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We Won’t Grow Old Together By some accounts, Saint Valentine was an early Christian priest who, after offending Emperor Claudius II, was beaten, stoned, and then beheaded. Many people feel something similar is happening to them each Valentine’s Day. It is to these lonely, sulking, love-weary souls that Anthology Film Archives devotes one of my favorite annual series, the Valentine’s Day Massacre. A celebration of cinematic anti-romance, this year’s four films––We Won’t Grow Old Together (72), Possession (81), Modern Romance (81), and Minnie and Moskowitz (71)—were a prime opportunity to look further afield and count the ways in which love can trap, horrify, infuriate, and debilitate us....

As if responding to the millennial rash of “death of cinema” prognostications, Pedro Almodóvar has spent the better part of two decades as a brand-name auteur soothing the cinephilic soul, reassuring us of the validity and profundity of that peculiar emotion known as movie love. That’s part of the reason both aesthetes and mainstream audiences adore him: like Tarantino, his unmistakable style exists at the vanishing point where cinephilia and nostalgia have irrevocably merged....

It’s not surprising that Michel Gondry confesses to what he calls a “childish” point of view: his movies tend to bounce around like an energetic kid trying to sit still. Whether it’s the “Sweded” remakes in Be Kind Rewind (08) or the evaporating dreamscapes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (04), Gondry shows us worlds in flux. From his hit-or-miss debut feature Human Nature (01) to his critically reviled take on The Green Hornet (2011), Gondry’s films suggest that repression and socialization are futile: when prompted, we’ll abandon ordinariness in the pursuit of some long-unfulfilled impulse....

Musicians on the move crop up throughout the work of Bahman Ghobadi. In his last feature, Half Moon (06), a generously mustachioed Kurdish family band attempts to make its way to a concert in Iraq, and Ghobadi nudges their road-movie travels and travails into the realm of the kind of mystical fantasy that could one day be put into song. In No One Knows About Persian Cats, the would-be travelers are a couple of Tehran indie-rockers looking to emigrate to somewhere that doesn’t demand endless permits or frown upon women singing solo....

It would neither be charitable nor very productive to compare Sam Raimi’s new adventure film Oz: the Great and Powerful with the 1939 classic that shares its source material. One point should be enough: The Wizard of Oz’s heroine was a dewy-eyed young woman who moved through the film with barely contained wonder, only to learn that the object of her quest was nothing but a bunch of smoke and mirrors—that if she wanted salvation, she’d have to make it happen herself....

“Show me your world, Chris,” says an unworldly Englishwoman to her lover as they embark on a trailer tour of the scenic North at the deceptively jaunty start of Sightseers. Tina (Alice Lowe) is a gonk-loving knitter (of pink wool lingerie) and dog-walker who lives at home with her possessive mother; Chris (Steve Oram) is an “anorak” (i.e., nerdish hobbyist) who lies that he has taken a sabbatical to write, whereas in fact he has been made redundant....

Before he became the great, singular filmmaker we all know, Eric Rohmer was Maurice Schérer, a teacher who failed the École normale supérieure exam, under-performed on the aggregation, and was an unrecognized writer. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, responsible for an excellent recent biography of the director, edited this edition of the young Schérer’s unpublished short fiction, which was written for the most part in Paris during the Forties....

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) by Nicolas Rapold “Scorsese’s vividly illustrated, largely anecdotal 209-minute movie has a way of ably simulating the actual passage of a life, in skipping nimbly from station to station in the protagonist’s own.” Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019) by Christina Newland “With its narrative double bluffs and knowingly byzantine plot twists, Knives Out nimbly swerves around the pitfalls of murder mysteries past. Full of rhythmic verve and pithy humor, this is uproariously entertaining filmmaking....

There are at least three beautiful things in Bruno Dumont’s depressing new film. First, there are cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines’s precise visual compositions. Stark and minimalist, at times they resemble classical Dutch painting. Second, there’s the film’s use of light—and Dumont’s patience with it. He employs lingering shots of the outdoor sun coming in through a gauzy window, or the light on a wall, or the shadows on a rug. Third, and most important, is Dumont’s use of light as metaphor for the radiance of Camille Claudel’s heart and soul....

It should be a no-brainer: Fido (not his real name) gets lost in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After some time, owner and animal are located by a volunteer organization, a joyful reunion takes place, and that’s the end of the story. But wait a minute, not so fast. What if, for example, Fido is a battle-scarred pit bull from a dead-end ghetto, and now goes by an adopted name, and currently lives like a puppy prince in some rural paradise?...

Why does the IMDB entry for pablo Larraín’s No give Jane Fonda billing alongside star Gael García Bernal? Because the filmmaker includes a snippet of Hanoi Jane from a 1988 Chilean TV ad in this predictable yet intriguing exercise in Hollywood-style fight-the-man uplift, albeit tempered with an edge of cynical critique. Larraín’s past two features, Tony Manero (08) and Post Mortem (10), wallowed in the vile and the twisted, centering on charisma-challenged protagonists at the time of and five years after Pinochet’s bloody ascendance....

The opening montage quickly establishes the mood: a bustling African street; hands rifling through a wad of bills; gasoline poured into a makeshift funnel—everything suffused with gritty angst and palpable desperation. And then—most visceral—a close-up of lips sucking on a rubber tube, causing fuel to flow into a large plastic jug. The liquid is so precious that the siphoner spits his mouthful into the container. The restless camera moves on, floating above the open hole of a vehicle’s gas tank before plunging into its blackness....

Four expert panelists—filmmakers Isabel Sandoval and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, and critics Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner—will join us for a deep-dive discussion on the new voices, aesthetics, and contours of transgender cinema and the ways in which it’s transforming the film landscape. What would you like our guests to talk about on the podcast? Send us your questions using this form by noon ET on Thursday, April 15 and we’ll pose them to our panel during the recording!...

In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel, the director coops up a gaggle of wealthy dinner guests who, for some inexplicable reason, cannot leave. The party moves from room to room, and characters make plans to walk out the door but can’t quite do it, all the while being tortured by the slow avalanche of inanity. In Mexican director Sebastian Hofmann’s new film, Time Share, he imagines a middle-class telling of this story, set at an Acapulco vacation resort, where families get deals on rooms as long as they sit through incessant sales pitches for time shares....