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Like Kalman and Horn’s Warholian proof-of-concept road-movie featurette Blondes in the Jungle (2009), Two Plains drops modern-day city-slicker types into an exotic setting rendered with the affectionate air-quotes artifice of micro-budget production design. Here, dandy illustrator Milton Tingling (filmmaker Benjamin Crotty), French geologist Ozanne Le Perrier (Laetitia Dosch), and spiritualist con-woman turned true believer Alta Mariah Sophronia (Marianna McClellan) arrive in a Colorado spa town renowned for its mineral water and hydrotherapy treatments; these lonesome cowboys soon take to the hills in search of a more “authentic” experience at unspoiled natural hot springs....

Horse Opera (Moyra Davey, 2022) The work of Canadian artist Moyra Davey is firmly personal, yet committed to fracturing and distressing the first-person subject as both an expression of self and a literary and visual construct. Born in Toronto in 1958, and trained at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, San Diego, Davey has lived in New York City for more than two decades. She is most famous for her photography, which includes family portraits and small-scale conceptual work focused on everyday objects....

The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973) © The American Film Theatre It sounds absurd, but it’s true: in the early 1970s, right as his career seemed to be taking off, Jeff Bridges came very close to quitting acting altogether. He’d been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic The Last Picture Show, and followed that up with his turn as a fledgling boxer in John Huston’s acclaimed 1972 drama Fat City....

The Quiet Family This week heralds the Blu-ray release of Arrow Video’s fully loaded edition of Takashi Miike’s murderous musical from 2002, Happiness of the Katakuris (full disclosure: I wrote an essay that’s included in the package). Happiness of the Katakuris is a remake of Korea’s The Quiet Family (98), the first film from director Kim Jee-woon, which Miike originally saw on a defective VHS tape. What’s surprising is that while Miike’s Happiness is getting the big-time Blu-ray release, Kim’s Quiet Family is nowhere to be found....

Cosmos, currently in competition for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, is Żuławski’s first film in 15 years. It’s an adaptation of the 1965 novel of the same name by Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69), in which two young students (played in the film by Jonathan Genet and Johan Libéreau) living at a secluded country house find themselves assailed by what they believe to be sinister auguries. Born in Eastern Poland (part of present-day Ukraine), after attending film school in France and serving as an assistant to Andrzej Wajda, Żuławski began his own directorial career with The Third Part of the Night (71)....

The darkly funny Gone Girl begins as a procedural illuminating the disintegration of an “ideal” marriage. But this is a David Fincher movie, which means that both dramatic forms happen concurrently and illuminate each other in the process. With the head-spinning drunken-revenge/party montage in The Social Network, Fincher set off in a new direction, braiding cues and micro-events—narrative, gestural, visual, sonic, textural—into an unbreakable cinematic cord. His films now have a diamond-cut sleekness that fits comfortably with the blind momentum of current popular movies, but said sleekness results from an attention that is hair-raisingly precise in its focus....

The Dark Room of Damocles In retrospect, much seems improbable about Raoul Coutard’s rise to fame as the premier cinematographer of the French New Wave. A veteran of the French Indochina War and an experienced magazine photojournalist, Coutard—the subject of a tribute in Film Comment Selects with screenings February 19 and 22—never shared the radical politics of such figures as Agnès Varda or Jean-Luc Godard. He irreverently called himself “a fascist of the right” who, in the long collaboration he sustained with Godard, made a kind of alliance with a “fascist of the left....

Into this desensitized journalistic context, self-described media activist Talal Derki launches an explosive assault with Return to Homs, one of a select few nonfiction entries in New Directors / New Films 2014. Eschewing impartial reportage for visceral on-the-ground sensation, the Damascus-born Derki drops the viewer in media res with handheld camerawork, covering (among other things) shootouts that are as adrenaline-pumping as any Hollywood action movie. But the blood is real, the bullets kill, and whoever’s behind the camera better get out of the way of that tank....

Wong Kar Wai on the set of Happy Together (1997) Wong Kar Wai recently sat down with Filmmaker magazine to discuss his two upcoming projects: the first, a television series titled Tong Wars, which looks to be something like Boardwalk Empire as told by Chinese immigrants in early-1900s San Francisco; and the second, the recently announced Blossoms, adapted from the novel by Jin Yucheng. Wong states that the book, originally written as a series of daily entries on an online forum, serves as the “missing piece of the Shanghai trilogy....

If…. (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) Over at LARB, Alex Harvey commemorates the 50-year anniversary of controversial Cannes-winner If…. (which came in at number 15 on our 2009 list of the best Palme d’Or winners of all time). At the 1969 festival, director Lindsay Anderson was told by the British Ambassador that the film was “an insult to the British nation” and “must be withdrawn,” to which he replied, “it is an insult to a nation that deserves to be insulted....

Sorry Angel In June 2017, I traveled to Binic, France, in northern Brittany, to visit the set of Christophe Honoré’s latest film, Sorry Angel. Honoré thinks fast on his feet, and to see him work in person is to engage with a quick-witted, well-read, and devilishly funny artist. Because of this, his direction is never stale, and his fresh ideas are prompted by collaborations with his cast and crew. On the other hand (perhaps ironically) the sharpness that underscores his impromptu tendencies reveals an ascetic intellectualism and precise eye for cinematic detail....

Somewhere between singular meteoric success and canonization lies the two-hit wonder: failing to sustain a certain level of quality, interest in the artist who once seemed so vital and amazing slowly declines and becomes trivia. This may be an overly grim assessment, but the career trajectories of Paula Cole or Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener, Blindness) seem to suggest its validity. With an eye towards what made his previous films successful (namely Rachel Weisz and crime), Meirelles’s latest effort, 360, is a Guillermo Arriaga–style update of La Ronde....

—Agnès Varda Early in the marvelously fluid, five-part cine-essay Agnès Varda: From Here to There, the eponymous veteran auteur briefly pauses to ponder the difference between cinema and photography. Legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson is Varda’s subject in this mini-digression, yet her comments on stillness and movement as captured through a camera lens clearly apply to her own art, particularly in light of her eccentric and deeply personal recent documentaries....

I laughed throughout Keanu with the audience, and when it was over, I was left wanting more. Not because it was so good, but because I was hoping for more. I should make a Shepard Fairey–style Hope poster picturing the Keanu trio (oh, I guess I can) because it is difficult not to link Key & Peele to their best-known characters, Barack Obama and his anger translator, Luther. The popular comics are also cultural translators who initially emphasized their biracial heritage and ability to “code switch” tactically (in the way that Obama is politically strategic) creating depictions of urban poor, suburban, middle- and upper-middle-class blacks, and bringing racially inflected humor that appeals to a Comedy Central–centric audience who, I would argue, want to believe that the duo transcends race....

Our dearly departed American movie musical was laid to rest sometime between 1968 and 1970, depending on which coroner you talk to. But every few years thereafter, it’s been disinterred for another brief frolic. Those intrepid enough to attempt such resurrections now have to contend with skeptical critics and indifferent audiences. The producing of a musical automatically becomes a referendum on the genre. Thus, the whiplash-inducing, super-clipped storytelling in Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is of secondary importance beside the question of whether its Oscar-fêted director can pull off a big-screen adaptation of the internationally treasured pop opera....

Philip Lewis Friedman, the arrogant, profoundly embittered protagonist of Alex Ross Perry’s third feature, is a writer of talent. His ability to perform as a novelist is rarely open to doubt because Listen Up Philip, despite its careful attention to the tone and texture of the literary life, is not a film about artistic creation. The hard-fought business of influence; the rifts and eddies of inspiration; the process of shaping a sentence into a kind of musical phrase; the painstaking working-out of character, plot, tone, setting, and theme: the movie deals not with these writerly gifts but with the consequences of wanting them too badly, or using them too often and too well....

Nobody Walks, directed by Ry Russo-Young and co-written by Lena Dunham, offers a glimpse into the life of that cool girl in high school you couldn’t help resenting even though she was always really nice and probably miserable too. Martine (Olivia Thirlby), 23, flies from New York to L.A. to collaborate with Pete (the undislikeable John Krasinski), the second husband of a friend of a friend, on the sound design for her art film: bugs in black and white accompanied by crunchy sound effects and moody synth....