What are the elements of a free and successful life? Money? A beautiful beach house stocked with servants? Generational wealth? Getting the deal done time after time?

Or is it something more intangible? Community and love and children and justice?  Lee Chang-Dong’s brilliant Possible Love asks us to consider whether class divisions even matter when compared to issues of justice, fairness and family. 

It explores why we want what we cannot have and what happens when we get close to our desires. And it asks us to think about how and why we care about others - when the cameras are turned off and we stand naked in front of the sea.

Beautiful, brilliant and moving - this is one of the films of 2026. It captures the spiritual defect at the heart of societies with guile and surprise.

NYFF Screening 3. Q&A with Lee Chang-Dong and cast

What more do you want from the movies? Another masterpiece. The most satisfying film of the year and probably the best. Don’t be spoiled!! Go! Go! Godzilla!!!!!

NYFF 64 Film #2. Q&A with director Takashi Yamazaki.

Is this massively overrated? While I like the theme of how far should anyone be pushed to achieve greatness (and who should do the pushing), isn’t Jazz at its best about improvisation?

Given the focus on precision and sticking to the score, this felt more like a film about a classical musician than a contemporary Jazz drummer. For a movie that aspires to Sadfie levels of anxiety, the stakes are impossibly and ridiculously low.

Also while I like JK Simmons’s performance - he’s really just an exaggerated version of JJJ. I felt like at any moment he would let Andrew into the band permanently if he brought him 4 photos of Spider-Man.

Miles Teller gives a fairly typical Miles Teller performance. He’s a tell don’t show kind of performer all the way down.

So it’s ok! But it gets the extra half star for coming in under 2 hours.

Can you call it love if it drives you mad? Infatuation maybe. Obsession absolutely. But Claire speaks worlds of truths about many men who are attracted to fragile beauty who “only care during a crisis”.

The framing of the Andromaque rehearsal, the documentary crew and Claire’s recordings all offer different views of reality and its pressures. But like Racine’s play - there is far more madness and tragedy than true love in this film.

Stands strong with Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Allen’s Husbands and Wives and more recently Wilde’s The Invite, as films that lay the dark side of a relationship bare.

Obvious influence on Hamaguchi for the structure and length of Drive My Car.

Paper Tiger is a very solid, if not great film - that 35 years ago would’ve been an easy Captain Video or HBO classic.

The bubbling pollution and influx of corruption at the Gowanus Canal is a tale known by many New Yorkers, but few outsiders would or should care. And yet here we are, back in the 1986 of James Gray’s memory - and my own, of a grimy and dirty city - with danger around every corner.

Adam Driver and Miles Teller give classic NY thriller performances, that would easily rate in a 1980’s Abel Ferrara or Sidney Lumet film. They simmer and brood and swag and simper in all the ways you’d hope. ScarJo veers a bit into caricature - but there’s a strong emotional truth that breaks through her bad hair and accent.

If you’re in the mood for a classic NY thriller you could do a lot worse than Paper Tiger.

Opening Night of 64th NY Film Festival. James Gray, Miles Teller and Adam Driver intro. Screened in 35mm 

When two morons and best friends put their heads together there’s nothing they can’t accomplish. Brilliantly funny and technically perfect. It’s shocking how much nostalgia and little / massive changes can occur in 17 years. 

Ben Folds! Back to the Future! Vinegar Syndrome! 

Can’t wait to watch this again. Movies!!!

Much as I hate to admit it, my Boomer parents were right about Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.

Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were is a perfect piece of pop romantic filmmaking. It is grand and epic and embraces politics and history with a dollop of schmaltz that makes it go down incredibly easy. It's a throwback to classic Hollywood, made just as New Hollywood naturalism was taking over.

On Sunday, September 27, the Cognitive Film Society is proud to open its Fall season at the Gold Theater with The Way We Were in tribute to Robert Redford — the biggest movie star of the 1970s, who died a year ago at age 89.

Misty and Watercolored

Early in The Way We Were, a writing professor reads Hubbell Gardiner’s short story aloud to the class. It opens: “In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him.”

For fifty years people have assumed that line was about Redford. The face, the hair, the Butch Cassidy grin. He hated it. “Glamour image can be a real handicap,” he said once. “It is crap.”

As Hubbell Gardiner, Robert Redford plays a man who goes along to get along. He moves to Hollywood, sells his novel to a studio, and when the blacklist comes for his friends and his wife, he is left in a moral quandary.

Scattered Pictures

Redford almost turned the part down. He thought Hubbell was one-dimensional and wanted “some justification for it, some reason.” Pollack, who’d been his friend since they acted together in War Hunt (1962), wrote him a letter insisting Hubbell was “the most sophisticated character” in the script, and kept telling everyone that without Redford the picture “literally wouldn’t work.”

The movie that reached theaters is gentler than the one they shot. After two sneak previews in San Francisco in July 1973, Pollack cut most of the politics — “audiences were just plain bored when we got into the politics,” he said.

Smiles We Left Behind

But no one who’s seen the film can forget its love story or its melancholy final scene. It’s hard to find a more powerful moment shared between two icons at the height of their powers.

Marvin Hamlisch and Alan and Marilyn Bergman won Oscars for the score and the title song, and in February 1974 “The Way We Were” became Streisand’s first number-one single. On Sunday, before the film, soloists from Hewlett-Woodmere will perform songs inspired by the movie.

The Afternoon

1:00 PM — Program begins

1:05 – 1:15 PM — Robert Redford tribute, hosted by Yelena Fradlis

1:15 – 1:25 PM — Music inspired by the film, performed live by Hewlett-Woodmere soloists

1:30 PM — The Way We Were (1973), 118 minutes

~3:30 PM — Audience Q&A

Location: Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett, NY 11557

FREE ADMISSION. Free and open to everyone, as always.

Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.

See you Sunday. Bring your hankies.

The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.

Romantasy long before that was a thing, this film might actually work better as a Superman “Elseworlds” story than its stated “time-travel” explanation. It looks great and Jane Seymour is as taken with Supes as Margot Kidder - but the script is so silly.

There’s some fun to be had here (again particularly if you can pretend that Supes is undercover or under the influence of Mr. Mxyzptlk), but considering that the time travel explanation lacks any internal logic / technical device, you’re counting on a lot belief suspension.

I remember this being on HBO a lot as a kid (mostly because it wasn’t Superman, but it was) and even with a 4K restoration, it still reads as a TV movie.

As a dedicated comic book reader for over 40 years, I can safely say this is the most screwed up vigilante origin story I’ve ever seen. Zoe Lund is magnificent in a harrowing and twisted portrayal of a woman possessed by trauma, madness and vengeance.

An absolute exploitation masterpiece. Abel Ferrara is a demented genius.

That final scream rivals only Laura Palmer’s. I just pray Mr. Met got out of the party alive.

More operatic and brutal than the technicolor West Side Story with light, shadows and Fukusaku-esque bloodletting to match. As a child of the 80’s who remembers Luna and La Bella Ferrara and Umbertos and Paouluccis, this film captured the feel of those streets and the strange hard border between Little Italy and Chinatown.

It feels like a B movie, and maybe in some sense it is. But the love, the intent, the setting, the hostilities all feel hyper-real. Like a dream you had after seeing a street fight be diffused coming home from a dinner at Luna’s.

Of course all of these territorial battles are moot now. Matcha stands and soup dumpling restaurants have long conquered downtown Manhattan - with both enclaves now fighting the hipster doofuses of “Dimes Square”.

But this film captures the opera of the 80s - when all of this felt new and “foreign”. But really it was just our fellow Americans looking for their rightful home.

Bonello is the cinematic Auden of our age of Anxiety. As much as a tone poem as a film, Coma leans into familiar horror tropes to reveal just how crazy the Pandemic made everyone. 

A weirder and experimental work, it doesn’t quite reach the heights of House of Pleasures, Nocturama or The Beast - but it’s great freaky-deaky fun.

There is no righteous revenge. There is no proper use of evil. There is only corruption and consequence.

We are told to guard against the evil inclination entering our souls. That God will take care of our oppressors and our enemies. That we will be inaugurated in the Book of Life if we bind up those that are oppressed, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger - for we were strangers and slaves in Egypt.

There is no higher blessing than peace. But there is can be no peace in vengeance and bloodlust. In a week of prayer and atonement, it’s what all men of faith can and should reflect upon.

Spielberg’s filmmaking feels effortless. Phenomenal performances across the board. Another masterpiece of form and function from the greatest American director.

Ennui is a powerful and dangerous drug. It’s almost admirable the way Rohmer’s characters can rationalize the unsettled anxiety they inflict upon each other, and then always be surprised at their profound loneliness.

Anyone in a relationship knows one must keep a private space or personal interests to keep sane. But there are obvious lines. Louise knows very well what keeping her apartment means for and for Remi.

Or as my good friend likes to say - when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Chris Rock's coda that "a man is only as faithful as his options" could be serve as the tagline for this very dark Japanese comedy/melodrama. Astoundingly - Kaze has the logistical ability and err... drive to maintain 9 mistresses alongside a wife.

Is it any shock that he is able to cheat death by turning them against each other?

This film is a bit too talky for its own good, but its gonzo mix of genres and its unique answers to the questions of infidelity and its motivation from the woman's perspective -- especially the Japanese woman's perspective make it worth watching.

More like the less than magnificent schmuck. I’m sorry but if you’re the owner of a declining hat factory concern in 1964 and you’ve managed to lock down peak Claudia Cardinale - just thank your blessings and cut the crap.

Didn’t Andreas have any real friends? This film does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Italians are hot blooded and impetuous. 

Aside from all that - the film is a bit uneven - despite an all time Gilda-esque burlesque from Ms. Cardinale. But worth watching just for that alone.

The not-so-secret origin of the greatest American filmmaker is not surprisingly a tour-de-force. And while the Spielberg oeuvre easter eggs are obvious fun, the humanistic performances, the heart and the deep love of art and cinema make this an all time masterpiece.

So true to the Jewish-American experience without pandering to stereotypes or obvious sentiment. It is beautiful and moving and I weeped through half of it.

Movies! Family! Life! David Lynch!

A masterpiece!

The most beautifully composed film about the absolute dumbest people you’ll ever encounter on vacation. Absolutely hysterical.

Rozier!

The last weeks of summer can feel like a dreamlike haze. A time apart, lazy yet melancholy for what it heralds: a return to reality, an accounting of sins, reflections on a year nearly ended. In these anxious days of algorithm-fueled dread, it’s far more pleasant to slip into summer’s unreality.

And why not?

The best of those days are brimming with time. With harried days ahead, we’re free to languish, hopefully by the ocean or pool or mountain lake. Even if your August was filled with work (as sadly mine was), you can still escape into a past slick from swim, or a late-breaking storm — drawing on a reservoir of endless hazy afternoons that never really ended, the humidity and perfume instantly available if you call for them.

Ahh but when you’re in its midst, endless time can obliterate reality. There are no consequences, only terrifying freedom. Who hasn’t chosen a different summer guise? Or let their mind run towards something more permanent? All it takes is a pale blue sky, and an illicit thrill or desire that cannot or should not be fulfilled becomes present and possible.

Why does yearning for possibilities that make no sense plague the aristocratic Russians on holiday in 19th-century Baden-Baden in Ivan Turgenev’s Smoke (1867) or waste the last pre-WWII days of the bourgeois French in Éric Rohmer’s novel Élisabeth? What spell does the late August sun cast on the American teenagers in Frank Perry’s Last Summer (1969) that leads them to act with such wanton cruelty towards people they claim to love?

Liberated from time and consequence, does identity itself become fungible?

Each of these works suggests that our yearning reveals truths hidden under layers of bourgeois distraction and material ambition. Our vacationers long for something new, with little regard for their “reality.”

Take the case of Turgenev’s Litvinov, the repressed and correct Russian aristocrat taking a mountain vacation in Smoke. His studies are finished, his father’s estate waits across the border like the rest of his life, furnished and quiet. Baden-Baden — the mountain spa where fashionable Russia takes its waters — is meant to be a brief holiday with his betrothed before that life begins. He is a serious man in an unserious place, and he believes that he is only passing through.

All it takes is a bouquet of heliotropes in his hotel room, and the entire carefully crafted identity collapses. His “lost love,” the Princess Irina, has reappeared (holidays can be like that no?) and is seeking to return to her more authentic past. Irina is trapped in a life of leisure and society, married to a vulgar, ambitious General who clears their path to social dominance and overwhelming material wealth.

Seduced by mountain mists and Irina’s beauty, Litvinov struggles but ultimately succumbs to his desires and destroys the stable relationship and social respectability he so carefully earned. The moment he smells heliotropes, time’s linear nature explodes and he is the man who loves Irina. His yearning overwhelms his senses.

As he contemplates later on, after the consequences of his actions have set in:

“…it all seemed as smoke to him, everything, his own life, Russian life — everything human, especially everything Russian. All smoke and steam… everything hurrying, flying towards something, and everything vanishing without a trace, attaining to nothing.”

Litvinov’s loss of control scandalized the Russian literati (Tolstoy especially), but would anyone blame him if we knew him? Or would we nod and think “there but for the grace of God or circumstance go I”?

80 years later, a similar late summer melancholy hangs over Élisabeth, Éric Rohmer’s novel set just before WWII begins. The Roby cousins spend the last weeks of August 1939 languishing through a heat wave on the Marne seaside and torturing themselves with impulse and regret.

The past few summers Michel has been having an affair with the married and older Irène while visiting his cousins’ summer home. Irène’s husband has since passed, and she has expectations of marriage. But with the thrill of an illicit summer affair turned to a potential lifelong commitment, the yearning curdles. Michel sits a few feet from Irène, smiling at her, and Rohmer lets us hear everything the smile contains:

“I hate her to the point of death, murder and death. At this precise moment it’s simply a fact. No matter how much I smile, I hate her; no matter how much I love her, I hate her; no matter how much . . .”

A moment later he has carried his chair to her side, all tenderness again, and it is Irène who tells him “you’re the one who’s dramatizing everything today.” She never learns how close it came. In this August a man can envision murdering his mistress between one smile and be kissing her hand by evening.

His cousin Bernard is plagued by similar indecision, and it runs aground one gray afternoon when the heat wave finally breaks and the rain comes down on the river. There Bernard finds a girl — sixteen at most, rich chestnut hair falling past her shoulders — straddling a tree trunk that slants out over the swollen water, in her bathing suit, in the rain, unbothered by either.

Bernard can narrate his desires as perfectly as his cousin, and act on them just as little; he tries his charm on her instead. What he gets back is a manifesto:

“…real camaraderie between men and women is possible,” she said, without turning, in that same steady and peremptory voice. “But when you look at the actual state of things, you don’t see that camaraderie—everything just devolves into flirtation. Especially with boys. If you’re here looking to flirt, you’re wasting your time.”

They swim anyway, rain stippling the slow water, the afternoon assembling itself around them the way August afternoons do. When they’ve dressed again on the bank, Bernard’s hand comes to rest on the shoulder of her rain jacket, “just beyond the touch of her damp curls”. Rohmer is already measuring desire in aching centimeters of indecision that he would perfect in his Moral Tales.

In the Robys’ endless August nothing is consummated and nothing is renounced; desire hangs in the air like the humidity, present and possible and permanently unresolved.

By the time he filmed La Collectionneuse (1967) Rohmer had distilled the Robys’ condition into a single borrowed villa near Saint-Tropez. Adrien — literally a dealer in beautiful classic objects — and Haydée, the “collectionneuse” of the title, share the house with Daniel and all the time in the world to do absolutely nothing.

Adrien first “meets” Haydee when he walks in on her having sex with a man we learn is one of her many dates. Haydee is a free spirt, which challenges the egos of both Adrien and Daniel, who seek at every turn to tease and humiliate a woman they both clearly desire. In little ways, we see cruelties played out, as Haydee offers honesty and affection to both men, and is objectified in return.

Idle, weary and languid, Adrian and Haydee clearly ache for one another. Haydee is willing to submit to all sorts of suggestions by Adrian. She is clearly able to handle herself. She is open that she is interested in Adrian, but his need to dominate her and control the situation leads only to frustration.

At the film’s conclusion Rohmer dresses them in matching greens, and the color runs deeper than wardrobe: they are perfectly matched in envy for the relationship each wants and won’t allow.an abundance of natural and physical beauty no competition for their anxious perseverations.

This is yearning as Rohmer understood it — torturous, neurotic, egotistical, leaving an ache at once delicious and dangerous. Before this summer is out, the ache has destroyed friendships and career dreams, and left a collector’s thousand-year-old Song vase in pieces on the floor.

And still the film tantalizes us to the end, withholding any real resolution between Adrien and Haydée — leaving the audience only a memory of unfulfillment.

Jacques Rozier explored these idle days in a far sweeter, yet no less melancholy key. His brilliant Near Orouët (1971) sends three young Parisiennes to a seaside house on the Vendée coast for the month of September. The film turns on the arrival of Gilbert, Joëlle’s boss back at the office, who seeks her out and crashes the vacation. Presumptuous to a fault, Gilbert concedes to sleeping outside the villa in a tent, just so he can yearn that much closer to his intended.

Near Orouët is all too real in showing us a summer where nothing is declared and nothing is decided; the relationships stay indefinable, blurred with ocean water and music and sun and wine. The film drifts past like a lost memory, blowing in through the jasmine of the mind and settling there. No film has ever captured the endless time so completely.

The flirtations are sweetly held and build a warm camaraderie among the foursome. Even when Gilbert is firmly rejected by Joëlle, he is comforted by his other two housemates — one gets the sense they have both fallen a little in love with him.

These are feelings of light and warmth that never overheat into frustration or violence. But frustration far more often mars these idylls, as endless time inevitably crashes into the reality of the seasons. The explosions follow: an engagement in Baden-Baden, a Song vase on a stone floor, and far worse. One senses the Robys can feel the static preceding the lightning of war, leaving no quarter or escape, like wild animals attuned to thunder.

Frank Perry’s Last Summer lets the storm break into almost unimaginable cruelty and violence amidst a beautiful Long Island summer.

The film strands three beautiful teenagers and one awkward outsider on Fire Island with no parents and no clocks — a Rohmer-esque trip into the Twilight Zone. Left to their own devices, to peer pressure and unfulfilled leering, the core trio — played by Bruce Davison, Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas — seduces and is seduced by the heat of the summer and not knowing what to do with it.

Their first meeting comes over an injured seagull, which they nurse back to health (graphically removing a fish hook) and adopt as a mascot. A throuple forms, bonded by what they claim is radical honesty — trading traumatic confessions like friendship bracelets. Hershey is preternaturally disturbing as the Queen Bee of the group.

Alluding to a history of abuse, she is well aware of the power she wields over the two young men in her grasp. In an extremely intense scene at a movie theater, she welcomes that power with overwhelming, almost ecstatic pleasure. Unlike the foursome at Orouët, this is a group that thrives on power dynamics.

Rhoda is the group’s fourth wheel — younger, awkward, achingly sincere in her one-piece bathing suit while the others swim in their skin. She mistakes their games for friendship and offers up her real grief to a group that collects confessions as ammunition, telling the story of her mother’s drowning in a long, unbroken monologue.

But these are all mere illusions fueled by summer’s lack of consequences. When the healed seagull bites the girl who saved it, Sandy kills it without a flicker of hesitation. Rhoda tells the group exactly what they’ve done — “You’ve taken away his sense of identity. You’ve turned him into a schizophrenic!”

But unchecked, their cruelty escalates. The trio submits a computer-dating questionnaire — 1969’s punch-card ancestor of the algorithm — and lures a lonely middle-aged man to the island for a date rigged as a humiliation, leaving him to be beaten by local thugs.

In the film’s final and most devastating scene, the frustrations of the summer explode into an assault. In the end, Rhoda is loved like the bird - a play thing, a curiosity, and a willing or unwilling participant in their twisted desires. The graphic scene is an explosion of violence with sex one more weapon to exert power, punishment and revenge.

For all its beauty, Summer is a dangerous time. It can lend itself to harmless flirtations, or temporary flings - but can also seduce us into destroying priceless and precious areas of our lives. These works transcend time, culture, era and technology - and yet the unfulfilled and illicit late August desires are common to us all.

If you close your eyes, I bet you can feel yours now. It’s an ache that can keep one warm all autumn and Winter.

WHERE TO WATCH (AND READ)

PHYSICAL MEDIA

Last Summer — Warner Archive Blu-ray (2026), remastered from 4K scans of the original negative; it is streaming nowhere. The disc ends a half-century in the wilderness: the film opened rated X in 1969, was trimmed to an R five weeks later — Frank Perry counted the cuts as “one Anglo-Saxon expletive” and “a half thrust” — and then all but vanished, never once released on DVD, surviving only as a pan-and-scan 1980s VHS from the long-defunct Key Video. The Blu-ray presents that theatrical R cut, lovingly restored.

La Collectionneuse — in Criterion’s Six Moral Tales box set.

Near Orouët — newly restored in 4K in Radiance’s limited-edition box set Time to Play: Films by Jacques Rozier, five features and a run of shorts (Region B, and worth the import).

IN PRINT

Turgenev, Smoke — Donald Rayfield’s new translation from NYRB Classics

Rohmer, Élisabeth — McNally Editions, translated by Aaron Kerner, with a foreword by André Aciman.

STREAMING

Near Orouët and La Collectionneuse stream on the Criterion Channel

The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.

Give me a romantic like Frank Abagnale Jr over the Wolf of Wall Street any day. Nearly a decade before Mad Men - Catch Me If You Can revived midcentury glamour in one of the most perfect pursuit films of all time.

If Spielberg made this entire film just for the “Come Fly With Me” set piece, it would be completely understandable. This is Leo’s most charming role, and some of the most fun Tom Hanks has ever had on screen. Walken’s Willy Loman-esque Frank Sr. is heartbreaking. 

In a list of all time greats, this is one of Spielberg’s best films and possibly the most purely entertaining.

A masterpiece.

Yearning is torturous, neurotic, egotistical and leaves a delicious and dangerous ache - that can destroy friendships, lives and 1000 year old vases.

Adrien and Haydee have all the time in the world to do absolutely nothing. Like the green in their clothing, they are perfectly matched in envy for the relationship each wants.

Weary and languid - they collect disappointment in others and in themselves. An abundance of natural and physical beauty are no competition for their anxious perseverations.

Rohmer’s film constantly tantalizes the audience with resolution to their intense attraction, but leaves us only with a memory of unfulfillment.

But those can be the memories that keep you warm at night, years after the summer is over.