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In last year’s Oscar-nominated Bullhead, Matthias Schoenaerts left a strong impression with his by turns quietly searing and explosive portrayal of a dangerous, desperate man in basic survival mode. His role in Rust and Bone is in a sense an extension of that character, but with added depth, confirming that the actor’s talents far outweigh his muscle mass. Schoenaerts plays Alain, the father of a young boy, and though it is implied that he is the more responsible of the child’s parents, he is quite negligent himself....

He was soon directing documentaries himself; his subjects included the first man in Japan to come out as HIV-positive as a result of sexual contacts, a man who hid his Korean origins from his family for 50 years, and a woman whose husband killed himself when his work forced him to compromise his ideals. (He also made one about his idols, the Taiwanese filmmakers Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.) Meanwhile his ambition to make features was put on hold....

Many terrible things happen in Stoker, the new film (and the first in English) from Korean mastermind Park Chan-wook, who has made several other films in which terrible things happen. I entered Stoker with some reservations, imagining that it would be heavy on spilled blood and low on compassion, but it turned out to be wickedly amusing and winkingly self-mocking. It’s a film that delights in every form of excess indiscriminately, like a kid who knows he’s already in trouble and might as well cram as much senseless destruction as he can into a single offense, making one suspicious about the very idea of “redeeming value....

Self-deprecation is crucial in comedy. The more you laugh at yourself, the more laughs you’ll get from your audience. It’s what separates the Louis CKs from the Andrew Dice Clays. In the past decade, however, it’s become more of a go-for-broke career move for celebrities whose moment seemed to have passed. William Shatner has done well as a character named “William Shatner,” a hack who talk-sings pop standards and charmingly over-acts with big quotation marks and winks....

Photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Twitter I was invited to follow the shoot of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in order to collect material for an upcoming book to be published by Fireflies Press. This included writing a daily diary of the production, from which the following passages are excerpted exclusively in Film Comment, in serialized form with a new entry every afternoon for the next week. Read the series here. Day 21—Monday, 16 September 2019 In the second half of the film, Jessica and Agnès travel to Pijao, in the western department of Quindío....

Driven very nearly crazy in the countryside, Laevsky (Andrew Scott) is the discontented Chekhovian intellectual taken to the brink. He’s shacked up with someone else’s fugitive wife (Fiona Glascott), whom he thinks he no longer loves—or is it that he can’t tell if he loves her because he’s become so depressed? As played by Scott (who looks a bit like Mark Ruffalo without the ingratiating mushmouth charm), he’s a desperate falling-apart man who might say or do anything, which is both awful and drolly funny....

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Dirty Wars makes the case that the War on Terror under President Obama has perpetrated fresh abuses of power through the activities of an elite military group known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). According to the film’s prime mover, Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill, JSOC conducts raids on and oversees missile strikes in places where we aren’t officially at war—and has even targeted Americans....

Ben Wheatley’s next project will be a horror film, which implies that the British director’s current release is not. But in significant ways, at least to these eyes, Down Terrace resembles The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In terms of horror, there’s nothing supernatural in either film—no “actual” monsters or zombies—but they both have perversely violent narratives driven by particularly cruel and unusually close-knit families. And they’re both at times unnervingly funny....

What distinguishes Sebastián Lelio’s funny-sad character study isn’t just its ubiquitous subject, a middle-aged divorcee looking for love and sex. It’s that we watch Gloria not simply getting her groove back (though we do see that), but also feeling numbed and downcast much of the time, often with the help of a drink. The Chilean director’s fourth feature isn’t some simplistic tale of uplift but one that honestly depicts someone who is taking emotional risks, having fun, and taking her lumps too....

Christmas, not unlike Facebook, has an unsavory creature at the center of its creation myth. Finnish director Jalmari Helandar riffs on the legendary Krampus, an ancient anti-Claus responsible for taking care of those on the wrong side of the he-knows-when-you’ve-been-bad-or-good equation. At a remote rural outpost in Finland’s north country, an archaeological dig supervised by a shady multinational has unearthed what appears to be an antiquated cold-storage unit for a giant whatsit....

J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost is an intelligent, precise nautical drama about a solitary American yachtsman, played by Robert Redford, who struggles to survive in the Indian Ocean after the hull of his boat is breached. Flooding soon destroys his electronic equipment, including his radio. Following a flash-forward, the film is devoted to showing how the man calmly marshals his modest seafaring skills and Crusoe-like adaptability to rap-idly changing circumstances....

Nance was at Sundance not with a film but with the moving-image improvisation “18 Black Girls / Boys Ages 1-18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines: $X in an Edition of $97 Quadrillion,” a live performance of an experiment whose previous iterations can be found online. Counting up year by year, Nance enters prompts from “One-year-old black boy” to “Eighteen-year-old black boy” (or “girl,” depending on the night) into Google and follows the predictive search prompts provided, thereby piecing together a narrative of black youth as filtered by algorithm....

Charles V. Hamilton [Professor of Political Science, Columbia University]: “It’s very difficult. The weaker you are in a society, the less resources you have to start anything . . . I know the argument you’re making, and I know that to a large extent it’s correct. But keep in mind that blacks are a minority: numerically, politically, economically. So it’s very difficult to initiate things from that position. So I don’t see that so much as a criticism....