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Shot on 70mm film over a five-year period, Samsara is the latest effort from filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, who previously collaborated on Baraka (92) and Chronos (85). “Samsara” is Sanskrit for “continuous flow,” or “the ever-turning wheel of life,” as the filmmakers translate it. The film’s locations span Nepal, Angkor Wat, the Arctic, Tokyo, Arizona, Kenya, Yosemite, Dubai, a Filipino prison, and the border between North and South Korea....

The angels’ share is the percentage of a cask of whiskey lost to evaporation during its years of maturation, and a fitting title for Ken Loach’s 23rd theatrical feature: a lovely if slight comedy that moves like a breath, always threatening to dissolve into thin air but somehow continuing to demand our attention. With this shaggy-dog tale of four petty Glaswegian criminals and their improbably successful scheme to steal the world’s most valuable whiskey, Loach turns naïveté into a sort of moral philosophy....

The landscape itself in The Road seems mummified, so much of it drained and stiffened. Oregon, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania become acres of petrified trees, dead grass, ash. The man and the boy resemble the undead. Shriveled, pale, hard-eyed, in tattered clothing, pushing that metal cart in some perverse parody of shopping, they’re the post-apocalyptic Joad family, their number reduced to two, their promised land the vague prospect of less frigid weather along the Gulf Coast....

Nearly a decade after his rise to prominence began, François Ozon might seem to be the last filmmaker one could see drafting the outline of a trilogy, as the trajectory of his career resembles nothing so much as a ricocheting pinball, bounding and rebounding from genre to genre at an even clip of one film per year. Certainly there’s a difference between being versatile and being fickle, and such a path doesn’t mark one for disgrace....

A Professional Gun Last Tuesday evening, on the occasion of Film Forum’s ongoing 27-film spaghetti westerns series, the Italian Cultural Institute hosted a lively roundtable discussion of the genre. Panelists included Bill Lustig (Maniac director, producer, and CEO of cult DVD company Blue Underground), critics J. Hoberman (whose recent essay on spaghetti westerns is in the latest FILM COMMENT) and Dave Kehr, programmer Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan (who co-curated the current Film Forum series), and—from out of the genre itself—actor Tony Musante....

While Saw and Hostel have spawned a never-ending supply of bad imitations, offspring of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (Them, The Strangers, Inside) have fared much better. Kidnapped, the latest contribution to the home-invasion subgenre, offers little innovation—it even opens with one of the Haneke film’s signature images, a victim with a bag over his head—yet it’s far better than it has any right to be. The film’s title is a bit deceptive, as its affluent characters aren’t so much kidnapped as held hostage in their new home on the night they move in....

With his 44th feature, Woody Allen returns with a characteristically formidable crew and top-drawer cast to a France of the imagination, previously the setting of his highest-grossing film to date, 2011’s Midnight in Paris. If last year’s Blue Jasmine was rooted in the frauds and self-delusions of a fallen, Madoff-afflicted world, Magic in the Moonlight harks back to another era and tradition of deceptions practiced by clairvoyants and stage entertainers....

From the co-screenwriter of Gomorrah comes this no-holds-barred story of one man’s struggle, torn from the pages of real life… Gianni (played by Gianni Di Gregorio) lives with his mama, and the fees for her Rome condo are in arrears. In the dog days of August, the building manager makes him an offer he can’t refuse: play host to his mother for a day or two (he later throws in an aged aunt as well)....

What ever happened to Cheyenne, the (fictional) front man of the Fellows? The answer is first banal—he’s retired to a Dublin castle in a standard rock-star move—and then deeply consequential, as he embarks on an improbable quest across America to confront his father’s World War II concentration camp guard. Preposterous yet surprisingly diverting, Paolo Sorrentino’s English-language film starts as a sight-gag comedy about an aging pop-music relic, before melding its fish-out-of-water journey with a soulsearching hunt for a Nazi....

Crime of Passion When talking about the body of postwar American crime films that have been grouped together under the heading of film noir, one frequent item of discussion is the unease of the returning serviceman adapting to stateside civilization. Just as important to these films, however, was a sense of the purgatory that awaited once that adaptation had been made, if it needed to be made at all. The stifling complacency of superpower prosperity and all the suburban trimmings that came with it is achingly evident, for example, as early as Dick Powell’s exhausted breakfast table performance in Andre de Toth’s Pitfall (1948)....

The Goddess One of the saddest things I ever heard was from an acting teacher who reminded us that an acting career is often a tragic pursuit, moving in a circular progression. He described it using Kim Stanley as an example: Who is Kim Stanley? 2. What about Kim Stanley? 3. Get me Kim Stanley. 4. Get me someone like Kim Stanley. 5. Who is Kim Stanley? Kim Stanley made only four feature films: The Goddess (1958), Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964, earning her an Academy Award nomination), Frances (1982, another nomination), and The Right Stuff (1983)....

The Wild Bunch A western is a table with the places already set. The conventions are established, the habitat familiar, so the story can proceed without expositional ado. But a set table can accommodate any dish; likewise, westerns can be traditional or revisionist, literal or allegorical, mythic or realistic. The one quality shared by all of them—even the most gleefully rambunctious—is a feeling that the world being represented has long since passed into folklore; the legend has become fact, and now we’re printing the legend....

How did the project originate? What was the guiding principle? I had already compiled the Morricone 2000/2001 records for Filippo Salvadori and Dagored Records when Filippo contacted me to compile a 2-CD set consisting of out/avant-garde/experimental Morricone tracks. He sent me a list of the scores he could license to choose tracks from and I created the release from that specific list of scores although I added one track from outside the list which Filippo managed to get the licensing for anyway....

This week’s episode of the Film Comment podcast explores the nuances of legacy, persona, and presence when it comes to acting. As with Léaud, we watch actors with enduring careers mature onscreen, developing their crafts and playing off of already formed associations that viewers might have with their earlier work. The panel—Shonni Enelow, English professor at Fordham and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Nick Pinkerton, regular Film Comment contributor and member of the New York Film Critics Circle; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer—muses on the shifting modes of expression and physicality of performers like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Gerard Depardieu, and Sissy Spacek....

For our (nearly) final episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival, and Justin Chang, film critic for The New Yorker, join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to discuss some late-festival selections and highlights, including Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Mohammed Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, and Truong Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam, before debating what the Cannes 2024 lineup says about the current state of cinema....

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In the second part of the episode, Devika and Clint interview Inney Prakash, the founder of Prismatic Ground, a new festival for experimental documentary. Inney began Prismatic Ground last year amid the upheavals of the pandemic as an attempt to reimagine film festivals from a more radical, ethical, and global perspective. Inney discusses his curatorial philosophy, why it was important for him to make the festival streamable for free worldwide, and some highlights from this year’s hybrid program, including The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton, Declarations of Love by Tiff Rekem, and Squish!...