“Film Comment Selects,” the annual grab bag of films programmed by the staff of Film Comment magazine, is one of the key cinephile experiences of the year. Now in its 16th edition, the series, which opens on February 17 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, focuses on work that falls outside the margins, whether it be older films that haven’t received their due critical praise or newer work that for numerous reasons hasn’t and doesn’t look like it ever will make it outside of the film festival bubble.The slate of films this year is one of the most expansive, taking in work from all over the world and encompassing voices both well known — or at least well known to a certain audience who spends a lot of time in darkened movie theaters — and unfamiliar. Terrence Davies, an art house staple since his debut feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988), opens the series with “Sunset Song,” based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel of the same name. Taking place over a number of years, from just before World War I through its opening battles, the film stars the ex-model Agyness Deyn as the daughter of a tyrannical father who moves from one familial prison into another when she meets her soon-to-be-husband, a nice local lad who turns savage after spending time on the front lines of the battlefield. Davies has managed here to fold his formal rigidity into what is his most grand emotional statement on the fragile bonds of family and love, while also creating a surprisingly accessible film. Two other films on the program with similar themes include the muddy and lyrical “The Fear,” told through the voice of one soldier’s memories of his time spent fighting for the French during WWI, and “The Paternal House,” a clever and moving Iranian drama that takes place over almost nine decades and concerns the burden of family and tradition.The theme of family extends to “Under Electric Clouds,” Aleksei German, Jr.’s slow-moving and dystopian portrait of his native Russia. Laboriously oblique and dense, German is working in the same critical mode that his father, Aleksei German, pioneered, but hopefully with more success (his father’s films were shelved, or delayed, or some combination of the two, because of their perceived subversive content). At the same time, he is distancing himself from his father’s formal complexity. “Hard to Be a God” (2013), the elder German’s late-career masterpiece (he died during post-production and the younger German finished the film), moves at an almost feverish pace — it’s based on the science-fiction novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which takes place on a future planet that is centuries behind in moral and technological advancement. “Under Electric Clouds” is set in the almost-present, but one where rapid technological change has radically transformed the landscape. Unraveling over seven chapters plus a prologue, the various narrative strands move around the construction of a building that was left unfinished and can be seen, half-built and monolithic, in the distance. It’s a challenging film with a specific rhythm that can easily pull you under its spell.But in terms of challenges, nothing in this year’s group of films comes close to “Malgré la nuit,” the latest from French provocateur Philippe Grandrieux. The director casts this deeply troubling and mysterious erotic thriller, about fleeting romance and a dangerous sex club that flirts with the line between desire and violence, literally in the shadows: the camera moves around these desperate, lonely characters as if stalking them, shifting from darker to darker, and fully into the black. Grandrieux is working in a familiar mode here, and if you’ve seen any of his previous features it will be instantly recognizable — he is not known for prizing visual or narrative clarity; his work is experiential. But this time, he has written the script with Rebecca Zlotowski, a decidedly more mainstream filmmaker who seems to have given at least some form to Grandrieux’s favored themes without restraining him from continuing his formal explorations.Just as surprising, if not as dangerous, are two films that are being presented as rediscoveries. Samuel Beckett’s “Film” (1964), starring Buster Keaton, is being screened with Ross Lipman’s loving and meticulous tribute, “Notfilm,” an essay-film that approaches Beckett’s ambiguous work from a variety of angles and features interviews with people close to the production. “Return to Waterloo” (1984) is a film from Ray Davies, the former lead singer of The Kinks, and is his first and only film. Davies had been interested in the medium for a number of years — he had proposed a television special for the group’s album “Arthur” (1969) that never came to fruition — but here finally achieved the combination of sound and vision that had been on his mind, at least in the conception of the work, for over a decade.The greatest discovery, or maybe rediscovery, depending on how closely you’ve been paying attention, is the work of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski, on display here across a number of films. Known for his hysterical-horror romance “Possession” (1981), which features a lot of ranting and raving and projectile vomit, his early work being shown in the series — “The Third Part of the Night” (1972), “The Devil” (1972), and “On the Silver Globe” (1988) — reaches a similar high pitch. But the highlight is his latest, “Cosmos,” making its United States premiere. The film, based on Witold Gombrowicz’s paranoid-comic novel, is the first Żuławski has made in 15 years and shows the director having fun with the rambunctious humor and rapid-fire pace of the narrative, which is updated here to the present day without losing any of its original tone. “Cosmos” is as much a director working in a comfortable mode, frenetic and perverse as ever, as it is a filmmaker finding the art of moving images still exciting, and finding new ways to work with those images, well into his career.
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