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There’s a moment in Iris when the documentary’s subject, venerable fashionista Iris Apfel, is presented with a department-store carrier bag emblazoned with her own photo. The Iris on the bag has a very faint look of Joan Rivers, in the expression at least—that wide-eyed stare of “Now what?” amazement. But while the late comedian’s gaze of perpetual astonishment—not least at the excesses of red-carpet clotheshorses—had much to do with the long-term work-in-progress redrafting of her face, Iris’s comically alert expression is just a symptom of delight at the excesses of life....

There’s a very high WTF factor to David O. Russell’s comedy-drama Joy. Early on, when his heroine (Jennifer Lawrence) is working at an airport desk, Russell’s camera sweeps briskly past a long, angry queue. “What’s your name? ‘Joy’?” rasps a discontented customer. “You don’t seem so joyous to me today!” Both these effects, the rushing camera move and the dyspeptic one-liner, are fun, yet both seem to be fundamentally superfluous—flashy bits of garnish that don’t seem in any way intrinsic to the film....

Images from Pasolini (Abel Ferrera, 2014) “To scandalize is a right.” You can imagine that motto being tattooed somewhere close to Abel Ferrara’s heart; it was a declaration of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who went on, “To be scandalized is a pleasure. And I believe those who refuse the right are moralists.” It’s unlikely, however, that many moralists today would be particularly scandalized, pleasurably or otherwise, by Pasolini, Ferrara’s tribute to the late Italian filmmaker, writer, and thinker....

James Bond matters a lot in the U.K. You can tell by the British box-office figures for his latest outing Spectre: £41.3 million ($63.15 million), since its release on October 26. You can also tell by the hyperventilating enthusiasm of British critics in general, many of them males of a certain age—by which I mean that the modified Aston Martin that 007 drives in this film will remind them unfailingly of the Sixties Corgi toy Bond cars that my generation eagerly collected....

The studio logos at the start of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch appear emblazoned on a velvet stage curtain, and the movie that follows is an unbridled loop-de-loop ride within the proscenium of Snyder’s imagination. Round and round we go, from a gothic nut house to an opulent whorehouse, and from the trenches of World War I to a medieval kingdom where fire-breathing dragons rule the land. And did I mention it’s also a musical?...

Paranormal Activity 1 Paranormal Activity 2 Whither found-footage horror in 2012? Everywhere, all over the place, alive and kicking and eating people’s tongues. The most gimmicky of contemporary genres doggedly persists despite much jumpage of the shark. (Let us here pass over [REC] 3 in silence.) Nearly a dozen features predicated on found footage were released last year alone, not to mention The River, ABC’s sloppy, ill-fated TV series co-created by Paranormal Activity mastermind Oren Peli....

International intrigue level one: under pretense of cultural exchange, journalist Mads Brügger arranges for a pair of slapstick entertainers and a documentary film crew to visit North Korea. Level Two: Brügger and colleagues are Danish, but the duo, Simon and Jakob, are Korean by birth. Level Three: Jakob is a self-described “spastic,” i.e., he suffers from cerebral palsy. It’s no surprise that North Korea views people with disabilities unfavorably. Having a handicap is an obvious impediment to expressing patriotism!...

Lonely are the Brave is something rare, and almost unique: a leftist American western. It’s based on a novel by Edward Abbey, celebrator of the desert and promoter of “eco-terrorism” in the never-filmed 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. It was written by Dalton Trumbo, a witch-hunted screenwriter who clearly loved and understood the genre, and directed by David Miller, whose career seems otherwise undistinguished, with the exception of Executive Action, another leftist feature written by Yordan....

You began making films in Korea in the early Fifties, and it was only in 1968 that you came to work for the Shaw Bros. in Hong Kong. It was unusual for a Korean director to be working in Hong Kong, so that made you a bit of an outsider initially. But by the time you made Five Fingers of Death, which was the final film you made for the Shaw Bros....

Wormwood, in six-part form, had its international premiere in September at the Venice International Film Festival. There, journeying by boat from the Lido where films are screened for the press, to a separate stand-alone island, I met Morris for a lengthy chat over coffee about his newest work. Netflix’s generated keywords for Wormwood aren’t wrong—“Provocative, Cerebral, Ominous”—and our conversation moved freely among the non-obviousness of the truth, 10-camera setups, Eric Olson’s maddening predicament, the sense of an ending, and the dark prospect of a government that can kill its own citizens (which recalled for me an interview, years ago in different circumstances, in which Morris spoke to Rob Nelson of the “scary” prospect of “a rogue government—a government whose officials believe they’re entitled to do anything”)....

Wormwood Wormwood shows how these events must have been traumatic for Eric Olson—because when does he ever get his sense of an ending? It’s a nightmare, that this mystery and cover-up could go from one decade to the next. There’s endings and there’s the related concept of closure. I always had this idea that Adam complained to God, “What about closure?” And God thought for a moment and said, “Oh… How about death?...

FILM COMMENT talked to Jean Paul Civeyrac about the riddles of his title character, the climate in France after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and an inspiring Richard Brooks film. What was the starting point for My Friend Victoria? A proposal from my producer, who had read Doris Lessing’s story “Victoria and the Staveneys.” When I read it, I told myself I could make a movie of it, first for narrative reasons, because I found the narrative very surprising in the way it unfolded from very simple initial elements, as if its subject were revealed little by little....

This year, Rotterdam screened Llansó’s debut feature, Crumbs, a “post-apocalyptic surrealist science fiction romance,” per its description in the Bright Future premieres section. Following in the same comedic vein as his previous films, Llansó made the film with his regular collaborators: the Ethiopian producer-director Yohannes Feleke, and theater and film actor Daniel Tadesse. The latter plays Gagano, one of the survivors (or perhaps descendants of survivors) of a mysterious apocalyptic event....

They called him Mr. Monster. From 1955 to 1990, Kim Ki-young was the lunatic in the attic of Korean cinema, a former newsreel propagandist who went on to write, direct, edit, and art direct deranged movies full of gothic lunacy which were funded by his wife’s dental practice. A lover of meat (he would often lock the door of his room on set and grill mountains of animal flesh just for himself) he made 32 movies, eight of which remain lost today, having apparently been turned into hats....

The Raid: Redemption told the story of a squad of cops trying to arrest a drug kingpin holed up in an apartment building populated entirely by criminals. Something of a moviemaking miracle, it was an example of the kind of narrative economy only the best movies manage. Now, Evans has gone back to his gangster movie, styling it as a sequel to The Raid called The Raid 2: Berandal. It premiered at Sundance and has been released by art-house distributor Sony Pictures Classics, it’s stylishly shot, edited with a lot of confidence in the audience’s ability to follow parallel action, and the action is faster and more brutal than anything else on the market....

Images from The Sky Socialist (Ken Jacobs, 1963–64/2019) After roughly 55 years, Ken Jacobs has completed work on The Sky Socialist, his legendary ode to Ferry Street, his first Manhattan home. Over the past 50 years, Jacobs has shown The Sky Socialist in various versions ranging from 95 to 140 minutes, the original 8mm Kodachrome footage blown up to an unsatisfyingly washed-out 16mm. The freshly completed work is comprised of two separate movies: The Sky Socialist (1963–64/2019) and The Sky Socialist:The Environs (1964–66/2019)....

Good Manners Following the more realist Hard Labor, which premiered at Cannes in 2011, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s new fiction feature is a rapturous, at times freewheeling tale that mixes social drama, horror, and even a touch of musical. In Good Manners, rich white socialite Ana (Marjorie Estiano) moves to São Paulo, pregnant and alone. She hires the taciturn Clara (Isabél Zuaa), who is black, to be her live-in nanny once she gives birth....