As casually unassuming yet expansive as its title suggests, 7 Walks With Mark Brown initially appears to consist of just that, with life partners Pierre Creton (best known for his run of docufiction hybrids that culminated in 2023’s A Prince) and Vincent Barré (who collaborated on these works but is listed as co-director for the first time) following botanist Mark Brown as he searches for indigenous plants along the French coastline before ending at The Dawn of Flowers, his own private botanical project. For just under an hour, these casual expeditions play out in demarcated, chronological order, as Creton’s desaturated digital camera observes the evident pleasure Brown, Barré, and their collaborators take in spotting and recounting the minutest variations of flora that each location possesses, occasionally throwing in a more personal observation, anecdote, or even joke. At various points, co-cinematographer Antoine Pirotte can be seen filming one plant or another with a 16mm camera, but the many digital close-ups on the flowers, often cradled by one or two hands, already carry something of a faded beauty.

If 7 Walks With Mark Brown consisted of just this first section, it would still be a little marvel, awash as it is in a collegial but very quiet atmosphere. But in the ensuing 45 minutes, titled “The Herbarium,” the results of the celluloid component of the shoot are displayed, separated once more into the seven walks. As the astoundingly gorgeous images play out on screen, mostly of flowers but sometimes involving a wider view of the landscape, Brown narrates as he himself sees these images for the first time. In doing so, the film becomes a dual act of memory for both participant and viewer, as the vivid representations conjure up divergent views and experiences of the same event, all bound up in the evident fragility of these living things. In its embrace of the miniature, 7 Walks With Mark Brown encompasses an entire way of viewing the world.

From its title on down, Henry Fonda for President both follows along and defies the idiosyncratic, sweeping aims it has set for itself. The filmmaking debut of longtime film critic and Austrian Film Museum director Alexander Horwath takes its name from the plot of an episode of the obscure sitcom Maude, and while it’s never meant as a completely sincere political statement, it sums up the aspirational tone of both the actor’s most beloved work and the impossibility of concrete hope. By beginning where Horwath does—circa 1980, where the director’s first exposure to Fonda’s work came on a trip to Paris—and entwining it with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the White House, Fonda’s belated Oscars, and the audio of a revealing interview with Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel, he immediately conjures up the feeling of a paradise lost, a nation set inexorably on an ever-darker path juxtaposed against a last bastion of hope almost faded away.

I was even more primed for Henry Fonda for President than normal, as I was enlisted by Jordan Cronk to transcribe his interview with Horwath for Film Comment. The conversation was much longer than space allowed for, but one tidbit that did make it in was the unavoidable comparison to and inspiration of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself; indeed, the legendary filmmaker came to the Los Angeles premiere of Horwath’s film. Certainly, there are many similarities to be found: an openly analytical, sociopolitical approach to cinephilia and the essay film, the three-hour runtime, the mix of film clips, footage shot on location at the sites of the former, and voiceover. That last point marks a fascinating point of divergence: Andersen’s is far more openly opinionated, witty, sarcastic, and somehow sincere in all the ways that make Los Angeles Plays Itself among the greatest of films, yet it was given by Encke King. Horwath speaks more neutrally but uses his own voice, and interweaves his own German words with Fonda’s recorded interview that asserts a certain objectivity, even as he makes all the logical assertions expected of an incisive scholar.

Henry Fonda for President is, of course, much closer to a biography of the legendary actor than it is a recounting of American history from the mid-1600s to 1981, but the latter is made possible by the sheer number of noteworthy films the former made that were strewn across time and brought to the forefront by Horwath’s generally chronological progression. Along the way, he makes some astonishing detours, including some brilliant digressions into Taxi Driver and Easy Rider, and while this does not quite possess the dynamism of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the steady, ruminative tone that Horwath establishes privileges the text and the man above all else. It is entirely to his credit that Horwath does not appear to ascribe to the clichéd notion of Fonda as simply an American paragon; his onscreen and personal lives are too multifaceted and anguished to support that kind of reading. Equally importantly, he still fully commits to the image of Fonda being proffered in a given text, incorporating the canonical films while also spending a surprising amount of time on lesser-known works, even giving over some of the most emotional cruxes to films like The Best Man and My Name Is Nobody. It is the kind of film that allows for, if not openly invites, room for extratextual associations: a brief interpolation of footage of elderly Fonda and John Ford revisiting the site of the final shot of Young Mr. Lincoln irresistibly brought to mind David Lynch’s portrayal of the latter in The Fabelmans, and I immediately became emotional in an entirely unexpected way.

Horwath’s own journey through America (mostly filmed at the tail end of the pandemic in 2021) doesn’t aim for the vibrancy of Deborah Stratman’s 16mm images in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but the separate immediacy of his HD digital video makes for a compelling contrast between the often variable sources of these entirely celluloid productions. The gulf in time is even greater, and even though Henry Fonda for President thankfully draws as few parallels to our current, analogous political situation as possible—some choice shots of a Trump impersonator dancing in Times Square, as part of a sequence that weaves together Fonda’s early Broadway success and Hamilton—the impression is of these places that, in some way or another, have largely fallen into a recursive image of themselves, a relatively young history nevertheless committed to a not unreasonable sense of self-preservation. Of course, the same is true of Fonda, and of Hollywood, and this brilliant film sees all of that with an inviting, ever-surprising eye.

The operative image of Sean Baker’s latest triumph takes place in the background of the film’s emotional highpoint. As Ani and Vanya celebrate their impulsive Vegas wedding, the camera continually places them against dazzling fireworks in the sky. Given the frenetic nature of Anora‘s first half, all fast cutting and legible but careening camerawork, it takes a few glances to ascertain the setting as an indoor mall, and the light show as “merely” a video display on the ceiling. The effect is somewhere between disappointment and wonder, a faked aesthetic adornment that, seen in the right light and mindset, is just as bewitching as the real thing.

Among his many preoccupations and pet themes, Baker has increasingly focused on the meeting points and gaps between fantasy and reality, and Anora registers as his most sustained, complex reckoning yet, despite the absence of escapist dream sequences like the ones that closed The Florida Project and Red Rocket. It’s too simplistic to designate the first half as fantastical and the second as realist—though the tone darkens and the camera locks down far more in the latter, it’s still punctuated with a great deal of slapstick and humor—but, in many ways, the structure acts as a conscious revision of the Cinderella tale briefly invoked in dialogue. Here, it is the prince who flees, and he takes all of the consciously extravagant trappings with him, leaving the viewer in something much slower, much more alive to the local color of each establishment that Ani and her quasi-kidnappers enter.

Mikey Madison absolutely makes the most of her vivid role, but it’s by design that, barring her fair share of outbursts, Ani is much more of an observer, letting more overtly garrulous figures like Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Toros (Karren Karagulian) shine at to her prompting as she attempts to absorb the dynamics of her situation. Given the extremity of his scenarios, Baker’s gift for pensiveness is continually under-appreciated, and his decision to mold Igor (Yura Borisov) into a taciturn companion in contemplation expands the inherent dynamics within each scene.

Without saying too much, the end of Anora magnifies all the loaded pleasures and pain involved in this narrative, where even a plainly humane act comes freighted with unpleasant associations. That Baker chooses to only further complicate them, then to conclude on such a note of quiet ambiguity, exemplifies the ever-shifting, devastating nature of this work.

Rare is the film that is so willing to map its protagonist’s successful and failed transformations onto its own sense of structure. As Sebastian Stan sheds his strikingly convincing facial prosthetics but retains his shy, hollow, and increasingly defeatist affect, Aaron Schimberg’s third feature only grows more complex, throwing in an increasing number of uncanny obstacles to his attempt to establish a new state of existence. This process, miraculously, comes across as sly rather than cruel, just absurd enough to register as humorous while retaining a core rigor of thought about an ever-expanding series of topics: the ethical means of representing people with facial disfigurements onscreen, the transformation of reality into increasingly “unfaithful” fiction, the continual confrontation of the self. Adam Pearson—as a man whose entire personage registers as the most genial cosmic taunt imaginable—embodies the playful spirit of A Different Man, which cuts to the quick with an omnipresent grin.

Soi Cheang’s cinema contains many things, but outright comedy isn’t generally one of them: aside from maybe a few choice scenes in SPL II: A Time for Consequences, his films operate under genre conventions that don’t usually allow for a great deal of humor to enter the proceedings. This is just one way in which Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In stands out in his oeuvre; a long-gestating project that has passed through the hands of numerous Hong Kong luminaries, it leans further than any of Cheang’s non-Monkey King films to date into crowd-pleasing conventionality, albeit so satisfying on its own terms that it scarcely seems to matter. Much of this comes from the coherence and loving treatment of the Kowloon Walled City, and how it seems to act as a reclamation of both past cinematic representations—most obviously the nightmarish ending of Long Arm of the Law, but maybe even the prologue of the re-edited Days of Being Wild—and of a space and industry lost in time. Similar to SPL II, the action is tighter and the sense of place is more deeply felt than the norm, with Hawksian dynamics leading the way, especially early on as our hero Lok (Raymond Lam) initially takes refuge by sleeping on corrugated metal eaves, sustained by the generosity of the city’s inhabitants as overseen by legendary martial artist Cyclone (Louis Koo). The film mixes in Koo and other luminaries—Sammo Hung, Richie Jen, Aaron Kwok—with Lam and other lesser-known cast members reasonably well, relying on Koo’s star power and the latter group’s likability (especially once Lok completes a quartet of younger martial artists) to establish this location as a melting pot of personalities and quiet camaraderie before the forces of the past come to tear things down.

Despite its confined, urban setting, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In comes to feel like something of an epic, along the lines of Leone or even this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, one of this year’s other worthy action extravaganzas, considering how much it is striving to embody something of the spirit of a particular time. Where Cheang comes in is the particularity and specificity of his images, and in the extremes to which his narrative pushes by the end. It’s ultimately apt that the closing credits play over a series of past images from the film, not of the dazzling fights, but of the quiet scenes of community building and daily living, a reminder of all the bloodshed and sacrifice needed to maintain such a city.

Catherine Breillat’s first film in ten years—a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019) as commissioned by the bravura French producer Saïd Ben Saïd—takes great pains to contextualize the central affair between a lawyer (Léa Drucker) and her stepson (Samuel Kircher) as, if not immoral, then as the culmination of a long string of events whose linkages remain eminently intuitive. Each interaction, both between them and with the aging man (Olivier Rabourdin) and adopted Chinese children caught in the middle, is developed as to always embody both an image of conformity and a thrilling danger, and it is in this nether space that Drucker’s performance, poised one moment and completely enthralled the next, defines the pivots that the film takes. Never entirely cold but always hard-edged and wary, Breillat’s unpredictable orchestration of these events—even going so far as to include some ruminative scenes of driving set to guitar music by Kim Gordon—culminates in a staggering closing fade, a sculpting of light whose final spark is as cannily ambiguous as any image in recent memory.

From its first images, Angela Schanelec’s very loose rendition of the Oedipus myth refuses a clear-cut relationship between its borrowed motifs—the central tangled relationships, the swollen feet, the transference of a child—and their place within the collection of experiences that this film so mystically embodies. Aside from perhaps a few glimpsed and overheard words, it is unclear until around the 30-minute mark that the film predominately takes place in Greece, and there is perhaps only one conversation in this largely dialogue-free film with real narrative import. Instead, what transpires is the development of an entire world with only a few characters, etching out how its central protagonist lives after an act of inexplicable violence and tracing, with a surprising lightness and care, the process of forgiveness and redemption. Its eponymous artform is on display throughout but bursts forth in an extraordinary extended coda, whose shockingly sincere performances create a sudden expansion in Schanelec’s rigorous framework. The film evokes a renewal that, rather than sweeping past pains under the rug, brings them to reflective, graceful light.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness has generally been viewed along two largely similar lines: as a rebuke of the quasi-mainstream success of his two Tony McNamara-scripted period farces The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), and as a return to some kind of form, a reunion with his co-writer Efthimis Filippou that plunges once more into tales of control and humiliation. But the operative word here is “tales” in its plural form. The film follows a tripartite anthology structure, utilizing the same repertory of seven main actors—Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn—to tell the successive stories of a man (Plemons) whose way of life crumbles after he ceases following the commands of his boss/lover (Dafoe); a cop (Plemons) who suspects his wife, who returned after being presumed lost at sea (Stone), has been replaced by a doppelgänger; and a woman (Stone) navigating her position in a cult obsessed with purity of bodily fluids led by a polyamorous couple (Dafoe and Chau), searching for a woman who can resurrect the dead (Qualley).

Each of these three parts is titled after an action on the part of a man named R.M.F., a bearded, mostly silent presence who potentially serves as a linking device. It may be significant that his name is one rotated letter away from the initials of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, another director obsessed with precise camera movements—here discarding the past two films’ fish-eye lenses in favor of inexorable forward and lateral tracking shots—narratives of degradation and domination/submission, and casting familiar actors in divergent roles; it is probably even more notable that R.M.F. is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, who has only appeared in Lanthimos’s films to date.

Whether this man who shares his director’s name is meant to serve as a stand-in is uncertain, but the anthology form, in contrast to the detestable The Killing of a Sacred Deer or even the brazenly static Dogtooth, allows Lanthimos to inject just a little bit more mystery into the proceedings than usual. For these are, at their core, fables about the limits of belief, observing how far each character is willing to go in order to maintain their status quo while testing the extent to which they truly believe that an external force can make it all disappear.

Perhaps Kinds of Kindness finds its fullest expression of that principle in its canny approach to recasting across each of the three parts. The clearest dynamic is the inverse relationship between Plemons and Stone’s prominence, especially in the way in which the former’s paring down of his facial hair and haircut represent a sinister hollowing out of his characters’ capacities for change. Other choices are very amusing on a metafictional level: Alwyn’s unnamed, one-scene roles during the first two parts; rising star Hunter Schafer appearing for only a few minutes in the third part. Each part ends with an credits screen showing these seven cast members (and only them, regardless of their or other actors’ prominence) and their roles, a seemingly final punctuation mark even as the inscrutable game Lanthimos plays continues to build in both potential meaning and, yes, exhaustion. The final moment, arguably the film’s most misguided, perhaps reveals this as just another case of the old Lanthimos rearing his head, but the journey to that point, at least to these eyes, can’t be discounted.

Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents operates under an air of preternatural grace. The story of two bank workers inextricably linked when one steals just enough money to sustain two people until retirement age and entrusts it to his compatriot while he serves a three-and-a-half-year stint in prison (reasoning that it beats the grind of twenty-five more years of work), it is a rare specimen: a film equal in its digressiveness and its focus. Unlike, say, the equally brilliant films by the Argentine’s compatriots at El Pampero Cine (La Flor and Trenquen Lauquen), which also run over three hours, feature multiple protagonists and a nested narrative, and have Laura Paredes in a key role, this film poses and extrapolates upon a simple, single question: is it possible to have a life free from work? From the initial, near-impulsive decision by Morán, an entire galaxy of consequences and possibilities open up for him and Román — the anagrammatic names, extending to a love interest named Norma, only underline the odd, almost Rohmerian Moral Tale-esque quality to their circumstances. Flitting between Buenos Aires, a prison, and the countryside in the province of Córdoba, Moreno fully commits to the contrasting emotions of each locale, to stifling investigation and gorgeously delicate scenes of leisure, frequently using dissolves and split screens to blend and complicate the bond between these ultimately very different men. Where the film chooses to end is fully in keeping with The Delinquents‘s heartfelt dedication to the act of searching, an ever-vital openness to choice and chance.

Full disclosure: I am good friends with the director.

Happer’s Comet, the new film by Tyler Taormina — one of the key members of the Omnes Films collective, which has emerged as one of the most promising lights in the American independent film scene — heralds a bold step forward. A slender, crepuscular experience, the 62-minute feature was filmed during the COIVD pandemic on the director’s native Long Island with both a skeleton crew (consisting just of himself and cinematographer Jesse Sperling) and an unpredictable, expansive cast of family and fellow denizens. Set seemingly over the course of a single night, the film eschews all audible dialogue, though this is still a film based very much on at least the suggestion of language — songs floating ethereally through the air, idle police radio chatter, televisions left on droning in the night — and plays like a feature-length exploration of a similar milieu as Taormina’s debut Ham on Rye. Where that film more explicitly cast its nighttime exploration as the curdling of teenage wonder and possibility, Happer’s Comet is more free-floating and reliant purely on Taormina’s considerable image-making skill: the majority of shots appear to be lit with a single off-screen source blasting through the darkness, and the recurring motif of roller-skating lends a potent anachronistic feeling. Though it concludes with the rising of the sun, Happer’s Comet proudly, deservedly wears its status as a film out of time.