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French-Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noe needs no introduction; he’s one of the most notorious and controversial directors currently active. In fact, he and fellow hellraiser Lars von Trier probably have a running contest going to see who can push the audience’s discomfort buttons further. Von Trier probably wins it after his "I love Hitler" comments, but only by a hair. Noe’s entire reputation rests on 2002’s Irreversible; even though he had previously directed I Stand Alone (1998), an unsparing film involving father-daughter incest and child abuse, it was not until his second film that he became infamous. A brutal rape revenge drama that had the novelty of being told in reverse, it’s now being rereleased in a “Straight Cut”,...

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The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Earwig (2021).There’s a moment in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s feverish 2021 psychodrama Earwig in which a man rifles through a small refrigerator, within it an icebox, and within that a stack of thick metallic cases, each one containing denture molds brimful of frozen saliva. Behind him sits a young girl in elaborate headgear, her small face flanked by tubes and two ampoules collecting her spit. The act is uncanny but clearly routine—a chilling, briefly expository moment that proffers countless questions and exemplifies Hadžihalilović’s aesthetic of reticence. Her films all possess this matryoshka-like effect, coming undone only to neatly curl back into themselves at will. As female-driven body horror stipples its way into the mainstream, Hadžihalilović’s work feels all the more resonant and, perhaps most crucially, misprized. Hadžihalilović auteurism is...