Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature, Corpo Celeste, is confronted with the challenge facing any work of new Italian cinema—how to live up to the celebrated cinema of the past, while offering a fresh voice to represent the Italy of the present. This naturalistic, often hypnotically quiet film in many ways draws on the neorealist tradition, while articulating a distinctly contemporary portrait of Italian life. The Swiss-born Rohrwacher’s Italy is not the Italy of Fellini, Rossellini, or de Sica, but an Italy as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl struggling to understand the world around her....

World War II and film history intersect with shadow-casting monumentality—in the use of film as a record of war and evidence of Nazi atrocities, in the crowded choir of personal and public accounts across hundreds of theatrical and broadcast documentaries, in the specific inquisitions of Marcel Ophüls and the massive war-movie output of Hollywood among others. Horrific images of rolling tanks and heaps of bodies rolling into pits are so familiar to many Westerners that reckoning requires a special effort, an unusually active engagement, a thinking-through of yet another encounter with this past....

Written by Mark Protosevich, Spike Lee’s thriller Oldboy is an action-packed reimagining of Chan-wook Park’s 2003 Korean film of the same name. A paranoia-laced tale of injustice, obsession, and revenge that finds Lee plumbing the dark depths of the human soul, Oldboy is replete with intricately choreographed fight sequences and shocking revelations that lead to a gut-wrenching surprise ending. Set in 1993 in an unnamed city resembling New York, Oldboy tells the story of an unlikable advertising executive, Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), who struggles to get ahead while paying child support to his ex-wife....

Sometimes you can learn just as much about a conflict by studying those involved as by dwelling on the positions they promote. This is the viewpoint advanced by director James Marsh in Shadow Dancer, a smoldering thriller adapted from a novel by Tom Bradby that centers on an IRA faction and the government effort to neutralize it during the waning days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. After a botched bombing of the Tube in London, pensive Collette (Andrea Riseborough) is whisked away by MI5 and deposited in a holding room....

Lost Lost Lost (Jonas Mekas, 1976) Final Destination 2 (David R. Ellis, 2003), the second entry in the five-film horror franchise, opens with a young woman, Kimberly (A.J. Cook), packing her car to go on a trip with her friends. As the giggling crew gets on the highway, Kimberly takes note of a semi-truck nearby carrying a giant load of uncut lumber. The teens are having a typically great time—flicking joints out the window, flashing their tits, and spilling coffee on their laps—when suddenly a chain snaps on the trailer in front of them....

Some art documentaries trot out talking heads to reassure us of the central importance of their subjects. Others simply confront us with the physical reality of the work, inasmuch as that’s possible. Corinna Belz’s process-oriented record of, yes, Gerhard Richter painting, sometimes pulls in close, sometimes stays back, as the calm, kindly, rigorous master digs into a series of abstracts in his Cologne studio. Aside from showing Richter attending to daily business and archival glimpses of his feisty younger self, the documentary sticks with the now-80-year-old artist as he paints, pauses, contemplates, and offers humble-sounding koans, conscious of the camera, as if it embodies the tantalizing boundaries of control and influence for an artist and his material....

Outcast of the Islands is a film quite like its antihero: disillusioned from the first frame, impervious to compromise, and for many, too despairing to endure. It was made by Carol Reed in 1951 after a hat trick of postwar masterpieces: the breathless chronicle of an IRA gunman’s last hours, Odd Man Out; the child’s-eye study of good intentions gone astray, The Fallen Idol; and that cockeyed rumination on ideals leveled by bombs, The Third Man....

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone While residing in Italy, like the protagonist of his only novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Tennessee Williams wrote a foreword to Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. McCullers and Williams were friends, and her second novel broached a literary genre that, Williams wrote, could be lost on certain readers: “The question one hears most frequently about writers of the gothic school is this little classic: ‘Why do they write about such dreadful things?...

The Late Mathias Pascal It is ironic that the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine may be remembered best—if at all—as a footnote in film history: the star whose face was used to demonstrate the Kuleshov Effect. Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov spliced the same close-up shot of Mosjoukine with different images—a bowl of soup, a dead child, a reclining woman—and reported that audiences were convinced his expression was different in each close-up, reading appropriate emotions into what is described (the original film does not survive) as his “expressionless” or “impassive” face....

Below are 10 film restorations, preservations, reprints, and remasters that I was able to see in 2023. These represent what I consider to be some of the best work done this year in terms of technical processes, efforts to make difficult-to-see films accessible to the public, and engagement with cinema history. Accompanying film titles are the available technical specifications, as well as the names of the organizations and labs that did the work....

White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022) There are certain novels that you wish you’d read the moment they came out. It’s not because they have since dated, but simply because it’s hard to recapture the uncanny frisson of sensing that a certain book represents its moment with pinpoint perfection. Read them one, two, four decades later and their freeze-framing of a mood has become a historical document. One such novel is Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), now adapted for the screen by Noah Baumbach....

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