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André Novais Oliveira’s Long Way Home (2018), their most quietly entrancing feature, tells the story of Juliana (Grace Passô, star of FP’s anti-star system), a woman who recently moved to Contagem for a job with the city’s anti-dengue unit. She knocks doors and inspects backyards for humid areas wh…

[...] And in China a canny, Party-negotiated mix of state funding and foreign partnerships has propped up an industry likewise defined by its blockbusters. The Wandering Earth (2019) — “China’s first full-scale interstellar spectacular,” The Hollywood Reporter gushed — is exemplary: a feverishly ac…

The irony of working-class film flourishing at the end of history lends this new proletkino its distinct structure of feeling. Today’s working-class films have dwindled to the size of isolated protagonists, often women, trapped in small homes with families burdensome or disintegrating, their loneli…

Bourgeois film: the phrase conjures a lost world of seething Communist weeklies, their back pages in thrall to the tidy metaphor of base and superstructure. But for much of cinema’s first century, “bourgeois film” was real enough: it could be said to exist because it had something to define itself …

While Leyner applied his talents elsewhere, literary history ground on. As Zadie Smith’s now-canonical argument goes, the standard-issue anglophone “lyrical realist” novel developed a severe case of neurosis in the years after September 11 and the endless war. As if it knew all too well that its ne…