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Master of the Universe Among the better-traveled films was Master of the Universe, which the Anthology Film Archives will be giving a theatrical run on June 6. In Marc Bauder’s documentary, former investment banker Rainer Voss theorizes at length about the workings of modern finance and recalls the luxurious lifestyle he led until only a few years ago. He waggishly dishes out factoids about a changed industry: “20 years ago, the holding period of shares was four years on average....

PEGGY AHWESH filmmaker The most evil, irredeemable, manipulative, award-winning piece of junk was Forrest Gump. Craig Baldwin owned this decade of culture jamming. Conspiracy theories, media piracy, found footage recycling, alien autopsies, the Rapture, and time travel. Life on the fringe with the wackos. Ten Best (chronological): Tales of the Forgotten Future (Klahr), Point Break (Bigelow), Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin), Unforgiven, The Valley of Abraham (Oliveira), Spin (Brian Springer), When We Were Kings (Leon Gast); Happy Together and Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai); Genealogies of a Crime (Ruiz); Flat Is Beautiful, It Wasn’t Love, and Jollies (Sadie Benning) JAMSHEED AKRAMI Iranian film scholar Instead of a single film, I would like to select the entire Iranian cinema for the unprecedented and crucial role it played in defending the humanity of a much-maligned nation, and its generous offering of another cinema to the rest of the world....

Mulholland Drive David Lynch, U.S., 2001 2808 In the Mood for Love Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong, 2000 2687 Yi Yi Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000 1833 Syndromes and a Century Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/Austria/France, 2006 1738 There Will Be Blood P.T. Anderson, U.S., 2007 1664 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005 1407 A History of Violence David Cronenberg, U.S./Canada, 2005 1303 Tropical Malady Apichatpong Weerasethakul, France/Thailand/Italy/Germany, 2004 1301...

Discussions of CGI have of late inherited a term that was first in use, I think, in the fields of robotics and then of computer games. The term is the “uncanny valley” and it refers to a certain point in the development of realistic artificial simulacra of human beings. A robot, or a photorealistic CGI image of a human, may be developed to such a degree of resemblance to a real person that a certain point is reached at which the resemblance becomes too close, and therefore too unsettling, to be anything other than disturbing....

M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Glass may possibly be something unique in the history of cinema—a sequel to two seemingly unrelated films. It follows on immediately from the events of his last movie Split (2016), which, apart from its Philadelphia setting, seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with Shyamalan’s 2000 movie Unbreakable. At least, it didn’t until the coda, when a frowning Bruce Willis made a sudden unexpected appearance, to suggest that something further was in the works from this most devious of storytellers....

It was Alfred Hitchcock who famously defined cinematic suspense as showing the audience a ticking time bomb under a table, and then showing two men sitting at that same table talking about baseball, unaware of their imminent doom. In the jaunty time-travel thriller Source Code, which tips its hat to Hitch early and often, director Duncan Jones shows us just such a bomb hidden on a crowded commuter train bound for downtown Chicago, and gives us a hero, Air Force Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has eight minutes to find the bomb—and, more importantly, identify the bomber—before everything goes boom....

Night of the Living Dead From the beginning, George Romero’s Living Dead movies have been at once mesmerizing, tantalizing, and oddly frustrating. One always has the sense that, beneath the surface shock/horror level, they are making a statement about . . . what, exactly? What do the Living Dead represent? Our culture, what we used to think of as our civilization, human life itself in all its confusions and unsatisfactoriness?...

In 1933, the same year that Kong first crumpled the pavements of Manhattan, a series of earthquakes and gargantuan tsunamis completely washed away the American coastlines, most notably that stretch including New York City, eradicating every one of its skyscrapers and reducing the world’s largest metropolis to an archipelago of sand bars strewn with a few palm trees. Welcome to Deluge, one of Hollywood’s first eco-apocalyptic speculative exercises. The film is mad, exhilaratingly so, and could have been helmed by Abel Gance at the zenith of his coke-addled, elliptical megalomania, and during the nadir of his financial support....

Allan Dwan & Douglas Fairbanks x 2: The Good Bad Man, USA, 1916; The Half-Breed, USA, 1916; Kino Lorber In 1916, the release year of this pair of early Westerns featuring Douglas Fairbanks as a man whose sense of fair play and uncertain lineage renders him an outsider in an already corrupt frontier society, director Allan Dwan was credited with inventing the crane shot on the set of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance....

Horizon (Performance by Opening Statement; directed by Joeri Heegstra, 2022) “What will I be doing in 30 years? Will I still be able to live in this city?” From the balcony overlooking the courtyard of De Brakke Grond in central Amsterdam, one of the venues for the annual International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), a 15-year-old girl confronted me with a series of questions and demanded answers—right there, right then....

Quai d’Orsay—titled The French Minister in its U.S. release—is a breathless catalogue of backroom political storms and stresses centered on a young, ambitious speechwriter working for an eccentric foreign minister. It’s also Tavernier’s first all-out comedy, and he approaches the genre with a fine eye for character and a careful sense of pace. With its rapid-fire dialogue exchanges and its string of pressure-cooker crises—set to the lively tempo of Philippe Sarde’s terrific score—the film is as close to the territory of classic American screwball comedy as it is to the political landscape of contemporary France....

Monterey Pop When did you decide to become a filmmaker? I lived in quite a different world. I grew up in Chicago, born in 1925. My father was a photographer, a very famous one. In fact, he did a lot of ads for Underwood & Underwood. But I didn’t want to be what he was—he had no time for a family. I never went to film school. I was at engineering school at Yale and trying to figure out how to build a power station in the Permian Basin, which interested me not at all....

Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020) It’s rare for a consensus to form around a single film at Sundance before the awards are given or the deals announced. But ask anyone during the festival’s concluding days what their favorite film is, and they answer Garrett Bradley’s Time. Bradley was not exactly an unknown when Time was selected for the U.S. Documentary competition this year. Her first feature, Below Dreams, had played in the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival; her short films Alone (2017) and America (2019) had won awards at Sundance....

Koyaanisqatsi During recent decades, Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke have directed a series of features that often evoke these earlier forms. Their collaboration on Koyaanisqatsi (84; Reggio directed, Fricke saw to the cinematography) produced one of the more popular and influential avant-docs in recent memory. Reggio and Fricke went their separate ways after Koyaanisqatsi: Reggio, to complete what he called the “Qatsi Trilogy” (qatsi means “life” in the Hopi language), with Powaqqatsi (88) and Naqoyqatsi (02); Fricke, to make the IMAX film Chronos (85) and the theatrical features Baraka (92) and Samsara (12)....

The older man agreed to the interview, which took place in his office at Universal Studios as he completed edits on The Birds. In August 1962, Hitchcock, with 48 films to his credit, sat down with Truffaut, three years into directing and already responsible for three touchstones of the French New Wave. For a week, with the aid of a translator, they discussed Hitchcock’s body of work and approach to his craft, and the resulting tapes were transcribed and edited over a period of four years, with pictorial supplements illustrating their points....

It’s not uncommon for artists to experience tidal waves of productivity, but Loznitsa’s seems to be more about an historical and moral urgency than just creative inspiration. His films have always grappled with the extended aftershocks of post-Soviet society, with the unshakable presence of history, with omnipresent pessimism, with absurdist humor volleying with tragedy. But in light of aggressions by Putin’s Russia, and specifically the incursions and conflicts between Putin’s Russia and the Republic of Ukraine, the details and nuances of which are hardly known and understood outside of the region, Loznitsa has some stories to tell....

Mekas spoke at a Film Society of Lincoln Center Free Talk event in 2016. Listen to his conversation with Dan Sullivan below.

Llewyn Davis is a man out of sync and out of sorts, heckling and glumly retorting his way through the Greenwich Village folk universe of the early Sixties with perfect deadpan sarcasm. His singing partner has committed suicide, his solo album has stiffed, his agent is useless, he’s gotten his friend’s wife pregnant, he’s homeless, and it’s getting cold . . . and he has to worry about someone else’s cat....