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José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is a monument of vulgarity and erudition, perfused by an eerie air of alluring, unsettling ambiguity. An intensely oneiric work, it was originally published in 1970 and is now being released in a new unabridged translation by Megan McDowell for New Directions that constitutes a major literary event.

Donoso’s novel attempts to give decisive language to the ineffable. It’s the progeny of Borges, its language as technically adroit and stunning as Gabriel García Márquez’s. But instead of lovely, tragic lyricism, Donoso spins wicked sentences, suggesting a corruption of Marquez’s romanticism.

The Obscene Bird of Night is defined by its unexpected swoops into surrealism and litany of exciting developments and imagery. The ridiculous isn’t rendered believable, as Donoso’s prose is governed by the logic of a realm that exists only in the mind of our ever-ruminating, ever-rambling, and quite unreliable narrator,...

Mathieu Amalric on the coat worn by Shirley Knight in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People and the one on Vicky Krieps: “That’s the reference. I told that to Caroline Spieth, the costume person.”

Mathieu Amalric’s terrific Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), based on the play Je Reviens De Loin by Claudine Galéa, shot by Christophe Beaucarne and starring Vicky Krieps and Arieh Worthalter was a highlight of the 74th Cannes Film Festival and New York’s 27th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In the first instalment with Mathieu we discussed his films on John Zorn, thoughts on Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, and going to Rome to film with Nanni Moretti Il Sol Dell'avvenire.

Mathieu Amalric (Je Reviens De Loin by Claudine Galéa) with Anne-Katrin Titze on Vicky Krieps as Clarisse: “As you said, she does the film. Her character is the projectionist,...

Wim Wenders's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) is showing January 7 – February 5, 2019 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series First Films First and Wim Wenders: Journeys of No Return.I“For a moment the film was a smell, a taste in the mouth, a tingle in the hands, a draught felt through a wet shirt, a children’s book that you haven’t seen since you were five years old, a blink of the eye.

It’s like walking out of the subway into broad daylight.”—Wim Wenders, Van Morrison 1970 IIIn the May 1970 edition of the magazine Filmkritik, Wim Wenders wrote in a review titled "Emotion Pictures slowly rockin’ on" of a Grateful Dead album: "Slow and calm and melancholy movements and images." That same year he shot with Robby Müller his first feature Summer in the City—his graduation film—about a young man named Franz,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lukas Valenta Rinner's A Decent Woman (2016), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from January 26 - February 25, 2018 as a Special Discovery.It’s possibly belaboring the obvious to note—to quote Naomi Watts’s Janey-e in David Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks—that we live in dark, dark times; for a counterblast against the rot, even irresponsible, unfocused dissent is cathartic. Lukas Valenta Rinner’s A Decent Woman premiered two years ago but feels absolutely of the moment: a story about cloistered communities which impose conservative impulses on everything around them. In this case, “conservative” doesn’t designate the old Gop model—in which a balanced budget is the top moral priority of the country and social issues come are a not-quite-as-close second—but the complete subjugation of all those who don’t...

Director Ulrich Seidl (left) in the documentary Ulrich Seidl – A Director at Work

Ascent is a passage towards holiness, and descent, towards darkness and fear. Although phenomenological experience takes place on the horizontal plane, the spiritual experience, wishing to mimic heavenly life, is ordered on the vertical one. Even when this spirituality is secularized into psychology, this vertical arrangement of space remains unchanged—the enlightened self sits aflame atop the mountain, and down below in the bowels of obscurity the impenetrable subconscious hangs heavy like a black mist.

This dense opacity is a great temptation to cinema which has always yearned to seize the unfilmable (be it violence, love, god, terror). And what better place to hunt for this unfilmable than in the gloom of cellars, both symbol and representation of repressed desire? The true darkness which exists only in the most horrific of basements, where actual enslavement, rape, murder are carried out repel representation.

Above: Director Benjamin Heisenberg

Benjamin Heisenberg has presented his third feature film and first comedy Superegos (Über-Ich und Du) in the Berlinale this year in the Panorama section. Superegos is an improbable buddy film between Curt Leidig (André Wilms), an octogenarian psychologist with an undefined Nazi history, and Nick Gutlicht (Georg Friedrich), a young small-time crook without either convictions or, seemingly, even a past. When chance brings them together, Dr. Leidig begins his study of his “not uninteresting patient” and, inevitably, Freudian-cinematic acts of transference and counter-transference occur, leaving them both to question their identities. Benjamin Heisenberg’s debut feature Sleeper was screened at Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2005 and his second film The Robber competed for the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlinale.

Yaron Dahan: Let's talk about your new film. It’s very different from your previous two. You mentioned you had wanted to do a comedy for a long time,...

My earliest memory? Giving my sister 'Smarties' that I knew were pills

Stephen Dillane, 57, grew up in London. He studied at Exeter University, then joined the Croydon Advertiser but left to enrol at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In the early 1990s, his performance in the National Theatre's Angels In America and his Hamlet for the Peter Hall Company attracted critical acclaim. In 2000, he won a Tony award for his role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. His films include Welcome To Sarajevo (1997) and The Hours (2002). Since 2012, he has played Stannis Baratheon in TV's Game Of Thrones, and he starred in the Sky Atlantic thriller The Tunnel, which is out on DVD. He has two sons with the actor Naomi Wirthner.

When were you happiest?

Playing football in the school playground at lunchtime.

What is your earliest memory?

Giving my sister "Smarties" that I knew were pills.

Which...

Top: Martin Parr, from “Life’s a Beach”. Bottom: Ulrich Seidl, from Paradise: Love.

Some films you watch. Others you live. In Ulrich Seidl's films you suffer. You suffer and laugh, and laugh and suffer, until tears pour from your eyes, until out from laughter arises guilt. Guilt for having suffered. Guilt for having laughed. And only then, when you emerge from the guilt, wipe the film from your eyes, do you realize that the naïve 200-pound quinquagenarian Austrian sex-tourist on holiday in Kenya is none other then yourself, if not your sister or perhaps mother. Only then does the comfort of guilt morph into the vexation of shame as you understand that the buffoon you saw on the screen was wearing what turned out to be your face for a mask.

But don’t say you weren’t forewarned. The ballsy and shameless opening scene of Paradise: Love,...

Above: Andrzej Żuławski on the set of Boris Godounov (1989).

The first American retrospective of Andrzej Żuławski offers the chance to discover an auteur whose idiosyncratic vision is as radical, overwhelming and instantly recognizable—it may take no longer than a few shots—as those of canonized masters like Robert Bresson and Andrej Tarkovskij. But maybe Paul Verhoeven would serve as a better comparison, since Żuławski has remained similarly polarizing due to a punchy sensibility that had the French coin the term "Zulawskienne," meaning "over the top." Consider the opening of his first feature The Third Part of the Night (1971): A woman reads out the apocalyptic passage containing the title from the Book of Revelation, only to be struck down minutes later by one of the soldiers on horseback suddenly intruding in her house. Clearly, this is a world where anything can happen, and Żuławski makes sure it does. Then again,...