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rolls on with a special in-person presentation Sunday night by James Franco: My Own Private River, a re-working of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, featuring the performance that proved to be River Phoenix’s apotheosis, as the Seattle hustler who loves and then loses slumming rich kid Scott (Keanu Reeves). After watching the film’s dailies and outtakes with Van Sant, Franco edited together a new version combining footage from the original film and its unused residue....

Readers of an august cinephile organ like this would probably balk at seeing a film called Always Shine unless they suspected the title was ironic. Trust me, in the case of Sophia Takal’s second feature, it is. The film begins with a caption, a quotation from The Secrets of Poise, Personality and Model Beauty by John Robert Powers: “It is a woman’s birthright to be attractive and cheery. In a sense, it is her duty… She is the bowl of flowers in the table of life....

This was not the most joyous year in Venice: sitting on the Lido on the festival’s final Friday, looking out at a gathering Mediterranean rainstorm, you can’t help thinking that the weather is finally catching up with the mood of the festival. From the apocalyptic solemnity of Joker, through the mystico-comical Beckett-isms of Roy Andersson’s quietly masterful About Endlessness, to the altogether punishing sado-solemnity of The Painted Bird, bleakness has been the dominant flavor this year (and one can safely predict that Ciro Guerra’s J....

So a film has to do something specific if it seeks to create an exceptional impression of things happening in the absolute moment. That’s a matter of stripping away or defusing the cinematic rhetoric that reminds us we’re watching a mediated fiction, that one way or another maintains a drama in a virtual “past tense.” Films that aim for such intensified immediacy strive to transcend conventional realism for what you might call “actualism....

It’s hard to think of anything as susceptible to the effects of time and social change as identity politics. So you certainly couldn’t call Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing an authoritative, timeless picture of what it means to be Chinese-American. It wouldn’t even be true to call it say it was a representative depiction of what it meant to be Chinese-American in 1982, when the film was made; rather, it ponders a range of possible identities within different social backgrounds and age groups in the San Francisco area, and that’s probably about as specific a description of the film as you can accurately attempt....

Child’s Pose, last year’s winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, begins with two elegantly dressed middle-aged women sitting smoking, as one of them complains about being mistreated by the rebellious man in her life. We think she’s talking about a lover: he’s behaving brutishly and neglecting her for some other woman, who’s exerting undue control over him. But it soon emerges that the woman is talking about her son....

At no point in Doctor Strange does anyone exclaim, like they used to in the comic, “By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth!” Apart from that, there is nothing remotely disappointing about this new Marvel superhero vehicle. And I speak as someone for whom disappointment with superhero cinema had become a sad fact of life, until I simply gave up on expecting anything at all. For a long while, the genre—whether Marvel- or DC-derived—seemed to have ossified into a matter of, as critic Matt Zoller Seitz concisely put it, “things crashing into other things (and) people smashing each other into buildings....

Based on a true story—and a deliriously tawdry one at that—Justin Kelly’s King Cobra is a sometimes agonizing study of love, lust, need, and money. It’s also a fascinating essay on the nature of star appeal, and the primacy of the Brand. The film centers on a young gay porn star who takes the name “Brent Corrigan.” When he breaks away from the pimpresario who launched him, Brent decides to peddle his talent elsewhere—after all, his body and his flirtatious looks to camera are what made him a star, and they haven’t changed....

The Greek film Suntan ought to come accompanied by a warning to men over a certain age, and a certain weight. Make that a trigger warning, as some guys will emerge from the film feeling ready to shoot themselves. Women won’t feel much happier, either, given that Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s film offers such a desolate picture of men, their dreams, and their appetites. The solace that we can all take from Suntan, however, is that this is an extraordinary, exuberant, and inventive piece of cinema, and a finely crafted character sketch and essay in dark moral comedy....

R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2023) Three critics recommend standouts from this year’s First Look festival, an annual showcase for adventurous new cinema at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The 2023 edition wrapped up on March 19. Forty minutes into Mohanad Yaqubi’s searing documentary R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity, an elderly woman—one of the 10 people who remained in Kuneitra, Syria, after its invasion by Israel in 1967—muses on what’s to be done with her razed city....

India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975) A blood-orange sun hovers in a swamp-green dusk, dissolving slowly over a horizon so barren and indistinct it could be almost anyplace. Then we arrive at a highly specific place: an embassy in Calcutta. We enter a room with a floor-to-ceiling mirror, French doors left ajar, a baby grand piano, a vase with freshly cut roses, and sticks of burning incense. A handful of well-dressed figures pass through the space, walking, lounging, slow-dancing, all silent as ghosts....

The Bad Batch, which opens June 23, received a decidedly mixed response at its Venice premiere, where some saw less than meets the eye. The Film Comment review by Farihah Zaman appears in our new May/June issue; in Venice last September, I chatted with Amirpour about the supersized film with which she follows her debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). When the film drops us into a dystopian landscape, it’s not immediately clear how the world, or Arlen, got to this point....

The willing prisoner this time around is Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), an acne-pockmarked 14-year-old boy whose growing antisocial behavior at school concerns his mother (Sonia Bergamasco) much more than it does him. Covertly ditching a weeklong student ski trip, he sets up camp in a dusty basement for some much-needed time away from Mamma and the therapist she insists he see. But his solitude is soon disrupted by a surprise visit from his heroin-addicted half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco)....

Poised in an otherworldly space encompassing rural villages, forests, and urban labor communities across India, Ekta Mittal’s Absence (Birha, in its original title) observes the lives of those affected by the country’s waves of migration. Through perspectives drawn from the workers who have disappeared into the cities, as well as from the women who have been left behind, the film serves as an intimate meditation on the complexities and nuances of separation, loss, and desire....

There’s a way in which Tabloid is inspirational. I suppose I should ask, inspirational to what end? Or what kind of inspiration? Isn’t part of the fascination with tabloid stories watching someone doing whatever the hell they want? Like a total fulfillment of their id. Maybe. I’m not even sure, but it’s a really interesting remark because I’m not sure what constitutes a tabloid story, but that may be part of it....

Along the way, the film plays with popularly held opinions about race and class among the wealthy: Hugo tells his son’s friends that appreciating black beauty is a taste one acquires with age; Jean’s first attempts at sex are with one of the maids and with Luiza, his half-Brazilian, half-Japanese girlfriend; family friends disparage the recently imposed college quota system over dinner. An incisive character study that’s never malicious, Casa Grande screens again tonight as part of Latinbeat at the Film Society of Lincoln Center....

Set in 1998 in Balagov’s hometown of Nalchik, Closeness centers on fiery 24-year-old Jewish tomboy Ilana, played by a riveting, uncontainable Darya Zhovner. Much to her mother’s chagrin, Ilana struts around in grimy denim overalls (with a jacket pointedly embroidered with a lion) and sneaks out at night to see her rough-edged Kabardian boyfriend Zalim. When her brother and his fiancée are kidnapped for ransom, she is confronted by a double alienation....