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Images from Freak Orlando (Ulrike Ottinger, 1981) “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” A meaty, provocative remark, and an idea that feels summative when uttered in the final movement of Freak Orlando, one of Ulrike Ottinger’s pleasurably disreputable bits of historical and narrative blasphemy. In her cinema, as well as her photography, Ottinger interrogated standard definitions of beauty and sexuality, and this 1981 epic of monumental irreverence climaxes with the public staging of an aesthetic role reversal....

Wanda Wiley is a victim of studio negligence. Of the 40-plus comedy shorts she made in the Twenties, only a few still exist. The majority were produced by Century Film and distributed by Universal, and Universal destroyed most of their silent negatives in the late Forties. Biographical details are slim outside of official studio publicity. According to a September 1924 issue of Universal Weekly, Wiley came from a medical family....

Shot quickly and cheaply in the winter of 1987, this consistently imaginative and enjoyable film follows a homeless Greenwich Village street artist (played by Lane) who forms a bond with a toddler after he witnesses her father being murdered. While evading the police (his fingerprints are on the knife), he cares for the young innocent, and embarks on a tentative, and touchingly improbable, romance with a beautiful businesswoman (Sandye Wilson) who comes to sit for a painting....

Alan Partridge has been a part of British entertainment since the early Nineties, but it feels as if he’s been around a lot longer. That’s the point: the inept TV host turned local radio DJ is essentially an Eighties man, but even in that decade he would have looked like a relic of a superannuated and cheesy tradition of U.K. broadcasting. Steve Coogan created Partridge for the BBC radio comedy show On the Hour (91-92), which was transferred to television as The Day Today (94) before spawning a spoof chat show, Knowing Me Knowing You (94-95), still among the best of its kind....

Dear Wendy is a movie about a boy and his gun. But the boy is a pacifist, the gun is also his girlfriend, and the movie is from Denmark, specifically the mind of Thomas Vinterberg via the mind of Lars von Trier. Loving it requires forgiving its reckless assaults on unspecified American values—but the movie is too foolish to defend. Loosely a youth violence parable and generically a schematic crypto-western, Dear Wendy asserts, among other things, that even good kids can go rotten in a land that permits ready access to firearms....

I am wary of documentary makers who announce that they are setting out to “discover” the truth about their subject—and then invite us along for the trip. The suggestion of openness usually augurs just the opposite. And so when Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir begins his new documentary by saying that, as an Israeli Jew, he’s never experienced anti-Semitism and that he intends to “learn more about the subject,” I was braced for the worst....

Carey Mulligan interprets Bathsheba Everdene brilliantly, as an innately modern woman. This rural dazzler inherits a farm estate in Hardy’s fictional Wessex County and insists on running it herself. Without theory or program, she upends 19th-century protocols simply by adhering to her own ambitious, changeable nature. Shortly before she comes into her fortune, Bathsheba tells the first fellow who proposes marriage, the warm, ultra-capable sheep farmer Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), that she can’t marry him because she knows he would never tame her....

“Get that money, baby,” an off-camera pal hollers to a young Lenny Cooke during a pit stop on a lengthy road trip. Sadly, Cooke, the titular subject of Josh and Benny Safdie’s new documentary, would internalize that myopic advice and opt for the pros over a college education. There are a number of stories of professional basketball busts, but Lenny, who at that moment was the highest-ranked high-school basketball player in the nation (over contemporaries LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony), would never play even a minute in the NBA, let alone make a regular-season roster, after going unselected in the 2002 NBA draft....

Timothy and Stephen Quay, the identical-twin surrealist expat Philadelphians who have been wafting intensely gorgeous animated and live-action dreams out into the world from the mildewed tumult of their intensely disordered London museum-cum-atelier since 1979, have a new feature coming out this fall, a full decade after their last, and they’ve never made anything like this before! The long wait was distressful, but The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes repays forbearance astonishingly, and anyway, shouldn’t cinephiles lusting for jaw-dropping filmic tropes endure, if necessary, Time’s painful passage with all the indefatigable patience of animators?...

Chantal Akerman’s “return to fiction” takes as its source Joseph Conrad’s 1895 maiden voyage in full-length prose, the first published novel by a Polish captain of the British Merchant Marine. Originally set in Borneo, and shot in Cambodia (standing in for Malaysia), this free adaptation is arguably the farthest afield the filmmaker has gone to portray the displacements of the past that are carried within the heart. As demonstrated by The Captive (00) and her affinity for homebody extraordinaire Proust (or by 2006’s roombound Israel-set Là-bas) Akerman has never needed more than four walls and a couple of doorways—an obsession of hers—to frame her travels....

If the apartment of the female lead in Head-On (04) looks (according to her boyfriend) like it’s been hit by a chick bomb, then the title restaurant of Fatih Akin’s latest film has been hit by the male equivalent. The dingy, sparsely frequented Hamburg eatery in question is owned and run by Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), an endearing Greek-German, who each night deep-fries frozen food for undiscriminating locals. It’s hardly the type of joint that even his awkwardly tall girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) would stoop to enter....

An intriguing, combustible cocktail of deceptive calm and nervous energy, Ben Foster has been someone to keep an eye on after stealing not one but three movies in 2007 (Alpha Dog, 30 Days of Night, and 3:10 to Yuma). In his maturing leading-man debut, he quietly impresses as Will Montgomery, a wounded American soldier temporarily assigned the undesirable task of notifying next of kin that a spouse or relative has been killed in the line of duty....

In his latest film, Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who is at the forefront of efforts to reckon with the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, employs an unusual mix of clay figurines with pensive voiceover and worn-out vintage propaganda footage to revisit his country’s traumatic past. Rather than adopting the accusatory tone of an investigation, The Missing Picture is marked by a certain stillness and emotional containment, like a hushed visit to a memorial....