Everyone’s Gone to the Movies

Last summer, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a restoration of No Fear No Die, an early and seldom-screened noir from the French iconoclast Claire Denis. It’s a spare tale of cockfighting and colonialism set at a tawdry truck stop-slash-nightclub outside Paris. J. Hoberman, that living legend of film criticism, celebrated the release for the “Rewind” column at the New York Times. Richard Brody, the unpredictable elder seer of the New Yorker, called it the filmmaker’s “first masterwork” in his online appraisal. Rounding out the coverage hat trick, the independent film site Screen Slate published a poignant and thorough interview with Denis and Isaach de Bankolé, one of the film’s leads. This is the best publicity a rep screening could ask for nowadays.