Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, based on the French graphic novel series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, is a travesty of storytelling. But if Paris’s Bureau International des Expositions, which licenses world’s fairs, ever needs a visionary new creative director, I think they have one in their own backyard. Unlike so many hyperactive would-be blockbusters, Valerian is not like a visit to a theme park....

Henry Koster’s 1947 The Unfinished Dance is a technicolor dramatization of prepubescent treachery in a ballet company. It begins with Meg, a 10-year-old Margaret O’Brien, up on the theater’s catwalk. She’s secretly peering down at Ariane (Cyd Charisse) spinning and bounding across the stage during rehearsal. The dance company is attached to a school, and Meg often skips class to watch her idol. Ariane, beginning a passage of barre work, leans back with her arm overhead, her throat and heart bared before the child’s rapt gaze....

Onlookers (Kimi Takesue, 2023) Over the last two decades, poetic or subjective nonfiction has become one of the most prevalent forms of avant-garde filmmaking. Artists like Kevin Jerome Everson, Ben Russell, Jodie Mack, Fox Maxy, Ja’Tovia Gary, and the members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab have focused their creative energies on applying unconventional formal strategies to filmic facticity, reimagining the contours of both documentary and experimental cinema. In recognizing such work as worthy of a showcase all its own, the Prismatic Ground festival, founded and programmed by Inney Prakash, is both confirming and expanding this salutary trend....

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927) screens in the Teatro Verdi at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, October 1, 2022. Photo by Valerio Greco When I go to a silent film festival, I have devilishly high expectations: I’m there for new restorations of long-lost masterpieces, virtually unseen for over a century, snatched from the abyss of archival decay, beautifully curated with transcendent music, and experienced with a passionate community of fellow travelers....

The exhibition aims, for one thing, to extend our sense of “Stanley Kubrick” by fragmenting and reassembling the elements of his films in different ways. The 45 exhibits, or installations, in this ambitiously curated show each take off from a Kubrick film, or a situation, motif, or atmosphere within the films, and spin this out into a self-contained version of “Kubrick.” Running through the hallway is exhibit no. 9, The Shining Carpet, a floor covering patterned after the hallways in the Overlook Hotel....

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is a remarkably beautiful film—which, for some, may cause alarm bells to ring. I should add that it’s a remarkably beautiful film set in the early Sixities, in black and white and in Academy ratio—and those bells may ring louder. This stately drama from Poland will indeed polarize viewers: when it screened in Toronto, Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter hailed it as “a connoisseur’s delight” with overtones of Dreyer, while Variety’s Peter Debruge was less impressed: “Devoid of color and mirth alike ....

Tel Aviv on Fire (Sameh Zoabi, 2019) The very term “soap opera” implies vapid frothiness. Originally a reference to radio serials being sponsored by soap companies, the term quickly came to signify a form of drama that is weightless, squeaky-clean, bubbly, and above all escapist, a reassuring distraction from the real problems of everyday life, public or private. Filmmakers and other artists haven’t always seen it this way, however, and have often latched onto the TV soap opera as a format that can very directly be a reflection of real life or a refraction of it, an enlarging, distorting lens through which to view the world....

Like a lot of British people my age, my life was changed on 4 September 1976. That was the night that the Sex Pistols first appeared on British TV, on a Granada Television show called So It Goes, presented by Tony Wilson, later founder of Factory Records. It wasn’t so much what the band sounded like, or what the lyrics said, it was purely the presence of its singer, then called Johnny Rotten, that made all the difference: the snarl, the whine, but most of all the contemptuous ironic stare with which he ended the performance, that was in itself a complete manifesto for a full-fledged attitude towards the world....

“My God,” says Woody Harrelson’s Colonel, gazing into the eyes of alpha chimpanzee Caesar in War for the Planet of the Apes, “look at your eyes—they look almost human.” It’s a line laden with ironic meaning, given that “human” isn’t likely to sound like a compliment to the leader of the species that’s about to make homo sapiens obsolete on earth. But the comment also derives an ironic charge from the film’s visual execution: Caesar’s eyes are consistently alive, expressive, while the Colonel’s, when not hidden by cobalt blue aviator shades, are often reduced to pools of ominous dark, occasionally lit by a feral gleam....

Life of Riley In short, what was at a premium this year was simple fun. Or, as Alain Resnais puts it in the payoff of his latest film Life of Riley: “le fun.” The joke here is that the dramatis personae in Resnais’s latest adaptation of playwright Alan Ayckbourn are all English, living in Yorkshire, but played by French actors (regulars Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier, along with new recruits including Michel Vuillermoz from Wild Grass, and Caroline Sihol), who can’t even pronounce their own characters’ names plausibly, and no doubt were never intended to....

(Courtesy of Laura Isabel Serna) While diversifying contemporary mainstream criticism is an important goal, the history of the parallel stream of Latino or Spanish-language criticism awaits writing. Our new project gathers translated motion-picture fiction—novels that in some way took up the world of Hollywood and filmmaking—and critical writing about films and film culture by a journalist named Gabriel Navarro (1894-1950) who was active in Los Angeles during the 1920s and ’30s....

It’d be a mistake to be scared off by the subject matter, so often a vehicle for moralism: suburban teenagers hang out around town, go to parties, hook up, are annoying or sweet. Or by the pedigree of the film’s 26-year-old director, Gia Coppola—granddaughter to Francis, niece to Sofia, and first cousin once removed to Nicolas Cage. Or the pedigree of its source material, the semiautobiographical short-story collection of the same name written by James Franco....

With the crutch of text banished—and with Slaboshpytskiy embracing the festival-film vernacular of long-take, hang-back views—we become pure observers of bodies and customs, of obscure exchanges and nasty violence. The story follows (often literally, by Steadicam) new foot-soldier Sergey as he ascends the gang’s power structure and falls for Anna, one of the girls in his charge. The young nonprofessional actors at times look too innocuous to be bashing in heads or turning tricks, but the explicit sex scene between Sergey and Anna seems to return this couple at least temporarily to a state of youthful vulnerability and innocence....

If Roger’s travails give the film its emotional thrust, it’s Crotty’s unique cinematic vision, combining animated flights of fancy with 16mm realism, that continually dislodges viewer expectation. That, for instance, all the wives are French bohemians, or that Roger registers as barely older than the daughter he shares with Frank, are part of the film’s idiosyncratic logic and atmospheric pleasures. As Fort Buchanan unfolds across four seasons, its narrative structure becomes increasingly slippery and digressive....

It was only a few years ago that Brady Corbet had become a “That Guy” phenomenon of art film, appearing in one auteur-driven movie after another from Melancholia to Martha Marcy May Marlene to Force Majeure to Saint Laurent. Then The Childhood of a Leader barreled onto the screen in Venice in 2015 with the bewildering and indefatigable story of a diplomat’s Valiant-coiffed brat during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference—a saturnine world vibrating with the music of Scott Walker, starring Bérénice Bejo and Liam Cunningham, and capped, like an extravagant cherry, with a vanishing appearance by Robert Pattinson and a drop-the-mike fascist finale....

In your movies, you see through corporate honchos as slick, exploitative gladhanders, but in the last reel you don’t always feel compelled to punish them. Well, John Glover in Gremlins 2 is probably the best example of that. In the original idea he was the bad guy. He was Ted Turner and Donald Trump rolled into one. And casting this particular actor changed the entire part, because he was so likable....

For Ayiva—the Burkina Faso native who is the focus of the dynamically attentive camerawork—the endpoint of the journey is Calabria, Italy. Much of the trouble Ayiva faces getting a job and fitting in was actually experienced by the actor portraying him, Koudous Seihon. I wrote about the resulting drama in our July/August Hot Property: “With an intimate naturalism that at times evokes a tag-along documentary, Carpignano’s matter-of-fact approach, leavened with the humor of engaging side characters, produces the ring of truth without strain....