostly wedded to the perspective of Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he scraps together a cast and crew for his own long-awaited debut. Like Hart, Godard here has a certain complex about his accomplishments relative to his peers, becoming the last of the Cahiers du cinéma crew to make a feature film, and the need to create courses through this knowingly flighty film.

I rewatched Breathless shortly after seeing Nouvelle Vague, and it illuminated something that feels key to understanding what could be seen as a crass appropriation of a revolutionary film’s aesthetics without the same rigor or intentionality backing them up. Something which can be neglected in assessments of Breathless is how much of a pure playground of a film it is, using the bones of a crime film’s tropes as a jumping off point for the other things that interested Godard, something heightened by his improvisatory approach to discovering the scenes to be filmed on each day. Though I’m sympathetic to the idea that some cows are too sacred, Breathless feels too unruly, too multi-faceted to be one of them, and consequently Linklater’s treatment of the early French New Wave and Breathless, while quite rosy and genial, feels entirely in keeping with Godard’s sense of play.

The script, though of course translated into French, is by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, who also wrote Me and Orson Welles and Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019), and both their efforts and Linklater’s convincing replication of roughly what the time period looked and sounded like through an Éclair Caméflex (augmented by a great deal of set dressing visual effects) brought to mind the Pauline Kael quote about another, later French masterwork The Mother and the Whore: “It took three months of editing to make this film seem unedited.” The most obvious intervention is also in many ways the loveliest: virtually every figure involved in this scene, from Truffaut to Suzanne Schiffman (who gets a wonderful amount of screentime) to Jacques Rozier to Robert Bresson to Pierre Rissient, no matter how peripheral, receives a close-up and a chyron with their name. By the twentieth iteration of this, it becomes clear that Godard, despite Marbeck’s uncannily accurate incarnation of his presence and especially his voice, is not the sole focus of Nouvelle Vague, which is borne out by the final title card being given to mentioning the three-year-period in which 162 French directors made their first film. Linklater is most interested in capturing the spirit of this time, filtered through his own hangout sensibilities (also on full display in Blue Moon of course), a collective where anything and everything was possible. The day-by-day presentation of Breathless‘s filming, proceeding in fits and starts yet always featuring a moment of levity, an amusingly spiky interaction between Godard and Jean Seberg, and more than a few bolts of inspiration, provides the ideal exemplar of such an artistic calling, and in both films Linklater carries the torch with admirable dexterity.

Courtesy of NEON.

Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center (MUBI).

New York Film Festival 2025:

The Secret Agent/O Agente Secreto
Below the Clouds/Sotto le nuvole

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

The timing of these three 2025 New York Film Festival dispatches has only gotten later and later, and I’m getting this in right before the new year, which in a way feels apt. Writing these words more than three months and over two thousand miles away from where I first encountered Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds—two key films of this year that exist in entirely different registers yet share a marked kinship—I can still remember much of the sensation, if not the specifics of seeing both in the Walter Reade press screenings. Granted, one film’s screening was much more full and has accordingly received something on the order of a thousand times more recognition, but both experiences were charged with a certain feeling of a continual awakening, one corresponding with both films’ ability to evolve their ever-broadening sense of place and time.

Only one of these films is by an established documentarian, but in an odd sense Kleber Mendonça Filho is the one to have marshaled a surge of interest in his past work, fiction and nonfiction alike. The Secret Agent is his first film in the former mode since Bacurau (2019, co-directed with his past production designer Juliano Dornelles), whose breakout potential was somewhat stymied by its US theatrical release coinciding with the pandemic. His follow-up, however, was the formerly too-little seen Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his second documentary after his debut/farewell to his past career as a film critic Crítico (2008). I had the fortune to see it and meet Mendonça Filho during its brief window of Oscar aspirations, with little knowledge of what was to come.

The Secret Agent distinguishes itself from all of Mendonça Filho’s prior films almost immediately. It is the first to take place mainly in the past, heralded by a chyron with a curious addendum: 1977, “a time of great mischief.” That sentiment, during a year smack-dab in the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is some mix of playful irony and sober summation that runs through nearly every interaction in the film. It accompanies Armando (Wagner Moura) as he drives to Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife in the midst of a certain amount of strife: a large number of Carnaval-related deaths, the discovery of a human leg inside a shark’s stomach, a lawsuit involving a wealthy woman’s negligent killing of her servant’s child. Though further blood will be spilled, and Armando is initially held up at a gas station by a suspicious police officer, it becomes clear that Mendonça Filho is most interested in the atmosphere of the city, using every bit of The Secret Agent‘s two hours and forty minutes to delve into all that makes up the city he has already evoked in Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius. While this present film does focus in on certain enclaves, and the former two films had their fair share of perambulation, the scale afforded here allows for the most vivid canvas Mendonça Filho has ever painted on.

To match, The Secret Agent—whose title is (once more, and in amusing counterpoint to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind) an ironic and yet oddly fitting for the star at its center, taken from a passing view of the trailer for the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Le Magnifique—operates according to a slowly unfurling narrative that can contain such myriad sights as covert telephone calls, bustling street celebrations, and a Holocaust survivor played by Udo Kier. Aside from saying the film makes it apparent that Armando is on the run from something, and that the main object of his visit to Recife is to reconnect with his son, it’s better to leave the exact details of his circumstances to be experienced. Indeed, one of the more potent cinematic sequences this year is a roughly half-hour stretch in the middle of the film where Armando tells his story to representatives of a political group in the room next to the projection booth where his father-in-law works, the only place currently safe for him. As he recounts his travails and flashbacks gradually intrude, presenting a long-haired version of the man the viewer has gotten to know over the previous hour, it thrusts the pains of history and cavalier oppression upon the viewer just as surely as it does to all those in the room.

Not just the room, but those outside of it as well. With the prominent use of the São Luiz Cinema, the resurgence of interest in Jaws prompted by the news item, and an increasingly important subplot that I won’t go into here, The Secret Agent reconfigures itself yet again as a film about memory—and in turn film’s capacity for housing said memory—one where every building in the city carries the weight of its past that in turn is in danger of being forgotten. It’s not for nothing that Pictures of Ghosts has been rediscovered and rightly hailed as a valuable precursor to this film: the few cinemas that he chronicled in that documentary that are still standing have received a movie steeped in the cinematic grammar of its time period, yet defiantly local and proud of its own heritage. After the fireworks of the climax, there is an air of wistful assurance that suffuses the coda, where the past lingers even among those who can no longer remember it.

That past is as present as ever in Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi’s latest endeavor. Rosi presents a curious case in contemporary non-fiction cinema: by at least one standard, he is the most successful documentarian alive, having come within a Palme d’or of completing the Golden Treble—now that Thierry Frémaux seems to be willing to have non-fiction films in Cannes Competition, who’s to say what might happen. At the same time, his footprint is largely unknown in the US, with his previous, somewhat controversial Notturno (2020) getting mired in the pandemic and his Golden Bear-winning Fire at Sea (2016) barely making a splash. Both films dealt directly with topical issues—Middle Eastern war zones and Mediterranean refugees, respectively—in what has become Rosi’s signature, kaleidoscopic style, cycling between various unrelated subjects within a relatively constrained sphere of operation, comparing and contrasting their respective situations.

Such an approach is used to ever-greater effect in Below the Clouds which is no less engaged with the problems of the present yet situates them in a more discernible, nearly serene context: the city of Naples. The title presumably refers to the emissions from Mount Vesuvius, the shadow that looks over more than a million people every day. Shooting in black-and-white for the first time since his debut Boatman (1993), Rosi begins by taking stock of the place he and the viewer will inhabit for the next two hours with super-long shots of the city’s many buildings and the volcano, before suddenly tunneling into one of many increasingly disparate perspectives.

Even more than most documentaries, Below the Clouds cannot be talked about in terms of a traditional narrative, considering the polyphonic nature of its development and little individual rhymes. A brief recounting, then, of (most of) its key narratives: an emergency call center that fields serious incidents, fears over an impending eruption, and people who just want to know the time alike; police officers investigating a spate of tombaroli break-ins in what feels like a mild riposte to Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera; a group of Japanese researchers delving further into the ruins of Pompeii; a curator in the catacombs of a museum, looking over the statues and other material; a shopkeeper who opens his doors to watch over a number of students as they study various topics; and, in something of a coup of topical issues, a cargo ship staffed by Syrians who deliver grain picked up from Odesa, Ukraine. Woven throughout these are shots from within a metro train winding through the city and shots within a decaying, empty cinema as scenes from films related to Naples play on the screen: Journey to Italy is easily the most prominent of these, though I think I also saw the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii; at least one appears to be an industrial documentary.

Many of these storylines are of sufficient interest that an entire (albeit shorter) documentary could be made about each of them, but Below the Clouds is most in thrall to the push-pull of the past and present, the way a textbook entry about Pompeii formerly being a major trader of grain in the shopkeeper narrative can suddenly illuminate the cargo ship story, or the continual eeriness of watching people interact almost interchangeably with statues and people volcanically sealed into stasis. Sometimes Rosi can be a bit too eager to dot his i’s, like in one scene in the museum where the curator muses about how being in an especially dark and statue-filled room feels like stepping into the past. But the beauty of his digital images, with flashlight beams cutting through darkness and fragmented shots of the city lit up at night, only enhances the feeling of a film, like The Secret Agent, which belongs to a city out of time.

Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.