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There’s a memorable sequence midway through Andrew Bujalski’s new feature, Beeswax, one that takes the measure of the writer-director’s talent. Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher), accompanied by her on-and-off boyfriend, Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), is driving to the middle of nowhere to meet Tom (Bob Byington), an old friend of Merrill’s who recently inherited a lot of money. Jeannie needs a new backer for her vintage store so that she can buy out her original partner, Amanda (Anne Dodge), who is about to sue her....

The protagonist of Ali Abbasi’s second feature, Border, Tina is somewhat odd-looking: her lumpy face, sunken eyes, and whetted teeth elicit cruel insults from strangers. A customs inspector in a remote, woodsy part of Sweden, she has an X-Men–esque ability to smell people’s intentions—a gift that makes her invaluable to port security but, as is the case with freakish powers in movies, compounds her sense of out-of-place-ness. Tina eventually discovers that this is all linked to her true identity as (it turns out) a troll....

Cam In the sly, unnerving prologue to Daniel Goldhaber’s pyscho-thriller Cam, protagonist Alice—or “Lola,” as she calls herself on the cam site FreeGirls.Live—is egged on by an anonymous viewer to hurt herself with a knife. Alice (Madeline Brewer) tries repeatedly to block and ignore the user, but when he keeps returning with increasing persistence, she succumbs angrily to his challenge. Perched on the floor of her kitschy, neon-pink room, wearing a barely-there cropped jacket and white underwear, she slowly slides a kitchen knife across her throat....

A dizzying plunge into ecstatic communion in the guise of a period nerdfest, shot in black and white with a Sony AVC3260 and, for one nerve-rattling stretch, in warm color with a Bolex, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess takes place over one weekend in the early Eighties in a drab hotel. The film was shot near Austin, Texas, but it has a distinctly Mass Turnpike/MIT vibe. We begin in an “activity room” where an annual computer chess tournament is underway....

An energetic debut feature from director John Krokidas, Kill Your Darlings is a hybrid biopic and crime drama based on actual events from the life of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe). The film opens with a disquieting image: a young man holding the bloody body of an older man immersed in water. Jarringly, the film’s attention abruptly shifts to suburban New Jersey, where the young Allen Ginsberg has just been accepted into Columbia University....

So innocuous is Ang Lee’s adaptation of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi that it can be hard to decipher just why it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. There’s nothing here that will be remotely disappointing to most viewers, just so long as you’re not expecting Lee to abandon his blatant Oscar-hunger, or his perpetual tactfulness as an interpreter of “quality” source material, to deliver something genuinely surprising....

With its innocuous title, Middle of Nowhere may seem like yet another passably shot Sundance indie you can skip because you’ve seen the soft beats it hits a thousand times before. Don’t be a jackass—resist such urges. Losing itself inside the labyrinthine emotions of long-distance relationships, relationships between female family members, and the prison industrial complex, Middle of Nowhere displays a rare savvy for such explorations, visually and narratively. The film is also notable for tearing down the long-standing division between “respectable” and “bad” in African American culture (a division pointedly made by Chris Rock in his 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain, speaking about self-representation: “I love Black people, but I hate niggas”)....

What fuels him is a distinct strain of love among men with generations of honor and loyalty infused in their DNA, along with gruff voices. One of Cooper’s strengths as a director and writer is a nuanced feel for male behavior, and with such a strong and varied cast of actors at his disposal, the film almost comes across as a study in tough guys together. The deepest bond of all is between Russell and his younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), an unemployed Iraq war vet who is more of a thrill-seeker than his brother....

Just as Gus Van Sant’s career has complicated the old “one for me and one for them” formula (more like “one for me, one for them, and one for whoever’s interested”), Promised Land continually shifts the ground beneath its own feet. Adapted by co-stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski from a Dave Eggers story (and originally intended as Damon’s directorial debut), the film seems at first glance to be a straight-line anti-fracking melodrama....

For at least a decade now, the two biggest stars of Chinese cinema’s Fifth Generation have been inspiring widespread disdain among cinephiles, even as they continue to enjoy celebrity status and respectable box-office returns in their native country. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige may have put China on the arthouse map in the Nineties with PRC-censored fare like Raise the Red Lantern (91) and Farewell My Concubine (93), but at the turn of the century, as their budgets began to grow and their populist, government-appeasing tendencies became more apparent, the goodwill many critics had shown them when they were racking up festival wins and Oscar nominations all but disappeared....

The life-altering bag or briefcase of money found by a major character remains a favorite plot-jumpstarting move in fiction. Immediately, friendships fracture, class issues boil, and frequently, people die. In Starlet, it’s a thermos full of the stuff, acquired randomly at an old lady’s yard sale by layabout-cum-pornstar Jane (Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of Ernest). As she’s rinsing out the ugly old thing, banded rolls of cash totaling about 10 grand tumble out, a discovery she conceals from her roommate Melissa (Stella Maeve) and hyper hanger-on “deal broker” Mikey (James Ransone)....

Nine years after the first trilogy wrapped came The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, an ambling, discursive exercise in Middle Earth immersion, wonderfully detailed yet a little dramatically inert. The fans, as always, were sharply, enthusiastically divided; critics shrugged. True, the movie wasn’t on the level of its predecessors; still, its brushed-off dismissal was perplexing. Had the times changed so sharply? The good news is that The Desolation of Smaug is a marvelous film, better paced, emotionally richer, and more tonally confident than Journey....

The Pirogue tells the story of a group of West African villagers who risk life and limb to cross the high seas between Senegal and Spain in search of better economic prospects. The decision stems from necessity more than desire; as one character puts it, everyone has already left anyway, “even the fish.” In the run-up to the voyage, Baye Laye (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the captain of a small fishing boat, weighs whether the approximately 1500 Euro purse he is offered to lead the expedition warrants the trouble....

For every wayfarer who comes to New York with enough spring in his step to sprain a groin, expecting his life to play out like a romantic comedy, there are more than a few million longtime city dwellers with starker mindsets. The latter bunch will probably enjoy They Came Together, a comedy that unravels every convention of the New York–based rom-com and leaves us with a feature-length string of comedy sketches that venture deeper and deeper into absurdity as the film goes on....

Despite his reputation as a leading J-Horror auteur, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has tended to eschew the grisly thrills and spectral manifestations of his peers for a more diffuse atmosphere of mystery and dread. Even at his most terrifying, his approach has always been one of genre estrangement, and films like Cure and Pulse are unsettling less for their shock-laden effects than the loneliness and isolation within which they’re embedded. There are no ghosts in the family drama Tokyo Sonata, no senseless violence (though, typical of a Kurosawa film, there are characters driven to suicide), but the spare, emptied-out cityscapes and sterile interiors clearly belong to the director....

Talking Picture (Takahiko Iimura, 1981) The lights are out. As I stare into the darkness, I hear a whir not only from the 16mm projector beside me but also from the ceiling, the screen, and the floor, as if the projector has expanded in size to fill the room. The film is running, but I see nothing. Then a mechanical click breaks the monotonous hum, and a moment later, a single white circle flashes in front of me....