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There’s something undeniably joyous about Harmony Korine’s “The Lotus Community Workshop,” the first section of the VICE and Grolsch beer–sponsored omnibus movie The Fourth Dimension. Eschewing a literal interpretation of the assigned theme, Korine instead touches (but does not dwell) upon some deep nerves of ugly Americana—dubious new age self-help philosophy, unemployment, mindlessly violent video games, Auto-Tune—and reveals himself to be a worthy inheritor of Vonnegut and Barth. Val Kilmer stars as a motivational speaker (also named Val Kilmer) who holds a workshop in a skating rink, doling out ludicrous practical advice and inspirational moonshine for the benefit of his audience....

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg, 1970) At 91 years old, Jerry Schatzberg has had a storied and frankly Zelig-like career in 20th-century pop culture. Born in the Bronx in 1927, Schatzberg came to a career in photography in his late twenties, soon ascending the ranks to become one of Vogue’s top fashion photographers in an era of peak mid-century glamour. Along with his fashion editorials, he would also befriend and capture iconic snaps of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Edie Sedgwick, among others....

Arábia begins by introducing the viewer to André, a teenager living near a factory in the outskirts of Ouro Preto. The film’s first 15 minutes describes André’s daily life, apparently setting the stage for a socially conscious coming-of-age tale. But when André finds a notebook belonging to the recently hospitalized factory worker Cristiano (played by de Sousa), the film takes a radical turn away from the factory town and onto the roads of rough-hewn Minas Gerais, following Cristiano from one menial job to another, from one makeshift bed to the next....

Photograph by Thomas Wilson/HBO In January 2013, John Wilson uploaded one of his first short films, an anthrax-laced love letter to New York City life called How To Live with Bed Bugs, to Vimeo. Over the next few years, he continued to post similar no-budget shorts, each a collage of random New York City–street scenes, shot guerilla-style by Wilson and transformed into parodies of educational films by his endearingly stilted and awkward narration....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Zlotowski last week to discuss the balance of documentary and fiction in Grand Central, which screens in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and the diverse influences that nourish her filmmaking. What came first in the conception of Grand Central, the desire to tell a passionate love story or to set a film in a nuclear power station? We had been trying to write a love story before the nuclear power setting came up, but it only became clear that we had the subject for a film once we had both....

Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021) Marianne Moore described poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In his numbing adaptation of Frank Herbert’s mother of all sci-fi cult novels, Dune (1965), director Denis Villeneuve expends so much industrial force creating imaginary gardens and megalopolises that he grounds his real toads into dust. Villeneuve’s Dune, his third over-deliberate sci-fi saga (after 2016’s Arrival and 2017’s Blade Runner 2049), typifies the current mania for world-building over character-building....

Bandh Darwaza From 1984 to 1993, the Ramsay family were the kings of Bollywood’s “doom boom,” a brief spot of grimy horror in the otherwise squeaky-clean Indian film industry. The Ramsays had enjoyed success in rural markets with horror movies throughout the Seventies (“Places where even the trains don’t stop, that’s where our business was,” Tulsi Ramsay said in a 2009 interview), and horror had occasionally been caught creeping around Bollywood’s margins....

Yeo Siew Hua’s second feature, A Land Imagined, portrays people and places rarely associated with Singapore, and yet integral to its immaculate infrastructure. Much of the film is shot on construction sites where land reclamation projects import sand from other South East Asian nations to expand its own territory. A Land Imagined combines documentary episodes capturing dangerous and exhausting conditions on site, and dreamlike sequences shot in a cybercafé and migrant workers’ barracks, where gaming, song, and dance provide distraction and escape....

Let’s begin with that sound you hear—or rather don’t. Although it’s been more than 30 years since Alien popularized the scientific fact that, in space, no one can hear you scream (or do anything else for that matter), in most space movies we hear quite a lot: warp-engine whooshes, photon torpedo blasts, air-lock vacuums. But not so in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which gives us silences as vast as the interplanetary canvases that fill the 3-D IMAX screen....

Meru Around two-thirds of the way through Meru, co-director and professional mountain climber Jimmy Chin has a crisis of faith. It’s right after a failed initial attempt to scale the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru in Northern India, and it follows a pair of near-death encounters with a landslide and a partner’s massive brain injury. “I took off for a while. I disappeared off the map. I needed some time to really contemplate,” he says into the camera, before we cut to images of him trudging solo up a snowy mountainside, and then staring off into the distance....

The Other Side of Hope (ranked #12) With The Other Side of Hope, Aki Kaurismäki expands on Le Havre’s consideration of the migrant crisis by frankly rendering xenophobic violence against a backdrop of person-to-person generosity. When frustrated shirt salesman Wikström (Kaurismäki regular Sakari Kuosmanen) first swerves his vintage car past Syrian refugee Khaled (Sherwan Haji, folding depths of emotion into Keaton-style deadpan), it’s a fleeting introduction that ties their fates together through low-key coincidence—a force that eventually reunites them, once the former’s quest to open a restaurant coalesces with the latter’s path through applying for asylum....

Despite initially being drawn to Colombia’s natural beauty, in touring the country and speaking with local artists to help prepare for the film, Apichatpong quickly found that he was “more attracted to the cities, the industry, and the people’s memory.” “I feel conscious about the political situation at home, and so I cannot help but listen and try to find out what’s happening politically,” he continued. “The film was developed from this standpoint....

Joaquin Phoenix and Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014) Paul Thomas Anderson has announced his next film, a yet-unnamed project set in the 1970s. Returning to the San Fernando Valley of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love, the film will focus on a high school student who is also a successful child actor. One of PTA’s previous films, the underappreciated Inherent Vice, is getting some love from The New Beverly’s Kim Morgan: “Doc bumbles around on his own stoner wavelength—he’s good at his job in the way he works it ....

Peter Kubelka’s Invisible Cinema, November 1970, Anthology Film Archives, at first location in The Public Theater The response to COVID-19 has (necessarily) ramped up over the past week, affecting the film industry big and small. Locally, a number of New York’s cinemas have temporarily closed their doors, including Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle, Light Industry, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the Moving Image (who have now canceled their First Look Film Festival)....

Sidney Poitier is the most valorized black performer in film history, and also the most patronized. Only the second African American to receive an Oscar nomination for a leading role and the first to win, Poitier was the lone black A-list star of the studio era, and arguably held that distinction until the 1980s. At the height of his career, his name was synonymous with integrity, self-respect, and understated resolve....

Images from These Three (William Wyler, 1936) These two, Martha and Karen, are fresh from graduating a women’s college in New England. We don’t know much about them yet, but it’s clear from the start that these bosom buddies share an easy intimacy. Packing up their dorm room, they dream of their future while sprawled out, inhabiting their space with a casual, physical chemistry that can only come from cohabitation....