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Gravity No film was more befitting of the “XL” label than Alfonso Cuarón’s 3-D outer-space spectacle, Gravity. Sprung from the same survivalist matrix as more than a handful of this year’s headliners, the film stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts—an overly chatty vet and nervous neophyte, respectively—who find themselves reeling weightlessly through the infinite galaxy when they become untethered from their space station. Impressively rendered in CGI, the interstellar landscape is indeed stunning—a boundless void that is as mesmerizing as it is terrifying....

Mulher à Tarde (Afternoon Woman) (Affonso Uchôa, 2012) Streaming as part of Cinema Tropical’s Veinte por veinte (“20 for 20”) series in MoMA’s Virtual Cinema, September 16-23 Affonso Uchôa’s debut feature focuses on the lives of three working-class single women living together in the industrial city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Unlike Uchôa’s follow-up, Araby (2017, co-directed with João Dumans), which chronicles a factory worker’s journey through Brazil through narrated flashbacks, Mulher à Tarde is a linear portrayal of the seemingly mundane existence shared by its protagonists over the course of a single afternoon....

Images from Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019) As you might guess from the title, Jojo Rabbit is a terribly cute movie. It just happens to be a terribly cute movie about Nazism. It’s written and directed by Taika Waititi, who has established himself as cinema’s current specialist in the dopey. By dopey, I mean something considerably smarter than dumb, more knowing than goofy, hipper than nerdy: his characteristic tone is a sweet-natured but knowing faux-gaucheness, as epitomized here by the exuberant, anachronistic use of the Beatles’ German-language version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand....

Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (1868-69) is a story about four sisters growing up in the Civil War years; Greta Gerwig’s adaptation is a film about a book named Little Women. Jo March, the sister with literary aspirations—played here by Saoirse Ronan—has always been understood as a surrogate for Alcott herself, and Gerwig’s script makes that explicit. At one point, Jo reads her sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a passage she has written, and fans of the book will recognize it as Alcott’s description of a pretend “post office”—actually a box in a hedge—used by the March girls and their young male neighbor Laurie....

A few years ago, I was showing a selection of classic Surrealist films—Un Chien Andalou and the rest—to a class of students who had never seen any before. At the end, I asked for responses. There was a silence, then one person tentatively said, “Looks to me like they’re just being weird for the sake of being weird.” My first reaction was disappointed that no one was more enthusiastic about these revolutionary works—and then I thought, well, yes, this kid has pretty much nailed Surrealist cinema in one sentence....

In his Dada Manifesto of March 1918, Tristan Tzara speaks of “that infinite and shapeless variation, man.” Manifesto, a new film by German artist Julian Rosefeldt, presents Cate Blanchett as not quite infinite (she plays only 13 characters, 14 if you count a puppet of her), and protean rather than shapeless; but even so, her transformations seem to embody what Tzara had in mind. Among the artistic manifestos Blanchett reads out in Rosefeldt’s film are various calls for conceptual art, and conceptual art is, in a sense, what this movie is....

Jim Jarmusch’s last film Only Lovers Left Alive was about the coolest people conceivable—ageless, beautiful, globe-trotting vampires, with a remarkably illustrious social circle of the undead, and a penchant for classic soul records, vintage guitars, and finely bound literature. You might say it was about as elitist as a romance could be. By contrast, his follow-up Paterson explores the everyday, the resolutely unglamorous: it’s about the possibility of ordinary ecstasy in the daily lives of working people....

Images from Rose Plays Julie (Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, 2019) There’s a curious feeling of déjà vu about Rose Plays Julie, a powerful new Irish feature that has just premiered in competition at the BFI London Film Festival. But then déjà vu often hovers strongly in the work of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who have worked together for a long time, sometimes trading under the name Desperate Optimists....

Dima the plumber, hero of the new Russian film The Fool is, more or less, the last honest man in town. He’s an idealist standing alone against the system, a prophet bearing a terrible message of catastrophe. He’s very like Gary Cooper’s marshal in High Noon, although by the end of the film, I started to wonder whether he might be Chicken Little. I mean, he has the charts and the tech specifications to show that the sky is falling, but are we meant to believe that he’s sufficiently qualified as a meteorologist to know for sure?...

Universal City, 1969. A projection room. The film is former blacklistee Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. The guests include fellow HUAC defier Adrian Scott, and directors Tay Garnett, Allan Dwan, and William A. Wellman. The man behind the screening, then-distributor and freelance publicist Pierre Rissient, seizes this opportunity to speak to Wellman about Polonsky’s difficulties with the Hollywood blacklist. Wellman does not react well. Clearly, the mere mention of the word “communist” makes him see red....

In a normal metanarrative, naming your main characters “X, Y, and Z” would be an acceptable affectation. So, opting for trans-meta, Mariano Llinás settles on “X, Z, and H.” The three narrative strands that make up the Argentine director’s debut feature are, on their own, only mildly absurd: an innocent bystander witnesses a crime that then triggers his own complicity; a new job compels a man to sleuth around for information pertaining to the cryptic behavior of the (missing) person who formerly held the post; a photographer’s odd mission to document a series of riverside monuments leads to the discovery of a man bent on destroying said monuments....

Childhood pain is perhaps best left forgotten—but director Ruben Östlund prefers to rub your face in it. Were you ever the victim of bullying? Or can you remember formative experiences with racism, specifically feelings of guilt or shame at your own instinctual reactions? Östlund can certainly take the moral high road and, admittedly, sometimes takes it a bit too high. He has reconstructed a real-life Swedish crime spree in which immigrant youths intimidated other kids into handing over their cell phones....

Images from Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019) For his first dramatic feature in five years, Abel Ferrara returns to the wellspring of personal experience that has served his cinema so well over the years. In Tommaso, Ferrara’s frequent lead Willem Dafoe plays a thinly veiled version of the director as a recovering addict and filmmaker living in Rome with his Eastern-European wife and their toddler daughter. Shot on low-grade digital video in and around Ferrara’s own apartment and co-starring his wife, actress Cristina Chiriac, and their 3-year-old daughter Anna, Tommaso looks and often feels like the director’s recent forays into nonfiction filmmaking; with rough-and-tumble grit, Ferrara’s camera follows the title character with an energy bordering on the obsessive....

In her seventies Mirren remains a stylish glamour puss with an hourglass figure and legs the envy of women several decades her junior. She exults in her sexuality, but has never allowed herself to be defined by it on or off screen. Which may be why she has been an extraordinarily durable presence, if mostly in supporting roles. She landed her two greatest realist roles in middle age, when her youthful radiance deepened into mature complication as her face became at once more ordinary, and more intensely capable of signaling a woman with an inner life at war with itself....

Dancing on the Edge (2013) I understand that you wanted to be a dancer initially. You studied ballet. I did study ballet. I was very attracted to ballet. I wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t have the body for it, but I was graceful and I had great passion for it. And my mother encouraged me. We lived in a very small cottage, thatched cottage, and because of the low roof, the wooden roof, and—the acoustics were amazing, so almost anything she played, music-wise, on the record player sounded fantastic....

Quillévéré’s third film is a graceful ode to life amid distress and heartache, much like prior features Suzanne (2013) and Love Like Poison (2010), but it expands into new realms of lush visual expression. Adapted by Quillévéré from Maylis de Kerangal’s 2013 novel, Heal the Living beautifully literalizes the familiar axiom of human connection as a sprawling network of characters ripple across each other in countless waves, featuring a first-rate ensemble that includes Emmanuelle Seigner, Tahar Rahim, and Anne Dorval....

What’s your relationship to the Mississippi Delta? I’m from Los Angeles, I’m white, I’m definitely an outsider in Mississippi. I fully accepted that before I started to make a film there. But I love the place. I lived there intermittently over the course of eight years, for weeks or months at a time. I would drive around and talk to people. There’s no rush in the Delta, and people took their time telling me stories....

Although I don’t think you wish to project yourself into a particular film heritage, I believe that some of the feelings that come through in your work also exist in two directors: François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer. In other words, we feel a great sense of freedom in your films and much tenderness towards the actions and doubts of your characters. But it is something that seems to come from yourself, by learning about life through your own path....

Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza, 2023) Miko Revereza’s new feature, Nowhere Near (2023), marks the latest entry in the filmmaker’s rich body of work exploring his and his family’s experiences living as undocumented immigrants within the United States. Across his shorts—Droga! (2014), Disintegration 93-96 (2017), Quantum Identity Politics (2017), Distancing (2019)—and feature films—No Data Plan (2019) and The Still Side (2021, co-directed by Carolina Fusilier)—Revereza finds ever-new ways of thinking with images, working across diaristic, documentary, and experimental modes to weave together personal and political histories of migration....

Madame Freedom As Hulu is to rare Japanese movies, so YouTube is to Korean cinema. Thanks to the Korean Film Archive (KOFA), the most Type-A film archive in Asia is now also the most accessible, with 116 classic Korean movies streaming for free on YouTube in nice transfers with removable English subtitles. The only problem is figuring out what to watch. KOFA has helpfully organized its channel into playlists like “Restored Films,” and “Seo Jeong-Min cinematographer (1934 – 2015),” but titles like “The Sensual Woman” don’t really help when you open it up to reveal a list of titles like Ticket (86), Declaration of Idiot (83), and Suddenly in Dark Night (81)....