The Last Bolshevik Dear Chris Marker: No one would mistake you for a True Believer—they’re the ones causing all the trouble in the world, as Hank Quinlan put it—but there’s no denying a certain aura of Keeper of the Flame. Actually several Flames, the sheltering of which might derive from an early personal (or collective) trauma of wartime uprootedness. Of course you’d find that sort of psycho-biographical speculation odious, and yet it is not, I think, entirely alien to patterns of interpretation in your films and videos, especially the handful made to staunch postmodern amnesia around Left culture—and, yes, to honor old friends....

Invocation (Amy Halpern, 1982) In Amy Halpern’s silent short Invocation (1982), two disembodied hands are surrounded by darkness. Just barely illuminated by a warm, honey-hued light, they pull and prod at the air in curvilinear motions that suggest the presence of an invisible orb. After a little over a minute of these hypnotic movements, the hands begin to expand outward toward the edges of the frame. Then they disappear, leaving the screen dark for several beats before a brief section of credits roll....

“When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you,” writes the first-person narrator of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel, Annihilation. “Desolation tries to colonize you.” Rather than reciting those words back to us, Alex Garland, the writer-director of the splendidly free movie adaptation, makes us experience their meaning in our bones. In this alternately hypnotic and pulse-quickening combination of harrowing survival tale and high-flown ecological parable, an all-female reconnaissance unit enters a southern zone of the North American coast where nature has gone haywire....

Maudie The Nova Scotia painter Maud Lewis was a North American primitive, a self-taught folk artist who created eye-popping pastoral scenes from memory and imagination and by the end of her life was celebrated as a Canadian Grandma Moses. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig could have been the archetype of the 20th century’s literary man of the world—a biographer, essayist, and fiction writer whose cosmopolitan sophistication rested on his humanistic dream of a unified Europe....

Images from Ready or Not (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2019) “Get the Guests,” “Humiliate the Host,“ “Hump the Hostess,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “Snap the Dragon,” and “Killing the Kid”—the makers of the killingly clumsy horror comedy Ready or Not aim to take all those games from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, swap sexual for homicidal content, and subsume them into a bout of “Hide and Seek” played for blood and wedded to Satanic ritual....

It’s no surprise that Ryan Reynolds is splendid and unsettling as a wholesome-looking serial killer in Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices. This perennially underrated actor has one extraordinary specialty. He’s nonpareil at suggesting a spiky sensibility under the affable veneer of a romantic lead or the athletic poise of an action hero. In Satrapi’s sporadically engaging mix of psycho-thriller and splatter comedy, Reynolds exacts a full measure of empathy for Jerry Hickfang, a cheery rube who inflicts terrible punishment on a string of unsuspecting ladies....

Taylor Sheridan directed a cheapo horror movie in 2009 called Vile, but it’s his success as a screenwriter that has earned him the right to strike out on his own as a writer-director with Wind River, a topical murder movie with an exorbitant ratio of corpses to characters. Wind River takes off from the rampant violence and criminality raging through the Arapaho and Shoshone populations on the frigid Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, covered in The New York Times five years ago under the headline, “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation....

A black West African man (Pape Sidy Niang), nicknamed Z, has made his home in Seattle where he works as a bicycle cop. It’s a serious job mildly undermined by definition. (It’s hard to maintain an air of authority when your uniform includes shorts and a bike helmet.) But this is the Pacific Northwest—a locale Police Beat uses as a dreamy, sometimes queasy, backdrop—and “mildly undermined” comes with the territory....

Festival-goers clamored to attend early weekend showings of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Damien Chazelle’s First Man, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s white-knuckle mountain-climbing movie Free Solo, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s timely Roe v. Wade examination Reversing Roe, and John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm, a charming portrait of a couple aiming to leave city life to restore ailing California farmland, emerged as must-see docs....

Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen, 2022) A sparely adorned period romance set in late Yeltsin-era Russia, Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 parcels out its few obvious retro elements—a Walkman, a camcorder, the twice-heard 1986 Euro hit “Voyage, Voyage”—less to elicit our own nostalgia than to suggest the future nostalgia these ephemera will someday evoke for the film’s sentimental heroine. With the lightest touch, Kuosmanen, along with his production designer Kari Kankaanpää and cinematographer J-P Passi, crafts a mise en scène that feels like one seamless, unspooling memory as opposed to a generalized lookbook of borrowed ones....

A term beloved of French film critics—and one I never tire of borrowing, just because it pinpoints its referent so well—is OVNI, meaning “UFO.” It’s used to refer to a film, usually a first feature, that’s next to impossible to categorize, that seems to have come out of nowhere, to have been made entirely against the odds—a film that appears to originate if not actually from other planets, then from some parallel cinematic dimension where the usual rules don’t apply....

It’s a common tactic, when defending filmmakers who stick doggedly to the same thematic or stylistic ground, to invoke Samuel Beckett. Yes, some artists repeat themselves; Beckett did it all the time, and no one ever saw that as a flaw. I’ve certainly made that case in the past with regard to Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, but in some ways Andersson is more Beckettian than Beckett. In reality, the Irish master practiced far more variation than he’s often given credit for: to put it bluntly, a character in one of his plays may be embedded in soil up to the neck, or reduced to a mouth suspended in darkness, or dissolved down to a pure disembodied effect of language....

If Jia Zhang-ke’s latest feature was one of 2015’s biggest disappointments, it’s simply because two-thirds of it are so good, making the misjudged final chapter all the more bathetic. Because of that, it’s hard to properly assess the first two sections of Mountains May Depart. You can see how much they promise, but without the context of a final successful whole, you can’t be sure how far they succeed. Still, you take what satisfaction you get—which is not inconsiderable—and you have at least to applaud Jia’s ambition to try something new, even if it leaves him flailing in inhospitable waters....

The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán, 2019) Over the last decade, documentarist Patricio Guzmán has made films of remarkable beauty about subject matter of extreme ugliness. That ugliness is the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship which held sway in Guzman’s native Chile between 1973 and 1990: the arrests, torture and executions, the psychic damage done to a generation, whether they stayed in their country or, like Guzmán and so many others, went into exile....

So it turns out that there is such a thing as a mermaid fetish—an actual sexual one, involving tails and all, although I have no idea how much it involves full or partial immersion in water, either by the mermaid or by her partner. I wonder how much its popularity owes to Daryl Hannah lolling on a beach in Ron Howard’s Splash (seriously though, can you imagine any Ron Howard film stoking anyone’s desire?...

Restless City Along with daffodils, sunshine, and graduations, a sure sign of spring is the arrival of the New York African Film Festival, founded and programmed by executive director Mahen Bonetti. The 19th edition arrived at the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the hallmarks of the season: color, freshness, warmth, and variety, with hopes for renewal and contemplation of what’s past. As co-programmer Richard Pena remarks, African cinema was born in 1963 (the same year as the New York Film Festival), and for almost 20 years NYAFF has mapped the development of this (youngish) industry by showing classic and contemporary films of the African continent and of the diasporas....

The idea for The Point came to cult singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson during an acid trip and inspired both a concept album and the first prime-time feature-length animated special to be televised in the U.S. Animated by Fred Wolf, it tells the story of a young boy named Oblio who is banished from the über-conformist Pointed Village for the misfortune of being born with a round head in a society of cone-shaped domes....

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty For every film we argue over and write articles about, there are legions of moving images we often ignore: industrial films, commercials, educational series, sound tests, news clips, travel diaries, amateur short films. Of all these, the home movie comes especially close to the intentions of cinema’s earliest founders, treating the camera not as a storytelling device or a magic wand, but a means of faithfully documenting life in motion, preserving the moment for posterity, and giving memory some analogue in the physical world....

A secret history could be written about movies in which things are not so much unwatchable as unseeable or, at the very least, illegible. The chronicle might include the cameraless work of Man Ray from the Twenties, the indiscernible imagery of Peter Gidal’s 1973 Room Film, or the threshold-of-vision passages characteristic of Philippe Grandrieux. Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay—to use the parlance of the pitch—makes Grandrieux’s Sombre look like a Vincente Minnelli flick....