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It is one of the enduring paradoxes of 1967 movie culture that, just as the generation gap threatened to widen into a chasm, a 42-year-old actor reinvented himself as an icon of alienation, rebellion, individualism, and protest for college-age moviegoers. Actually, for Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke was less a reinvention than a culmination; as Roger Ebert, then 26, pointed out, the movie completed “a cycle of five films over six years”—the others he placed in the sequence were The Hustler, Hud, Harper, and Hombre—that had “something to say about the current status of heroism....

Images from Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, 2019) After saving Elena Orsini’s (Jessica Cressy) brother from a beating, Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) is invited for lunch at the siblings’ posh family estate. That’s where he makes his first mistake. Though the fact that Martin is unafraid to throw a punch is appreciated, his brawny physicality becomes a liability with a bowl of pasta in front of him; elbows on the table, a nervous smile on his face, he eats with an animation that Elena’s mother notes with alarm....

The five features and three shorts made by French actor/director/comedian Pierre Etaix between 1961 and 1971 have thankfully resurfaced after a long period of unavailability. Having served as assistant director to Jacques Tati on Mon Oncle and appeared in Bresson’s Pickpocket, Etaix produced a series of comedies that retain Tati’s situational humor and sight gags but move away from his Hulot-specific qualities—instead creating more diverse roles for himself, including a Keaton-esque loner, a rags-to-riches clown, and a married businessman smitten with his secretary....

Sprang breeeaaak… Sprang breeeaaak… Sprang breeeaaak… So drawls Alien, the deep-fried, half-baked drug dealer played by James Franco with equal parts cockiness, tenderness, horniness, and madness in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. He repeats the mantra, often over images that, as Scott Foundas puts it in The Village Voice, look like they come from “the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made.” The most artistic, too—as if Terence Malick had traded sunsets and wheat fields for bikini-clad coeds, beer-soaked ragers, and consequence-free shoot-’em-ups....

At its turbulent peak, A Private War movingly depicts Marie Colvin’s conflict reporting as an act of personal and moral witness. In this film, as in Marie Brenner’s terrific 2012 Vanity Fair piece, “Marie Colvin’s Private War,” everything she does is firsthand. Whether in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Libya, or Syria, she won’t allow anything or anyone to filter her connection to what she called “humanity in extremis.” She ignores government protocols and military strictures (no “embedding” for her), ditches political handlers, and charts her own paths straight into hearts of darkness....

Before a Los Angeles press screening of Aloha, writer/producer/director Cameron Crowe called it his “love letter to Hawaii.” Visually, that’s right. Cinematographer Eric Gautier matches his rapturous work for director Olivier Assayas (Something in the Air, Summer Hours) with fresh and energizing vistas of deep forests and dramatic shorelines. These moviemakers abhor lazy beach-movie imagery and focus on changeable atmospheres and sudden, enveloping mists. They conjure an aura that might feel magical if Crowe’s script weren’t constantly telling you how magical it is....

Denial moves efficiently yet too deliberately through the London libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), the eminent Emory University historian who was sued for defamation by British historical fantasist David Irving (Timothy Spall), after calling him “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial” in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust. “Familiar with historical evidence,” she wrote, “he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda....

Images from Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019) Seven years after the enormous critical and commercial success of his earlier 3D fantasy, Life of Pi (2012), Ang Lee gives us Gemini Man, an epic sci-fi fiasco that should be called Life of Null. Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, a crack assassin for the Defense Intelligence Agency who retires at 51 only to be targeted by his previously unknown 23-year-old clone, part of a private para-military group called Gemini that does the DIA’s dirty work....

Lovesong is just that. This film about two best girlfriends and one-time lovers settles in your head like a melancholy lyric. It doesn’t break new ground in technique or subject matter. But by staying faithful to its characters—women who make, break, and alter an intimate connection—it expresses a refreshing freedom from sexual-identity dogma and narrative formula. The director, So Yong Kim, who co-wrote the script with her husband, Bradley Rust Gray (they also collaborate on the editing), has a captivating way of defining character via atmosphere and gesture as well as action....

Monsieur Hire’s Engagement, Georges Simenon’s double-edged 1933 novel about sexual duplicity and scapegoating, generated Patrice Leconte’s lovesick reverie Monsieur Hire (1989) and Julien Duvivier’s newly restored suspense classic Panique (1946). It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar movies extracted from the same material: a murder committed in the close-knit, petit bourgeois Paris neighborhood of Villejuif. In both films, Monsieur Hire becomes a suspect because he’s an oddball and a misanthrope....

Brothers who team up as moviemakers are often organic virtuosos—think the Tavianis in The Night of the Shooting Stars and Kaos, the Coens in No Country for Old Men and Inside Llewyn Davis, or, in a pop, sci-fi/fantasy vein, the Wachowskis in The Matrix. It’s as if their bond empowers them to go out on an artistic limb without losing their emotional foundation. So it is with the German-born Australians Peter and Michael Spierig, identical twins who co-write and co-direct their films....

From the opening shot of Unbroken—a gorgeous view of B-24 “Liberator” bombers flying in blue sky and dawn-tinged clouds—director Angelina Jolie and her ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins, prepare the audience for an epic. Their depiction of the dangers inside a B-24 will stun even viewers who’ve already devoured Laura Hillenbrand’s compulsively involving and insightful biography of World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini. It’s breathtaking to see Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) navigate the bomb bay catwalk, a mere nine inches wide, as the bay doors open wide beneath him and only his balance prevents him from plummeting into the ocean....

How does one convince a distributor to take a chance on a film that dispenses with drama in the interest of encouraging viewers to keep their eyes on the light? Indeed, Café Lumière, the title of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s latest, refers not merely to the tiny shop where the heroine (a writer who’s researching a Thirties Japanese classical composer) and her soul mate (a used bookstore owner devoted to recording the sounds of the Tokyo tram system) occasionally meet but to the luminosity of the entire physical world....

Different From the Others “What matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, and after us.” With such powerful language about equality, its recovered history, its potent timeliness, and its imagined future, Richard Oswald wrapped up what would become the first film to deal explicitly and sympathetically with homosexuality: 1919’s Different from the Others. A new 35mm print of the silent film, which was co-written by renowned sexologist Dr....

But Ichiyama put together a slate that illustrated some pertinent themes. One was the disintegration of the social contract in a world of unfettered capitalism, particularly with regard to how societies take care of the elderly and less fortunate. Works from China illustrated the huge class divisions that continue to grow in the People’s Republic. And on the film historical front, the festival’s customary collaboration with the National Film Center yielded a retrospective of journeyman filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita....

Phoenix Perhaps it was the Berlin Schooler’s embrace of melodramatic and noir conceits that turned some people off (many apparently before even seeing it), but Petzold’s borrowings from postwar genre films are key to his latest feature. Phoenix follows a scarred concentration camp survivor as she returns and finds herself inexorably drawn into looking for her husband who thinks her dead. Petzold fixture Nina Hoss plays Nelly, the fragile survivor, while her shifty spouse is called Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), and the two not-very-German-sounding names suggest an old bar ballad....

Întregalde (Radu Muntean, 2021) Romanian director Radu Muntean’s provocative new film echoes John Boorman’s Deliverance, though here the threat of violent emasculation is replaced with a more millennial set of backcountry terrors: bad cell reception, nasty smells, and various other inconveniences. The story follows a group of urbanites delivering Christmas aid packages to rural villagers. While navigating remote, rocky hill roads, three of the volunteers agree to give an eccentric old hitchhiker a ride to a nearby mill....

In a film fairly heaving with poignant, even bitterly painful images, one stands out in a singular way. It’s a shot of the late Amy Winehouse sitting on stage, seemingly in a world of her own, when she’s supposed to be standing up and singing her guts out. The occasion is perhaps the most catastrophic, indeed humiliating experience of her professional life: her notorious 2011 concert in Belgrade at which she ran onstage, appeared to collapse, then doggedly refused to perform, while angry fans chanted, “Sing!...

Jesse Eisenberg recently appeared in a Dostoevsky adaptation of sorts: Richard Ayoade’s claustrophobic, Gilliam-esque take on The Double. Now it’s surely time for him to go the full mile and get himself cast in Crime and Punishment. He’d be a terrific Raskolnikov—but I suspect you wouldn’t get mad eyes, raging, the full trembling-hand routine of haunted, hunted anxiety. Eisenberg is turning out to be the kind of actor who’s brilliant at internalizing trauma, and I imagine his performance would be tuned tantalizingly a few notches above zero—the strangely placid face would barely flicker, the eyes remain fixedly trained on a thought, and perhaps there would be just a hint of cold sweat in the shininess of his skin....

Images from Oh Mercy (Arnaud Desplechin, 2019) In French, the word “thriller” is sometimes translated as film policier, sometimes more colloquially as polar, which derives from the first. The exact differences are hard to define, although a quick search online suggests this distinction: a film policier is shot from the point of view of the cop, and a polar from that of the gangster (and a thriller, apparently, from that of the victim)....