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Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019) As both a critic and screenwriter in a time of well-trod IP, I’ve had to develop a simple ethos around the idea of remakes and how to assess or approach them. A remake, in my opinion, must warrant itself beyond the craven cash grab. It must make the case for its existence in the here and now, and it must reflect its environment. The best remakes are those whose IP can function like a time capsule that’s opened every ten to forty years to examine the thoughts, fears, and ideas of its generation, i....

Film Forum and distributor Grasshopper Film have timed the American theatrical premiere of Asghar Farhadi’s 2006 film Fireworks Wednesday for the raucous title holiday, observed with public merrymaking and pyrotechnics on the Wednesday before the Persian New Year. The movie itself is cause enough for celebration. It’s a masterpiece of Farhadi’s psychologically charged scene-making and sensuous, insinuating style, and it’s a milestone of what I call keyhole cinema. Director Richard Rush once told me that the secret to the greatness of The Stunt Man was his decision to have “the title character peeking through a keyhole and getting a very partial view of the truth....

The timing couldn’t be better for reviving Cocteau’s least-seen masterpiece, Les Parents terribles: a peerlessly witty, imaginative, and haunting tale of volatile emotions in a chaotic family. The situation of penniless 22-year-old Michel (Jean Marais), living in his parents’ apartment, under the sway of his diabetic, ultra-possessive mother Yvonne (Yvonne de Bray), should connect with American audiences in an age when more young adults live with their parents than with a spouse or partner....

Lion tells the harrowing fact-based story of a 5-year-old boy from an impoverished hamlet in central India who gets separated from his older brother after a train ride to a nearby city and winds up at the chaotic Howrah Station in Kolkata (the former Calcutta), roughly 1600 kilometers away. Unable to read or write or to speak Bengali dialect or even to provide his mother’s or his own correct name, he rebounds from the teeming city’s mean streets to a Dickensian orphanage and from there to a loving home on the Australian island of Tasmania, with his adoptive parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham)....

I’d been looking forward to Michael Fassbender’s interpretation of Macbeth. After actually seeing him star in Australian director Justin Kurzel’s version of “the Scottish play,” I’m still looking forward to it. Given the circumstances, Fassbender gets a mulligan. Kurzel and his three screenwriters (Todd Louiso & Jacob Koskoff, and Michael Lesslie) have drastically cut and reshaped Shakespeare’s text and swamped it in grime, gore, and murk. Even slashed to the bone, the words should still spill over with vitality and splendor, but the filmmakers bury them alive....

Mary Poppins Returns propels the Banks family and its nonpareil nanny on so many gusts of poignant, humorous invention that it leaves not just the cast but any non-Grinch audience floating merrily in mid-air. The film takes place during “The Great Slump” (better known as The Great Depression) but the director, Rob Marshall, establishes a nifty, resilient tone as Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), a lamplighter, cycles through London at dawn to turn down gaslights....

Readers of the Angry Chinese Blogger website, among other sinophilic cine-types, are well aware of the unsettling situation surrounding Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, a sprawling, deeply moving epic that spans the period from just prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre to a little before the present. The movie has basically been accused of treason by the Chinese government. Although its pro-democracy, pro-reform stance is the obvious reason it’s been targeted, some of the charges regime bubbleheads have leveled at it are just plain laughable....

Nineteen forty-seven was a good year for film noir. It was the year that saw the release of Born to Kill (Robert Wise), Body and Soul (Robert Rossen), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur), Dark Passage (Delmer Daves), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk), and Dead Reckoning (John Cromwell), all shot in appropriately atmospheric black and white. But in the midst of these monochrome movies one oddity came along: Desert Fury, a film noir in glorious Technicolor, directed by Lewis Allen, perhaps the only other previous example being John Stahl’s equally delirious 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven....

Love is Colder Than Death Love Is Colder Than Death (69) kicked off Fassbinder’s unparalleled creative deluge, with the 24-year-old directing his own script, editing under a pseudonym (Franz Walsch), and playing a key role without billing. Like many feature debuts, it reflects its author’s immersion in film culture and collection of its tropes. Fassbinder dedicates the work to (among others) French New Wavers Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, and he might well have added François Truffaut, whose Jules and Jim anticipates far more lyrically its doomed ménage à trois configuration, and especially Jean-Luc Godard, whose Band of Outsiders explores like themes of a postwar generation culling its identity from pop sources....

12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen, U.S. (2) Inside Llewyn Davis Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S. (1) Her Spike Jonze, U.S. (17) Gravity Alfonso Cuarón, U.S. (7) Before Midnight Richard Linklater, U.S. (3) Frances Ha Noah Baumbach, U.S. (9) The Act of Killing Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/U.K. (4) The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese, U.S. (37) Nebraska Alexander Payne, U.S. (18) American Hustle David O. Russell, U.S. (19) Blue Jasmine Woody Allen, U....

Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, “Silent Thunder” So, why Ted Post? My initial thought was the longevity of the career, or really, just Mr. Post’s longevity. At some point, I discovered that he was born in 1918 and thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of history, not only as a filmmaker, but as a filmgoer,” as the trusty IMDb bio mentioned that he was an usher at a Loew’s moviehouse in Brownsville in the late Thirties....

Just because a film is set in the past doesn’t mean that it also has to take place in the past tense. Of course, in a sense, all film narratives are in the past tense: even though movies tend to maximize the immediacy of what’s happening on screen, we’re always at least partly aware of seeing events that have already happened in front of a lens and been edited into a simulated present for our benefit....

Cocote, from the Dominican Republic, isn’t an obscure work by any means. It’s generally clear what is happening in a narrative that is altogether linear. If this film seems challenging, it’s more a matter of texture and vision—a matter of difference, if you like. I wouldn’t be the only critic to compare Cocote to Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge, an Argentinian film that, among other themes, evokes a new global consciousness born of the Internet, and that accordingly invented its own novel, perplexing syntax....

S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete is an extremely clever, gripping film, but you may come out of it wondering exactly what it is you’ve seen—uncertain whether it’s cynical in a productive or merely an exploitative way, or even downright nihilistic. Seen from one angle—and you can decide whether this angle is the most or least important—the movie is a steely, inventive, finely crafted thriller of a sort that doesn’t get made very often these days, a sensationalist narrative with an aura of stark, considered realism....

The late Russian director Aleksei German once declared: “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch.” He achieved his ambition in his final film, albeit posthumously. German had dreamed of adapting the Strugatsky Brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God since its publication in 1964, at the very start of his directing career; he finally embarked on a six-year shoot in 2000, but died in February 2013 before his film was completed....

Director Amos Gitai gives himself just a few seconds’ worth of cameo in his Rabin, The Last Day. He’s seen as an officer present at a Tel Aviv police station on November 4, 1995, when a young man named Yigal Amir is brought in, having just fatally shot Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “Take that scumbag to interrogation,” says Gitai’s cop—and that’s essentially what his film does, performing an extended, cool-headedly prosecuted act of interrogation....

Myself, the last time I saw Macao was in the James Bond film Skyfall, in which the former Portuguese colony appears as a lantern-lit fantasyland where Chinese heavies risk getting eaten by Komodo dragons. Before that, it featured as the exotic setting of Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story and of Josef von Sternberg’s 1952 adventure Macao, with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. I say “exotic” advisedly. If the idea of Macao comes laden with orientalist fantasy, if the reality is hard to extricate from the movie myth, that’s the very premise of a new Portuguese essay film cum meta-noir narrative....

Americans are the beloved noise-makers, the unschooled and the uncut, appreciated most when at their simplest. Poet Charles Bukowski is the classic case of the American original who found his first audience abroad. In the U.S.A., particularly in his hometown of Los Angeles, he is the dirty old man, boss vizier of the sleaze-o-rama precincts of East Hollywood. Where transients slide into cheap rooms and get awakened in the middle of the night by yelling neighbors, Charles Bukowski is the presiding boozehound laureate....

In the upcoming issue of Film Comment, Hoberman writes about Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s Movie Orgy, a touring series of screenings where two simultaneously running projectors would “interpolate reedited TV shows, hygiene films, and newsreels.” Ken Jacobs also pioneered the use of multiple projections in his 24-hour long screening/performance A Good Night at the Movies. Hoberman, a former student and projectionist of Jacobs, was in the audience for A Good Night at the Movies 2, and later incorporated this technique into his own classes....