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Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022) The opening scenes of Trenque Lauquen plunge the viewer in medias res into the search for a missing botanist named Laura (Laura Paredes), an ultimately fruitless venture carried out by her boyfriend, Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and her coworker-cum-confidante, Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri). But Laura Citarella’s uncanny epic, named for the Argentine town where the film takes place, is not the kind of detective story whose secrets are later explained by hard facts....

Admittedly, it’s not always easy to tell one from the other, and some of the most interesting films in the festival’s history—sex, lies, and videotape or Reservoir Dogs—are populist successes with a foot in both worlds. Still, when a film like the routine inner-city inspirational Hustle and Flow hogs the spotlight—not because it’s good but because it’s the object of a bidding war—and a film like Police Beat goes virtually unnoticed, something is seriously wrong with Sundance and the discourse about independent film it generates....

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021) The Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi likes sections and segments. His rigorously constructed films come with built-in dividers, sometimes in the form of hard breaks between self-contained episodes—as in the tripartite anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, with its 40-minute chapters—and elsewhere via the judicious use of ellipses to variably collapse, distend, or mystify narrative time, as in the three-hour epic Drive My Car....

Yet another wing, which has been gradually built up for the past four years and has now fully come into its own, is BAL, the Buenos Aires Lab. It’s designed along the lines of works-in-progress and co-production development workshops in Rotterdam and San Sebastian, but with a keen eye toward encouraging new and adventurous Latin American filmmakers (along with several prizes for the juried films-to-be). BAL’s growth gives BAFICI an additional dimension that makes it fairly rare—certainly in terms of sheer quantity—in the festival world....

Theatrical moviegoing is not, I trust, under any grave, immediate threat. When I hit the multiplex over the holidays, it was well and truly mobbed, in spite of the fact that the bill of fare was worse than any in recent Christmases past. Much evidence indicates, however, that the venues for theatrical moviegoing which remain are going to be fewer, larger, and more homogeneous in their offerings, so take advantage of what variety still exists, while variety still exists—in the immortal words of the Dog Brothers from MTV’s Sex in the 90s, “Who wants to have the same cereal for breakfast every day?...

It is towards that end that a few months ago I left behind the apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I’d lived for something like eight years, and relocated to bucolic Woodside, Queens. (For those so inclined, I wrote a bit about the cinema of Williamsburg here.) Cinephiles will of course recognize Woodside as the home turf of Edward Burns and Roman Coppola’s dad, whatsisface. I am now a 25-minute walk or two subways stops away from the Museum of the Moving Image, which hosts repertory screenings every weekend, and from the United Artists Kaufman-Astoria 14 (discussed here) just up the street, a state-of-the-art multiplex with all of the trimmings....

Liquid Sky Last week, for the second year, I attended one of the best regional festivals that I know of in America, the Maryland Film Festival. There were two 35mm projections on the schedule, both of them old movies. (Last year, I believe Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux was the lone new release that played on 35mm.) This still puts the humble MDFF two prints up on the 22-film Cannes Classics selection, all playing on 2K or 4K DCP restorations....

Tchaikovsky’s Wife (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2022) When the Cannes Film Festival organizers decided to make the iconic image of its 75th edition an homage to Peter Weir’s The Truman Show—the official festival poster shows the moment when Jim Carrey touches the fake horizon of Truman’s virtual world—they likely didn’t foresee that the image might imply something other than a “poetic celebration of the insuperable quest for expression and freedom” (as the Cannes press office has it)....

Tale of Tales Seated at the head of a wide table in a white room, Salma Hayek is voraciously feasting on a giant, beating heart. That image of Hayek, from Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales, traversed social media in the days leading up to the film’s world premiere at Cannes. In the Italian director’s latest, Hayek’s feast is a turning point in one of the three fairy tales reimagined in this fantastical competition entry....

On Dec. 3, 1966, the documentary filmmaker Shirley Clarke turned her cameras on a gay African-African aspiring performer named Jason Holliday. The “when” is crucial to any real understanding of the transfixing, troubling, immensely powerful documentary that resulted. This was three years before Stonewall; two years before the movies looked sneeringly at lesbians and their presumably sham “marriages” in The Killing of Sister George; one year before Mike Wallace, on the “CBS Reports” special The Homosexuals (whose subjects were interviewed in silhouette), called homosexuality an “enigma” and cited a poll showing that most Americans thought it was more harmful to society than adultery or prostitution....

Chances are that before seeing Sofia Coppola’s fifth feature, The Bling Ring, you probably already know more or less how you feel about the gang of teenagers who made off four years ago with over $3 million in designer clothes, flashy jewelry, and cold, hard cash from a series of celebrity homes in the Hollywood Hills. In the course of trying to pin down these kids’ motives, it’s easy to play amateur sociologist (blame a culture obsessed with fame for its own sake), economist (blame a system that makes a virtue out of the constant acquisition of material wealth), or philosopher (blame a world—or at least a first world—in which reality has become synonymous with its own reproductions)....

Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019) When Alita (Rosa Salazar), a sweet teenage cyborg in tumbledown Iron City, peers upward at Zalem, a pristine city in the sky, she asks her kindly surrogate father, cybersurgeon Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz), whether “magic” keeps it floating in mid-air. Ido says the force behind it is stronger than magic: it’s “engineering.” In this lavish adaptation of the manga series by Yukito Kishiro (which debuted in 1990), producer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez ask, pace the Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do you believe in engineering in a young girl’s heart?...

Delicate and rich, In This Corner of the World details a young woman’s delayed coming of age, in and around Hiroshima and Kure before, during, and after World War II. It begins as a portrait of an artist as a young girl. As an innocent daydreamer of primary school age, Suzu uses drawings and storytelling to transform, illuminate, and redeem everyday pettiness. She pictures her mean, obstreperous older brother as a monster: a fantastic two-legged beast, all teeth and fur, resembling Maurice Sendak’s wild things....

I didn’t buy the Old Testament tenet that “the iniquity of fathers will be visited upon children unto the third and fourth generations” until I started following Jurassic Park. The franchise started out compromised. Each new movie gets worse and/or more confused than its predecessor. The latest, Jurassic World (#4), is a distressing fiasco—dumb non-fun—but its failure is thoroughly predictable and rooted in the first film 22 years ago. That’s when director Steven Spielberg turned the founder of the dinosaur theme park, John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough), from the ruthless CEO of Michael Crichton’s original novel to an empathetic old softie crying into his melted ice cream....

The Second Mother may remind American moviegoers of the inspired exchange in Wild when Cheryl Strayed tells her self-sacrificing mom, “It must be weird seeing how much more sophisticated I am than you were at my age,” and her mom responds, “I wanted you to be more sophisticated than me. I just hadn’t figured out that it would hurt sometimes.” In this sharp, unpredictable Brazilian comedy-drama, the writer-director Anna Muylaert creates similar piercing moments as she depicts salt-of-the-earth Val (Regina Casé) confronting her ambitious college-age daughter, Jessica (Camila Márdila), after a 10-year estrangement....

Chris Rock finds his crackling identity as a moviemaker in his third film, Top Five, the way he found his incendiary personality as a standup in his 1996 HBO special, Feel the Pain. Whippet thin and volatile, Rock, in his breakthrough days, was dangerous but disarming. He gave his spindly body a forward tilt, matching the way he treated his gut feelings as the galaxy’s true center of wisdom. He pulled out the stops on his brusque, unsentimental view of life, discovering his stage legs by going out on a limb as a hip young truth-teller rather than an oblique yarn-spinner like Bill Cosby or a one-man carnival of characters like Richard Pryor....

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) Available this week, Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay presents Jordan Peele’s Academy Award–winning script with extensive annotations by the filmmaker, as well as an introductory essay by Tananarive Due and a selection of deleted scenes. Reprinted below with the kind permission of Inventory Press is an excerpt of Peele’s notes, which provide rich insights on the themes and the making of two crucial setpieces in the film: the Sunken Place sequence, in which Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is hypnotized by Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) in her office; and the lawn party sequence, which oscillates cleverly between racial satire and classic horror....

Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955) When a movie you love crosses the threshold to become a personal favorite—the kind that you rewatch to the extent that you can anticipate the dialogue—it starts to occupy a curious place in your head as a critic. It can become a precious thing to you: impervious to critique. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1955 screen adaptation of the stage play Guys & Dolls is one of those movies for me....

This Land Is Ours Perhaps it’s a temporary state of shock, but this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival seemed to portend the way that all film festivals might be for the next few years—in that last week it seemed barely possible to think about the work on display, so agitated was everyone about the opening gambits of the Trump administration. Still, the current horrors of a changing world will provide the cultural sphere cues to rethink its rationale and sense of purpose, and IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) was very aware of that from the start....

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” as the saying goes (sometimes attributed to Elvis Costello, although the real source is reportedly humorist Martin Mull). The American independent feature Columbus is possibly as close to dancing about architecture as you can get; it’s certainly a film about the way that architecture can make the soul dance, although when the heroine actually dances, it’s not about architecture at all, but emerges in a flurry of frustration, rage, and self-doubt....