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Sunset (László Nemes, 2018) A young person from the provinces arriving in a big city with naïve ambitions is one of the classic narrative gambits; two recent films take this premise and, in very different ways, explode or unravel it. László Nemes’ Sunset (2018) (screening in Film Comment Selects) opens with a young woman, Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), arriving in Budapest from Trieste in 1913. Orphaned as an infant, she seeks out the legendary hat shop founded by her parents, hoping to find employment there as a milliner....

Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939) “Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production,” Charlotte Brontë wrote, in apology for the untamed and harsh character of her sister Emily’s novel, published in 1847. “It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath . . . In its storm-heated and electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning.” The description of Wuthering Heights as a crude outpouring of unconscious passions might fit the cultural legacy of the novel more than the book Emily wrote....

1 A significant case in point would be Pater Sparrow’s 1. This creepily hypnotic Hungarian film, adapted from a story by Stanislaw Lem, is barely classifiable (and harder to describe). An investigative team specializing in paranormal phenomena arrives at the scene of a surreal non-crime: a bookstore’s entire stock has been replaced by a seemingly infinite number of a single book. The appearance of the fat tome, composed entirely of endless columns of cryptic statistics, has something to do with a synchronized rash of suicides, a mental-institution conspiracy, telekinetic dolphins, and an Inception-related gizmo-slash-plot device that allows small groups of people to share each other’s dreams....

Dry Ground Burning (Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, 2022) The slogan on the refinery’s flag in Dry Ground Burning mounts a protest against these recent developments, asserting the nation’s right to profit from its own supply of crude, which was first discovered in the region in the 1930s. But the “Ours” on the flag disavows the country’s corrupt, violent state, instead claiming its resources for the people—the women, the poor, indigenous communities, and people of color—whom it pushes to its social and economic margins....

My colleagues in the crit racket beat the drum for Dawn for the most part, but it left me dissatisfied, dispirited, even a little depressed. For a clue as to what was missing, I looked to the dissenting opinions. Among these was that of The New Yorker’s ever-precious Anthony Lane who, writing of the apes’ forest refuge, notes that its “residents communicate in a blend of gestures, grunts, and very plain English, not unlike the customers in a sports bar,” said very much in the manner of someone who has never set foot in a sports bar....

Norte, the End of History Any discussion of Diaz must begin—and all too often ends—with his cosmic running times: his best-known films run anywhere from five to 11 hours. Many festivalgoers dismiss him as a slow-cinema ascetic, not to mention a scheduling nightmare. But for Diaz, duration is a marker of commitment and an instrument of empathy, a way of inviting viewers into the physical spaces and emotional states of his characters....

Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024) Affixed to the bus shelters all around the center of Cannes are celebrity photos from festivals past. Right outside my Airbnb, there’s Samuel L. Jackson in a backwards Kangol, from 2005, when he was here with Revenge of the Sith; farther down the hill, past the boulangerie where my flatmates and I source our emergency supply of baguettes, it’s Raquel Welch in a ’60s updo. On the barriers lining the Croisette—the festival’s main, oceanside street—are myriad pictures of stars from cinema’s different eras: here is a boyish Alain Delon in a red-carpet tuxedo; there is a distinctly swaggering John Wayne on a yacht, in a polo shirt with a popped collar....

What was the inspiration for the story? To be honest, I wrote the one-page synopsis for the film about 10 years ago, so I don’t remember what inspired me to write it. But there are two things that I wanted to explore in this project, and the first one is family. Through the depiction of a family, a married couple or parent and child, I wanted to explore solitude—the essential, fundamental solitude that we all possess as individual human beings as part of the human condition....

House of Flying Daggers The new millennium began with a new model for the transnational Chinese blockbuster in the form of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which remains the single highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. box-office history. It was followed by a series of high-budget martial-arts spectacles that tried to cash in on the success of Lee’s juggernaut. One after another, films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Promise, Curse of the Black Scorpion, and others tried to emulate and tweak the Crouching Tiger formula: pan-Asian superstar casts, cutting-edge martial arts choreography harnessing state-of-the- art CGI, epic story arcs set in a fantasy version of ancient China, and complex international financing and distribution deals....

Few major American directors with 40-year careers are as far outside of the cinephile canon circa 2017 as Joseph Losey. The maker of almost three dozen features between the mid-1940s and the mid-1980s—his career had roughly the span of John Huston’s—Losey worked with everyone from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to Noel Coward, Tom Stoppard, and Jeanne Moreau. Yet the director, who emigrated to Europe after being blacklisted in the 1950s but never slowed down, doesn’t have the reputation of many of his peers, despite occasional art-house screenings....

Peter Falk in Columbo There’s an open secret among film aficionados old enough to remember studio output before Kevin Feige but young enough to cosplay Captain America on occasion: Columbo and Murder, She Wrote are good, actually. Considering these shows dominated their time slots for years, it shouldn’t be such a controversial thing to attest to their quality, but they’re also both of a genre that’s earned a bit of disrespect over the years, that of the whodunit....

Applause To many, Iceland is an exotic destination, a snowy paradise blessed with natural wonders (read: hot springs). It’s startling, though, that even the most educated sorts will openly, and only a bit ashamedly, admit to not knowing exactly where this island nation is located. (For the record, it’s 500 or so miles northwest of Scotland in the North Atlantic, just south of the Arctic Circle, and a speedy under-five-hour direct flight from New York....

For more on these films, explore our Cannes coverage—including dispatches, interviews, and podcasts—here. Click here to view in full-resolution. *films are listed in descending order from highest-rated to lowest-rated

Following up on the theme of last month’s column, Anthology Film Archives’ current tribute to American International Pictures is set to screen some of the genre’s best soundtracks, attached to titles such as Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sugar Hill, and Blacula, among others. Two of those films star Pam Grier, who began her career as a receptionist at AIP. In many respects the most recognizable face of blaxploitation cinema, Grier had an indelible run of starring roles in AIP productions that are highlighted by a string of knockout opening title themes....

It’s too bad Stephen Gaghan’s Gold didn’t open, as originally scheduled, a month ago, because December 11 marked the tenth anniversary of a prize moment in pop culture: the night on Late Night With David Letterman when Matt Damon unleashed his killer impersonation of Matthew McConaughey advising a director, “Today’s scene would be a great opportunity for me to take my shirt off.” Yes, in those distant years before the McConaissance, when the star was cashing in on his early promise with romantic comedies like Fool’s Gold (no, Gold is not a prequel), both Damon’s spot-on mimicry and his use of “take my shirt off” as McConaughey’s signature threatened to turn the drawling star into a walking punch line....

With Jason Bourne, Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return to the rare Hollywood franchise that’s equally brainy and brawny, and once again they try to engage adrenaline addicts and high-end espionage fans alike. A visceral workout with several clever nods to current events, this entry gives series fans their money’s worth as former CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) and current CIA digital intelligence guru Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) introduce Bourne, now living as a bare-knuckle fighter based in Athens, to the part brave, part cowardly new world of high-tech surveillance....

Peter Jackson’s final movie in his Hobbit trilogy has the wiry elegance of elves, the robust craftsmanship of dwarves, the whimsical bonhomie of hobbits, and the spellbinding poetry of wizards. It’s elating to see these characters in action—and tough to bid them farewell. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug didn’t entrance critics: in Jackson’s Middle Earth sextet, these films were viewed as the awkward younger brothers to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings....

Is there such thing as an “Unspoiler Alert”? Then let this be the first. The crucial thing about The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, the grand finale of the movie tetralogy based on Suzanne Collins’s print trilogy, is that it doesn’t spoil the saga at its source. This movie completes the odyssey of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) without an ounce of happily-ever-after. Her psychic scars color even a quiet pastoral finale....