Marjane Satrapi passed away this on June 4, 2026—a year after the death of her husband—at the age of 56. I interviewed Ms. Satrapi at the end of 2007, while she was promoting the animated feature Persepolis, based on her autobiographical graphic novel.
Born and raised in Iran but educated in Vienna, Marjane Satrapi grew up in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, where she watched the idealism in the wake of freedom from the Shah’s rule give way to an increasingly oppressive and intolerant culture of religious extremism. She left for Paris in 1994 and has been an exile from her home ever since. “You become a stranger everywhere,” is how she described the feeling of exile, “but in a way you are also an insider everywhere.” Satrapi first told her story in the autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, sharing experiences and feelings at once culturally specific and universally human. Now she brings her story to the screen in the richly realized and evocatively told animated feature Persepolis, which she adapted and directed with Vincent Paronnaud. She talked about her novel, her film, and her life in a December visit to Seattle.
I read your graphic novels about a year ago and saw the film at Toronto. I thought it was remarkable how faithful the movie is to the character of the art and style of the original novels, and yet so fluid and creative in its use of the animation medium. What was the biggest challenge in moving from the static panel of the graphic novel to the medium of animation?
The first thing was to understand is that it is not the same narration, so we had to forget about the book and really start to make a new narration but with the same material. And that’s why, as you say, the book and the movie, they are very similar and at the same time they are very different and that is the whole paradox. In the relationship that reader, as with the comic books, and the viewer with the movie, to start with that, is not the same. Unlike literature, when you read a comic book, you are very active as a reader because between two frames you have to imagine the movement yourself. When you are watching a movie you are passive because you see the images. We’ll start with that. Then you have things like the sound, the music, etc., so if there is a feeling that I have to describe with one word or draw something in a comic, for example, I can count on the music to get this feeling. So it’s not the same medium. The whole danger of this project was to do exactly what everybody thought I would do, to take a camera and take it from the frame, one after the other, and think that we will get a movie. Since we knew this danger, we tried to avoid it as much as possible. And we thought about it as a movie, not even as an animated movie. We made it like a movie, the only thing is that it was drawn. People talk about animated movies as if it was a style. It’s not a style, it’s just a technique. It’s like comics. “Comics” is not a style, it’s not just superhero stories, it’s a medium. Animation is the same thing. So we approached it this way and just tried to make a movie.
On May 6, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival returned to its longtime home: the Castro, which closed for renovations in 2024 and reopened in early 2026. The theatrical experience is a little different—the seats were removed to create a concert venue, with modular risers and rows of lightweight padded seats brought in for the festival—but the restoration of the frescoes and interior designs is beautiful, the sight lines improved with the increased rake, and the atmosphere…well, let’s just say that it’s good to be home.
This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment, plus a special presentation of Japanese films produced on paper strips, and the annual “Amazing Tales from the Archives” program. Among the new restorations of films both legendary and forgotten were early features by Carl Theodor Dreyer and William Wyler, as well as revelatory German and Polish productions previously unseen stateside.
Opening night offered the new restoration of the famously unfinished Queen Kelly, Erich von Stroheim’s notorious 1929 production starring Gloria Swanson as an innocent corrupted. Von Stroheim’s overruns and excesses proved too much for Swanson and producer Joseph Kennedy (yes, the paterfamilas of the political dynasty), with production shutting down with less than half of his script in the can. Now, still photos and descriptions drawn from the complete script suggest Stroheim’s vision for the film’s missing sequences.
The oft-quoted cliché about Yasujirō Ozu is that he is the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors, a somewhat problematic claim (is there really a single ideal expression of Japanese character?) that nonetheless strives to describe a style and sensibility that rejected the cinematic influences of the West. His evolution is all the more fascinating given his love of Hollywood films as a voracious young film buff. His film career began in the early 1920s as an assistant cameraman at Shochiku, Japan’s biggest film studio. He remained at Shochiku his entire career, working his way up to assistant to director Tadamoto Okubo before making his directorial debut in 1927. The film, the only period piece of his career, has not survived. Ozu made every type of genre in those early years, from lighthearted college comedies to crime dramas and romantic melodramas to social dramas, turning out as many as six features a year. But, he really found his voice in shomin-geki, which translates to “home drama,” stories that explore the everyday lives of middle and lower middle-class citizens.
Where so many of his contemporaries delved into adventures and elegant period dramas, Ozu’s films are contemporary to his times. From his silent films in the early 1920s to his final film in 1962, An Autumn Afternoon, he set his quietly understated family dramas and modest comedies in the homes and workplaces of everyday citizens trying to make a life for themselves and their children. His films are a veritable survey of Japanese society from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, exploring themes of social expectations, familial responsibility, sacrifice and the collision of traditional culture and modern life, from The Depression through The War to the transition of a new democracy and Western-style economy.
TCM celebrates the legacy of Yasujirō Ozu, proclaimed by film critic and historian David Bordwell as “the greatest director ever to work in the history of cinema,” with 20 features plus the TV premiere of a new documentary on the legendary filmmaker.
Roger Corman left behind a legacy unmatched by filmmakers of his (or, for that matter, any) generation when he passed away in 2024 at the age of 98. In addition to directing over 50 films, he produced almost 500 features, created and ran two production companies and hired young talent in all facets of the business, both in front of and behind the cameras. He was dubbed “King of the B-movies” for his cheap productions and cost-cutting tricks, but he had an eye for talent and provided invaluable practical experience to hungry young artists willing to work long hours for small paychecks. Among the graduates of the “Corman School” are such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert Towne, John Sayles, Gale Anne Hurd and Jonathan Demme. TCM celebrates the magnate with four nights spanning his career. The first two nights feature films directed by Corman, and the following two highlight the directors who came up under his tutelage.
Friday, April 3
Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, and Ron Howard are among the filmmakers who share their stories in Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema (2021), a French documentary that sketches out the defining contradictions of the ambitious young director who gave up on the studios and created his own career as an independent filmmaker. The rest of the night dives into a sampling of his early career as director, including a pair of films that have become cult classics.
The man has been around for some time; several days, a week — we can’t be sure. The guy he was traveling with moved on, leaving him among the cigarette butts and half-empty bottles in the clapboard country-roadside motel. Upon coming to and finding himself penniless to pay for the room, he offered to odd-job his way out of debt to the lady who operates the place. She accepted — “No drinking on the job,” though — and he stayed on. Now, one night at supper, her young son eyes him across the table and asks, “Mister, what’s yore name?”
That’s the way life gets sorted out in Tender Mercies. Nothing forced, no privileged information elicited or shoved into the foreground before its time. The characters and their collective life will not be butted and chivvied into artificial poses so that conventional rhythms of “story” can be satisfied. This drifter and the roadside lady come to care for each other (months have gone by now, we know from in-passing references in the dialogue), but we do not see them marry. We do not even see them agree to marry: He asks her whether she’s ever thought about marrying again, says he’s been thinking about it, asks if she’ll think about marrying him. She agrees to think about it. Next scene we see, schoolkids are taunting her boy, Sonny, about his mother’s new husband.
The slippage of scenes — the omission of conventional Big Scenes between scenes, as it were — does not imply that anything common-law has been allowed to develop (the lady is a good Baptist, after all; they’ve been married, legal and proper). What this narrative technique does imply is that life’s truest ceremonies are celebrated in the random minutiae of everyday experience. And that is right nextdoor to recognizing the film’s theme of “tender mercies”: that the pain of mortality, of being bound on a deathward journey whose purpose and itinerary often seem obscure, can be truly alleviated not by spectacular sunsets, exceptional interventions in the progress of existence, but rather by quiet moments of self-knowledge, of seeing oneself in perspective with one’s fellows and one’s environment, in the limpid light of day.
[originally published in Queen Anne/Magnolia News, August 27, 2003]
Film critics have a lot of things on their plate when they sit down to deal with a movie, and some of those things can be pretty far removed from the concerns and curiosity of the typical reader. When you get down to basics, what most people want to know when reading about a given movie is: Am I going to enjoy it? Am I going to be satisfied that I spent two hours of my time that way?
Open Range will take slightly more than two hours of your time, and viewers who keep a stopwatch handy may not appreciate all of it, because it’s easy to imagine how the film could have been shortened, tightened up. But I wouldn’t part with a minute of it. It moves at the settled pace and with the assured stride of a national genre in a culture that values such a thing.
It’s also deeply satisfying in ways that few movies are these days. Then again, few movies these days are Westerns. Fewer still are Westerns that aspire to give the sort of pleasure that even run-of-the-mill Westerns could once be depended upon to stimulate. Open Range costars and was directed by Kevin Costner, who thirteen years ago won some Oscars for making Dances with Wolves. That movie had its virtues, and the new film is clearly the work of the same man, but a better measure of the satisfaction Open Range delivers is the movie in which Costner, as a featured actor, first connected with audiences: Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado in 1985.
[Originally published in Seattle Weekly, October 7, 2014]
Leave out Robert Downey, Jr., and The Judge looks like a painfully old-fashioned exercise in the Tradition of Quality. Big-city defense attorney Hank Palmer (that’s Downey) comes home to Indiana just in time to see his father (Robert Duvall), a respected judge, arrested for vehicular homicide. Father and son do not care for each other, but the dominoes are poised to let Hank stick around and mount a spirited defense.
In the course of the trial, family dynamics are tested, Hank brushes up against an old girlfriend (Vera Farmiga), and zero coolness points are awarded to anyone involved in the movie. Well, maybe Billy Bob Thornton earns a few as a sleek prosecutor (think George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder), but otherwise this is a very square film, suitable for limited Oscar buzz and a safe choice for seeing with your parents.
[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]
They were smart to change the title from TheTen–SecondJailbreak. Even though Charles Bronson says he’s going to set his ‘copter down in the prisonyard for only ten seconds, we don’t dwell on that. If there were a title to remind us, though, we might irritably observe that minutes seem to pass by—and it’s not from suspense or Odessa-steps montage while those prison guards stare on with whuddafuck expressions on their mugs, deciding to open fire only after the whirlybird has all but made its belated exit. It must be well known to everyone who passed near a TV set during Breakout‘s opening week of summer business that this nice man who looks just like Robert Duvall has been tossed into a Mexican slammer on a trumped-up charge, and left to rot there by his business enemies, who happen to include Uncle John Huston, confirmed now in the nasty habits he picked up in Chinatown. Faithful wife Jill Ireland (who is also the faithful wife of Charles Bronson, and hence keeps working in her husband’s pictures) hires baling-wire airman Bronson to get him out somehow. Breakout isn’t nearly the offense against decency, not to mention narrative intelligence, that last summer’s saturation-promo action flick was—DirtyMaryCrazyLarry, if you’d forgot, and if you had, excuse me for bringing it up again. But Tom Gries, for whom many of us once had hopes, has unwisely decided to play most of this film as comedy, without knowing how; and if somebody says that that’s all the plot sounds worthy of, I have to point out that comedy doesn’t just happen automatically when melodrama trips over its absurdities—not comedy consistent enough to carry a whole movie. The actors are noticeably stranded by Gries’s decision and only Sheree North comes near wresting an integral characterization out of the mélange.
[Originally published in Movietone News 33, July 1974]
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1969 movie TheRainPeople is generally referred to as one of the director’s “personal” films, by which is presumably meant (1) that the story was Coppola’s own and (2) that he didn’t have nearly the bucks which Paramount Pictures supplied for likely moneymaking projects such as TheGodfather. In light of this, it is not surprising that TheRainPeople is a quiet, modestly conceived film revolving around a minimum of characters whose problems are pretty much everybody’s problems. Alienation and lack of communication are key themes, and TheRainPeople, if less socially relevant than The Conversation, seems to be a psychologically more credible examination of the things that tend to keep people apart.
Most of us at Parallax View are no longer actively reviewing new films but we still try to keep up with them. And after decades of making lists like this, it’s still part of our routine. So while, even a week into January 2026, we are still catching up on some of the most celebrated films of 2025, we can’t help ourselves. Though far from definitive, these are snapshots of what we have been able to see, and what impressed us, over the last year.
Contributors in reverse alphabetical order. Films list in preferential order (unless otherwise noted).
Jeffrey Overstreet
This list of my favorite films of the year comprises only titles that opened on big screens or on streaming services in Seattle before the end of the calendar year. Thus, a lot of titles you see on other 2025 lists are missing here because they reached Seattle moviegoers after January 1, 2026, and some titles were popular on 2024 lists but didn’t reach Seattle until early 2025.
You’ll find reviews of some of these films at jeffreyoverstreet.com, my new website (under construction). More reviews of these titles are coming soon.
THE TOP NINE Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh) Eephus (Carson Lund) It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi) No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor) On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson) Seven Walks With Mark Brown (Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton) Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson)
ELEVEN RUNNERS-UP I’m still arguing with myself, so any of these could climb into the top ten in the coming weeks: A Little Prayer (Angus MacLachlan) Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang) Bono: Songs Of Surrender (Andrew Dominik) Hard Truths (Mike Leigh) Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari) Hedda (Nia DaCosta) Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou) Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk (Sepideh Farsi) The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Richard T. Jameson
From the top: Sinners One Battle after Another It Was Just an Accident The Secret Agent Sentimental Value Train Dreams Blue Moon Sorry, Baby Sirāt A House of Dynamite
Continuing more or less in order: The Mastermind, Die My Love, Nouvelle Vague, No Other Choice, 28 Years Later, Weapons, Bugonia, After the Hunt, Nuremberg, Freaky Tales, Superman
Have yet to see Hamnet, Marty Supreme, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Materialists
Robert Horton
First Tier: Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) One Battle After Another(Paul Thomas Anderson) The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendoça Filho)
Second Tier: Sirat (Oliver Laxe) Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay) When Fall Is Coming (Francois Ozon) Marty Supreme(Josh Safdie) Weapons (Zach Cregger) Sound of Falling (Mascha Schiliniski) Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) House of Dynamite(Kathryn Bigelow)
Not-Inconsiderable-Pleasure Tier: No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater) Friendship (Andrew DeYoung) Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths) 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)
Michael B. Jordan and cast in Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners.’ Photo credit: Warner Bros.
Kathy Fennessy
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) 3. The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 4. Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland) 5. 40 Acres (R.T. Thorne) 6. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe) 7. Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang) 8. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) 9. It Was Just an Accident / Un Simple Accident(Jafar Panahi) 10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
1. Sinners, Ryan Coogler 2. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson 3. Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke 4. It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi 5. Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine 6. Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof 7. I’m Still Here, Walter Salles 8. Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs 9. The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt 10. Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke.
Honorable Mentions: The Featherweight, Robert Kolodny; Grand Theft Hamlet, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane
A Baker’s Dozen (plus one, because I just won’t be constrained by the whole number thing) of my favorites for 2025, in ascending order: 14. Merrily We Roll Along (Maria Friedman) 13. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) 12. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) 11. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) 10. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor) 9. Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson) 8. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) 7. Eephus (Carson Lund) 6. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh) 5. La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino) 4. The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan) 3. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) and finally, pure catnip… 1. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
I also liked: Becoming Led Zeppelin (Bernard Macmahon), Chain Reactions (Alexandre O. Philippe), Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein), KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Applehans, Maggie Kang), The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence), The Monkey (Osgood Perkins), One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson), Superman (James Gunn), 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle), Weapons (Zach Cregger)
I have not yet had a chance to see either No Other Choice (Park Chan-Wook), Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) or The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho), three movies I fully expect would stir this baker’s dozen list up a bit, but so be it— as a wise candyman once said, so little time, so much to do. Others I have yet to experience include The Ugly Stepsister, The Shrouds, A House of Dynamite, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Misericordia, Dust Bunny, After the Hunt, Eddington, Jay Kelly, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Naked Gun, Splitsville and Father Mother Sister Brother, among many others. I’ll get to them in 2026, along with other non-movie-related matters. Maybe.
Sean Axmaker
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) 2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) 3. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley) 4. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) 5. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) 6. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 7. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) 8. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater) 9. Hamnet (Chloe Zhao) 10. A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
Runners-up (and on another day may have made the list): Cloud (Japan), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Embeth Davidtz), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt), No Other Choice (South Korea), Sirāt (Oliver Laxe), Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor).
Honorable mentions and memorable cinematic experiences: Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh), Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos), Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky), Dust Bunny (Bryan Fuller), Eephus (Carson Lund), Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro), Reflections in a Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani), Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson), Weapons (Zach Cregger).
There are, sadly, some significant films I have not yet seen (among them Blue Moon, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Sound of Falling, Father Mother Sister Brother and Peter Hujar’s Day) and hope to catch up with them soon, but as of publication this is where they stand.
Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value.’ Photo credit: Neon
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