After a year of warnings from the film community, the flames were hardly surprising. In December 2019, in the latest of the many recent administrative and logistical crises faced by Cinemateca Brasileira, the federal government revoked its contract with the Associação de Comunicação Educativa Roquette Pinto (ACERP), the privately owned cultural organization that had administered the archive since 2018. Employees were left without pay and the keys were seized in August by the government, which assumed legal responsibility but did nothing to restore operations....

The Girl Hitchcock It might be an Olympic event. Nine hundred people have assembled in front of a London landmark, and for a moment you might think they are here for a marathon perhaps, because from a distance such spectators all look alike. They all have one face. But actually, crowds have gathered for a bit of stage hocus-pocus, a vanishing trick (call it The Audience Vanishes). They are standing in front of the British Museum, and all of them have donned cardboard cutout masks of Alfred Hitchcock....

“Now you’ll see a real movie,” snaps a haughty actress in The Student after a young production assistant spills hot tea on her. She phones her banker husband, two thugs in suits arrive, and a beating is administered. Just another day in post-Communist Kazakhstan’s oligarchy, where, to quote a university lecturer in the film who brightly champions Social Darwinism, “the weak disappear.” As in the 1860s Russia of Crime and Punishment—the source for Darezhan Omirbaev’s concise adaptation—both the country and the film’s student protagonist are in the throes of a moral crisis with deadly consequences....

The family relationship between still photography and film is intimate and rivalrous; each, at times, seems to envy the qualities that are unique to the other. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was also a dedicated photographer, as well as an accomplished painter and illustrator. “I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us,” he said, “unless it’s inside a frame.” A narrative is also a kind of frame; a filmmaker not only composes shots but decides what to include and what to leave out of the story....

Far from a conventional love triangle, Fidelio: Alice’s Journey is a daring exploration of monogamy and long-distance relationships. A sailor with a man in every port, Alice takes an odyssey that is thrilling, erotic, thoughtful, and exquisitely photographed. Deep in the belly of a cargo ship is where Alice is truly in her element, as an experienced mechanic with the Merchant Marine. But she leaves behind her loving boyfriend, Felix, to take a position on the Fidelio....

Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) continues to impress. The intersection of serious filmmaking with serious anthropological study, masterminded by SEL director Lucien Castaing-Taylor, has made the lab a nexus for documentary filmmaking, even within an era when documentary has developed a following unimaginable even 20 years ago. The past couple of years have seen the emergence of Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan and, more recently, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana....

Battlefield Heroes In Hollywood, the second a movie features an actual real live historical figure doing actual real live historical things, many great directors start stammering and stuttering, apparently full of fear over what their seventh-grade history teacher will think if they get something wrong. Their historical movies are sapped of vitality, transformed by over-caution into historical dioramas filled with clacking, waxwork dummies stuffed with sawdust. Steven Spielberg’s movies like Amistad and Lincoln are particular offenders, but Martin Scorsese lost his mojo with Gangs of New York, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus and J....

Field Niggas So let’s get this straight. What makes a feature feature-length, and what makes a short, short? Is one over and the other under an hour? By that logic, is a three-minute movie categorically equivalent to a 60-minute movie? And by categorically equivalent, you mean equally unsuitable for distribution, yes? Convento It’s actually alive and well—perhaps more alive than it’s ever been—even if few people know what to call it or where to put it....

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is a fascinating blend of intense family psychodrama and bite-your-fingernails-off spook-show. Through the use of basic special effects and evocatively bleak production design, Kent conjures a world that is equally realistic and nightmarish. Essie Davis gives a tragic and horrifying performance as Amelia, a woman perilously under the influence, her grip on reality slipping with every waking second. Her struggle is a terrifying display of how the monsters under the bed never go away....

Debra Granik on the set of Leave No Trace For the past three and a half years, Leave No Trace and Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik has been collecting footage for her next documentary project: a study of four men and one woman, across multiple New York boroughs, navigating life after incarceration. “They were allowing us to document and chronicle and stay with them a bit, and try to, as best we could, find the moments that were extremely difficult, [as well as] the moments where success was sweet,” Granik told Film Comment....

If you think that Air Supply’s sappy slow-dance essential “All Out of Love” couldn’t possibly give you goose bumps, think again. The song drives a scene midway through David Michôd’s gripping criminal-family tale Animal Kingdom: its video flickers on a TV screen in a dark living room, as the camera pans cautiously past the film’s teenage protagonist, asleep on the couch with his girlfriend, to the tortured face of his uncle Pope, the oldest of three hot-blooded brothers....

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022) One of the strangest, most improbable effects of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is that after over two and half hours of unrelenting garishness, the film’s obnoxious editing, historical inaccuracy, obvious dialogue, and didactic sermonizing suddenly melt away. The shock of the real that occurs near the film’s end, when Luhrmann cuts to archival documentary footage of Presley’s final 1977 performance, renders this blockbuster unexpectedly heartbreaking. The movie’s CGI flourishes and gaudy rap remixes pale against this image of a middle-aged man at the end of his rope, barely able to stand up but still finding solace in his art as he belts out a spine-tingling version of the cornball “Unchained Melody....

In documentary, archival footage often plays a supporting role, but with Our Nixon, the Super 8 films, and the men who filmed them, are the central players. Shot between 1969 and 1973, the years of Nixon’s first administration, the footage shows three young men eager to document everything, from the monumental, including the president’s phone call with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, and the historic trip to China in 1972, to the mundane: the men lounging in shorts on the White House lawn, or a marble bathroom observed during an official state visit....

La Belle de Nuit (Louis Valray, 1934) The finding of lost films is always cause for celebration—but some films were never lost, merely forgotten, and discovering them can be just as exciting. Take the case of the only two feature films directed by Louis Valray, which were shown in the 17th edition of To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual series dedicated to film preservation. Introducing these new restorations, Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films recounted how he first came across a choppy, poor-quality print of Valray’s Escale (1935), and went in search of the filmmaker’s heirs as well as more of his work....

Zerzura (Christopher Kirkley with Rhissa Koutata and Ahmoudou Madassane, 2017) The snaking, reverb-laden guitar lines that open Zerzura seem designed to conjure forth magic onto the screen. The film, a self-styled “acid western,” is a decidedly low-budget, homemade collaboration between Christopher Kirkley (founder of the record label Sahel Sounds) and the musicians Rhissa Koutata and Ahmoudou Madassane (who also serves as lead actor), and it locates that magic in the sweeping desert landscapes and stunning vernacular architecture of Niger....