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High Society Early in Julie Lopes Curval’s subtle, culturally incisive coming-of-age film High Society, Alice (Ana Girardot) serves middle-aged customer Agnès (Aurélia Petit) while working at a pastry shop. The older woman is a Parisian fashion designer vacationing at her summer home in Alice’s working-class seaside town. Alice confesses her ambitions to study fashion design, and Agnès offers to help with her art-school application—but her assistance is not given in the spirit of egalitarianism....

In Minions, the prequel to the Despicable Me movies, evil Scarlett Overkill describes her mini-henchmen as “pill-shaped miracle workers.” Actually, they’re more like petite yellow projectiles. With knock-’em-dead burlesque instinct, that’s how directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda deploy them throughout a cock-eyed “origin story” that goes from all way back to Creation to “42 B.G.” (That is, 1968 A.D., 42 years before they first appeared with Gru, their one true master, in Despicable Me....

Sully’s restaging of US Airways Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s landing of his disabled Airbus on the Hudson River, on January 15, 2009, shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, is so thrilling that it keeps the audience in a hammerlock even when the director, Clint Eastwood, unveils it in fragments or repeats it at varying lengths and from alternate points of views. There’s been no better use of IMAX since Brad Bird stuck Tom Cruise to the tallest building in the world in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol....

Philippe Garrel is, for sure, an anomaly. A self-described artisan, he has managed to carve out a personal space for himself in spite of the French film industry’s protracted Night of the Long Knives against its aesthetic rebels. Acknowledged at home as the most important filmmaker of the post-Nouvelle Vague generation, his reputation is steadily growing overseas due, in large part, to a passionate and ever-growing coterie of people interested in his work....

Do movies leave an impression? Watching the September 27 cinematic event known as the Kavanaugh Hearing, one might wonder. If you were an American kid during the season in which 15-year-old Christine Blasey encountered 17-year-old Brett “Bart” Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, you and your parents undoubtably saw E.T. If you had (or were) a hip older sibling, you might have caught the more complicated Blade Runner. But if you were a brewski-chugging body-builder, the movie of movies was Conan the Barbarian....

Our House Home is an uncanny place in horror movies, thrillers, and ghost stories. What is scarier than being threatened in the place where you feel safest, more unsettling than the unknown emerging from the familiar? Director Yui Kiyohara studied with J-horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Tokyo University of the Arts, where she made her thesis film and debut feature, Our House (2017), which has its American premiere in this year’s edition of New Directors / New Films....

Cryptozoo (Dash Shaw, 2021) “A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time,” write Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero in the preface to The Book of Imaginary Beings. “This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it.” Cryptozoo, a sort of cinematic equivalent of Borges and Guerrero’s make-believe bestiary, similarly attempts to renew a jaded audience’s capacity for awe and terror....

Possession My first encounter with Andrzej Żuławski’s cinema was in my mid-teens. Possession (81) was both exhilarating and disturbing. What struck me first were the performances—surrealistic in the sense that they exceeded realism. Coming from a nation whose national character is epitomized by a stiff upper lip, the lips in Żuławski’s films were often full, frequently bloodied, but never, ever stiff. In fact, a scarred lip is one of the key images of Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, the book upon which Żuławski’s most recent film is based....

Even in the harshest, most unembellished documentary, you may find the occasional accidental moment of poetry. There’s one such moment in Miles Lagoze’s Combat Obscura, which he shot as a combat cameraman serving as Lance-Corporal in the Marine Corps in Kajaki, Afghanistan, in 2011-12. At one moment, in the heat of action, the camera appears to have been laid down on dusty, parched earth; an out-of-focus object, possibly a boot, fills most of the frame....

You might, without being disparaging, call In Bloom a perfect vin ordinaire of a film. It’s the sort of drama that you’ll always find at least one example of at any festival: an autobiographical coming-of-age story about two female friends, set against a particular cultural and geographic backdrop. In Bloom is in many ways a textbook example of the genre: it features classroom turbulence, family mealtime arguments, female camaraderie jeopardized as boyfriends assert their presence, and a smattering of radio pop in the background....

The subtlety, complexity, even difficulty of some Stephen Sondheim musicals means that the composer’s shows have rarely had “surefire hit” written all over them (what, you mean you can’t hum any tunes from his Road Show, aka Bounce?). But Sondheim was right in guessing that there would be mileage in his and book writer James Lapine’s 1987 venture into fairy tales; he recalls in his second lyrics anthology Look, I Made a Hat: “I brashly predicted that if the piece worked, it would spawn innumerable productions for many years to come, since it dealt with world myths and fables and would never therefore feel dated ....

I honestly can’t remember seeing a more off-putting trailer than the one for Le Week-End. It features Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan flitting around the streets of Paris, lashings of breezy accordion, and then the stars—with Jeff Goldblum, and with Duncan in an amusing hat—imitating the Madison dance from Godard’s Band of Outsiders. It all suggests excruciating whimsy, a coy entertainment for Francophile viewers d’un certain âge—people, perhaps, like Duncan’s character Meg Burrows, whose choice of reading on the Eurostar is Muriel Barbery’s soft-philosophy best-seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog....

The key point about Shirkers is that it is definitively “a film by Sandi Tan.” This documentary is the only film in existence called Shirkers, but there very nearly was another one—a Singaporean road movie made in 1992, and that one could properly have been labeled “a film by Sandi Tan and friends”—except that it would have carried the name of a different director entirely. As it turns out, there never was a 1992 Shirkers, and whether that non-existent film was in any normal sense directed by that other person, one Georges Cardona, is one of the mysteries that emerge from the actual Shirkers, the very entertaining documentary that Tan has now made about the nightmarish abortive start to her moviemaking career....

“Can anybody make sense of what’s happening here?” asks the hero of The Wailing—and that’s by no means the only slyly self-referential moment in the film. To really make sense of what’s happening in the latest from South Korea’s Na Hong-jin, you’d probably need to be an expert in the conventions of Korean horror, and writer-director Na may or may not be that. His previous films have been highly successful ventures in a different field of genre cinema—the thrillers The Chaser (08) and The Yellow Sea (10)....

No matter what it gets, it never gets easier. Making movies is nearly impossible when you’re young enough to handle the heartbreak and the compromise; and, as shown in John Boorman’s Money Into Light; The Emerald Forest, A Diary (Faber and Faber, London, 1985, £ 4.95), getting older doesn’t necessarily give you an edge. Neither, it turns out, does making a few of the best movies of the past couple of decades....

Comedy matchmaker Hal Roach, the auteur-producer who aligned the stars of Laurel & Hardy and The Little Rascals, envisioned a female duo with the same knockabout antics, slow-burn reactions, and crackerjack timing as his beloved male and juvenile franchises. Roach initially paired ZaSu Pitts, the comedienne whom Erich von Stroheim had cast brilliantly against type in Greed and declared “the greatest dramatic actress,” with Thelma Todd, a sprightly blonde contract player who’d appeared to charming if limited effect in Roach’s Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase shorts....

Paris, summer of ’60: Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin set out to document the lives, expectations, and disappointments of a diverse group of Parisians. Away from the capital’s landmarks, the two immerse themselves in the ordinary lives of workers, family men, students, immigrants, and, albeit briefly, children. A woman armed with a microphone asks passersby the plainly provocative question: “Are you happy?” In this way, through Rouch and Morin’s viewpoint, the viewer becomes engaged with the daily tribulations, humble joys, and discontents of men and women leading completely different lives within the same city, thus offering multiple perspectives on French society....