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Bisbee, Arizona, is a former copper mining town that, since local mines closed in 1975, has turned to mining its past. While the town emphatically shuns the “fake history” of nearby Tombstone, where tourists can watch costumed reenactments of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Bisbee attracts visitors with numerous vintage and antique stores and boasts a hotel and a courthouse that claim to be haunted. The quirky, retro appeal of the community has saved it from becoming a ghost town, but unquiet spirits abound, lurking not in hotel corridors but in the memories of those residents aware of the Bisbee Deportation....

Most still-active stars of Dustin Hoffman’s caliber start getting the whole Clint Eastwood national-treasure routine about now. Closing in on 70, with over 34 films, two Oscars, five more nominations, and several legendary performances on his résumé, Hoffman has more than earned the standard James Lipton-styled hagiography. But there’s an extra aura around Hoffman’s most recent incarnation, a distinctly beatific valence. He comes off like a hipper Ram Dass, Dr....

“The key is contained in the question of where the power lies,” James Baldwin wrote in The Devil Finds Work, a question at the heart of Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird. The film chronicles 72 hours in the life of sports agent Ray Burke (André Holland) who, in the midst of an NBA lockout, sees a window of opportunity to disrupt the game of basketball and help put agency back into the hands of players like his client, Erick (Melvin Gregg) and his rival Jamero Umber (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley)....

Cape Breton Island has a privileged place in the history of Canadian cinema—it’s the dead end from whence Pete and Joey light out for Toronto at the beginning of Donald Shebib’s massively influential low-budget 1970 Canuck classic Goin’ Down the Road. Werewolf, and its characters, stay firmly planted in that dead end, stranded on their island. With its pronounced documentary impulse, the film may broadly be connected to the same neorealist strain that runs through Shebib’s movie, but McKenzie is enormously invested in developing an almost subjective experience through a harsh, at times assaultive sound design and an intent, detail-oriented way of constructing scenes that consumes the viewer in the moment-to-moment process of getting through the day, entirely appropriate to the experience of people caught up in the monomania of substance dependency, for whom there is no future and no past....

Last year in the May/June issue, I wrote about Burak Çevik’s debut The Pillar of Salt, an elliptical narrative of a pregnant vampire emerging from a cave in search of her urbanite twin sister: “Infused with an apocalyptic atmosphere that draws as much from ’70s visceral horror as from the slow-burning, contemplative cinemas of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 24-year-old first-time feature filmmaker Burak Çevik’s Berlinale Forum entry The Pillar of Salt is an engrossingly imaginative dystopian meditation on the fractured and paranoid nature of contemporary Turkish reality....

As China’s socioeconomic and political landscape is constantly changing, so too is its virtual space. Many of the film’s protagonists and their sites have disappeared since the film’s making. Entirely composed of found-footage from the internet, Present.Perfect. is pixelated and jumpy—seemingly in contrast with the static, Vermeer-like treatment of space in Zhu’s previous documentary feature, Another Year (2017). But Present.Perfect.‘s characteristic use of the long take and her careful cutting, along with the conversion of found-footage to black and white, demonstrate Zhu’s continued interest in framing everyday life in formally precise ways....

Run You were discovered on the street in Paris, right? Yes! I was crossing the street when Gérard [Vergez] approached me and I said yeah, what do you want? I wasn’t an actor then but I had some dreadlocks, kind of around the same time as Bo Derek or someone like that [chuckles]—so he goes listen, I’m a director and I’m working on this project, it’s a version of Robinson Crusoe and I want you to play Friday ....

This week, 30-year-old Anthony Chen’s quiet domestic drama, Ilo Ilo, arrives on DVD in the U.S. from boutique label, Film Movement. It’s a sign of how much the foreign film landscape has changed since Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (00), which mined similar territory, got a 15 screen theatrical release in the U.S., earning over $1 million; 15 years later, Ilo Ilo hit 17 screens and barely made it past the $50,000 mark, pulling in around $3,600 per screen....

Virgins of the Seven Seas “Put frankly, Kuei was not a big-time director in the Shaw stable,” said screenwriter Szeto On in an interview about Kuei Chih-hung with the Hong Kong Film Archive. But while he was regarded as minor league during his time at Shaw Brothers, today he’s a giant, standing alongside Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung as one of the best directors the studio ever produced. A pissed-off perfectionist with proletarian sensibilities, he directed groundbreaking, realistic crime flicks and some of the filthiest horror movies ever to leave a slime trail across the silver screen....

The great musicals of the late Fifties have a curtain-call feeling to them, a sense the artists knew their champagne was about to be confiscated. It’s the finale—time to give it all you got, kid. And of all the era’s big-budget jewels, few give me sharper pleasure, or a bigger Cassandra-stab of regret, than Les Girls, made at MGM in 1957. There were plenty of “three girls” movies in the Fifties, but none of them are as sizzlingly adult as this gender-flipped Rashomon about three showgirls vying for the caddish heart of Gene Kelly, the song-and-dance man who runs the troupe....

Delivered off screen in Mark Cousins’s lilting Irish accent, this hefty promise and warning—only eight minutes into his lively, watchable, eight-part, 15-hour series—carries an undeniable thrill, even after one factors in the nod at the end to All About Eve, which suggests that some of the bumps and glitches along the way may be familiar and even predictable. I haven’t read The Story of Film: A Worldwide History, the book by Cousins that served as his starting point and has already become a collector’s item....

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) We start this week by wading through the holiday deluge of “best-of” lists—some personal, as in the case of K. Austin Collins and Richard Brody picking their best films of the decade, and others crowd-sourced and more canonical, as with the recent BBC announcement of “The 100 Greatest Films Directed by Women.” TIFF Cinematheque have put together their best of the decade (their No. 1, Zama, our best of last year); and Sight & Sound just published their best of 2019....

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These movies-on-demand services are a mixed blessing, as the video transfers are of a variable quality and sell at premium prices, while there is also some concern that burned discs have a shorter shelf-life than pressed discs. The Warner Archive, Universal and Sony have been reliable in presenting films in their original aspect ratios, but both MGM and Fox have issued full-frame (1.33:1) editions, likely originally mastered for television, of widescreen films....

In early 1967, the presciently titled documentary A Time for Burning appeared in theaters, months before race riots erupted in cities across the U.S. Originally aired on public television, the unassuming 58-minute piece of verité reportage follows a white Omaha pastor in his attempt to bridge the racial divide in his segregated community. But even his seemingly moderate initiative towards integration—a baby step, really—ends up wracking his church with discord: congregants defect, elders quarrel, and the high-minded pastor is humbled....