Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest film, “Fatherland,” which won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is about the novelist Thomas Mann’s return to Germany, in 1949, to receive an award. “If Pawlikowski’s aim was to portray Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) as a terminal bore and a pompous ass, he succeeded brilliantly,” Richard Brody writes. Pawlikowski tweaks the facts of Mann’s life to fit his style—and the style he rarifies in this film is one with little room for variety or range. “It is a cinema of prefabricated meaning and predetermined mood,” Brody writes. Read his full review: newyorker.com/culture/the-fr…

The Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong talks about his work in terms of exigencies: “Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a film?” He’s referring not to the time, money, and labor necessary to sustain a feature-length film but to the social necessity of a particular story. “I like to think, both for me and the audience, What is an important issue that we’re struggling with right now?” he tells E.Tammy Kim. Lee’s most recent film, and his first feature in eight years, “Possible Love,” tells the story of a group of laborers who have recently been laid off from their factory jobs, and of the woman who is attempting to direct a documentary about their story. It is both a reflection on a real confrontation, from 2009, when a Korean car company fired a third of its workforce, and a tale of a violent betrayal which probes at the value of filmmaking itself. At the link in our bio, Kim spends time with Lee, and talks to him about his relationship to filmmaking. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…