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Known since the mid-1990s for his gritty autobiographical portraits of family life in a Birmingham council flat, British photographer Richard Billingham premiered his first feature film this week in Locarno. As with Billingham’s photographs, RAY & LIZ employs a painterly and meticulously framed formal register to portray his family over two decades. It is a nuanced memoir that eschews melodrama in favor of the kind of photographic detail that you can feel with your fingertips (including a meal routine that surely wins the award for best condiment-based sandwich in cinema)....

Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem For my money (which is a figure of speech that can be taken literally due to the high cost of attending Cannes), the 2014 titles that were new to me did have a clear standout in an Israeli film whose action largely unfolded within a single room. In Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the sibling filmmaking team of Ronit and Schlomi Elkabetz, completing a trilogy that they began with To Take a Wife (04) and 7 Days (08), again set themselves certain formal limitations to unearth profound drama and mystery from the dry-sounding scenario of a protracted divorce trial before a rabbinical court....

Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan, 96) The pinnacle of Chan’s style of glossy filmmaking, this romance stars Maggie Cheung and Canto-pop star Leon Lai as two Mainland immigrants who fall in love to the sound of Teresa Teng’s Eighties hits. Full Alert (Ringo Lam, 97) More than Lam’s farewell to pre-handover Hong Kong. As the film fades to black with its hero cop (Lau Ching Wan) sobbing alone in his car, Lam seems to be bidding farewell to the entire crime genre....

Tess “Very grown-up and very childlike at once” is how an ogling 1982 Rolling Stone profile described Kinski, quoting her mother, Ruth Brigitte Tocki. One need only watch a scene from Tess or Maria’s Lovers (84) to see this quality in action. In both, Kinski plays beautiful young women hemmed in by stifling societies and ill treatment at the hands of men, during the late 19th century and 1940s, respectively....

Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) John Singleton, director of Boyz n the Hood and many others, passed away last week. For Variety, longtime friend and collaborator Stephanie Allen remembers the time she first met Singleton—a young USC graduate cunningly using the conceit of a job interview to get his screenplay sold. Boyz n the Hood is currently playing at BAM as part of their Black 90s retrospective, discussed on this week’s podcast by programmer Ashley Clark and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold....

Ronald Reagan, 1955 If you pine for a time before celebrity Presidents and rampant Russophobia, too bad: J. Hoberman is in town and he’s celebrating the release of his long-awaited book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan. For the New York Review of Books, the critic penned this piece as something of an appetizer (“As much as he had been a movie actor, Reagan was a fan—a true believer in what he saw, or imagined, on the screen”)....

Italian playwright, actress, and theatre director Eleonora Danco conducts a voiceover conversation with herself in her debut feature N-Capace, which screens tonight as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Danco revisits her southeastern hometown of Terracina in an attempt to exorcise her adolescent haunts of troublesome associations. Dressed in white-striped pajamas and wearing the expression of a discontented child on her face, Danco wanders the streets in search of her lost memories, but they’re nowhere to be found: the city has changed....

Framing Agnes (Chase Joynt, 2022) Reenactment has seen an exciting resurgence in nonfiction cinema in the last decade or so. But for most of the second half of the 20th century, it was viewed with suspicion and marginalized as a practice. The reason, according to documentary scholar Stella Bruzzi, lies in the powerful, hegemonic sway once held by direct cinema. Famously, advocates of direct cinema believed that authenticity could only be achieved through neutral, fly-on-the-wall observation in which the camera becomes (as D....

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) 1. Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema is often called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts are themselves cinematic in essence, automatic disruptions in space and time. Movies and ghosts both afford the possibility of life after death. Our engagement with them inevitably raises the matter of belief. Jacques Derrida, perhaps the philosopher most responsible for the ongoing scholarly interest in ghosts, has described film as “the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms....

The Old Dark House Throw a rock in a room full of gays (but please don’t!), and you’re likely to hit a horror movie lover. No discussion of queerness in film is complete without a reckoning with narrative cinema’s most disreputable genre, and the reasons for that are—like so much of queer culture—in some ways covert and in other ways as obvious as a billboard in Ebbing, Missouri. Historically there has been no single mainstream category of film that so consistently menaces the heterosexual lifestyle....

Images from The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944) She appears from the dark or she comes in mist. She’s out of the past or here from lands unknown. She’s not of this earth anymore, yet she has a distinct effect on the material world. The attraction-repulsion she instills is born of sensuality as much as fear, and her threat almost always descends upon a living woman. Who is she, or who was she?...

In one of the more hair-raising moments of both Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House and Robert Wise’s 1963 Hollywood adaptation, more economically—and dully—named The Haunting, protagonist Eleanor, during the middle of one of the many nights she has been willingly staying in the haunted domicile of the book’s title, grabs the hand of her roommate, Theodora, as she lies in her bed in the dark. She has been terrified by the whisperings and taunting, gurgling laughter emanating from the house’s very walls....

In 1980, Studio Six Productions ramped up its PR machine to spread the word about its latest film project, Argo—a sci-fi “cosmic conflagration” with a (non)human interest story, to be shot in the Middle East. How in the world was anyone able to raise money for a film with such a hopeless concept? Well, let’s just say that Argo had a powerful backer: the CIA. Based on real-life events described in former CIA agent Antonio “Tony” Mendes’s book The Master of Disguise and a 2007 Wired Magazine article, director Ben Affleck’s Argo tells the improbable true story of the eponymous sci-fi flick used as a cover for a covert CIA operation during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979....

Early in Black Swan, artistic director Thomas Leroy concludes his personal synopsis of Swan Lake with the declaration that only in death does its troubled heroine find freedom. Leroy is played by Vincent Cassel, whose triangular head always reads to me as unambiguously villainous, and his detached yet portent-soaked description of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, along with his Continental accent, immediately bring to mind a similar moment in what remains the most enduring film set in the world of ballet, The Red Shoes....

If Level Five, originally released in 1996, could be reduced to essentials, the pungent, bracing ingredients of its perfect Crème de la Chris Marker recipe would include: virtual realities and the immaterial figurations of the Internet, the fateful Battle of Okinawa in 1945 (as concrete history, as disremembering, and as a potential video game), mass suicide and cultural dictation (vis-à-vis the shifting meanings of “sacrifice”), a fable-like tale behind David Raksin’s composition of the theme from Laura, a terrifying bullfight (two bulls roped together head to head, goaded on by grunting trainers), tourists guided through the bunkers of Okinawa like chattering lemmings, Yves Klein blue horizons, computer- generated voices reminiscent of Alphaville and Stephen Hawking, prophetic networks of knowledge and (dis)information, masks/avatars draping counterfeit skin over old ceremonies, grainy footage of women jumping off cliffs like people leaping from the Twin Towers… Wait, stop—that hadn’t taken place yet, 9/11 was still years away....

Brothers Billy (Tom Burke) and Julian (Ryan Gosling) are drug dealers in Bangkok who work its seedy underworld surrounded by a cadre of white enforcers. Meanwhile, tougher-than-nails police captain Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) metes out brutal justice with a sword, taking no prisoners. One night, after following through on his loudly announced intention to “fuck a 14-year-old girl,” bad boy Billy is murdered. The brothers’ overbearing mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), promptly flies into town and demands that Julian exact revenge....

What’s that smell? The plain isn’t the only thing that’s charred in screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s directorial debut; subtlety goes up in flames too. The Burning Plain, which Arriaga also scripted, follows the same fractured, parceled-out, time-toggling narrative structure found in his trilogy with Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel) and his collaboration with Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). Though far less globe-hopping and linguistically ambitious than 2006’s Babel, The Burning Plain, cutting between Mexico, New Mexico, and Oregon—in Spanish and English—shares the earlier film’s facile ideas about salvation and forgiveness....

In Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s 1959 study in scopophilia, the director incorporated a critique of pornography’s secretive production and dissemination. The serial-killer protagonist takes sleazy glamour photos in a room above a news-agent’s shop in Soho, London’s red-light district. He’s listening in when a fluttery old gent buys an album of “views” that the proprietor keeps concealed under the counter. Notwithstanding Miles Malleson’s comic turn as the customer, the scene radiates a very English furtiveness....

Leopoldo Pisanello, the central character in one of the four intercut stories in Woody Allen’s latest Europalogue, is described by the narrator as being dependable, agreeable, and predictable. The same can be said for the film itself, which presents a bounty of oft-recycled delights from Allen’s neurotic confectionary. But To Rome with Love is nearly done in by an overcrowded (and somewhat miscast) ensemble, as the filmmaker sacrifices depth in favor of a plurality of vignettes....