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Since Miyazaki had the nerve not to open his film with a series of title cards clearly and unambiguously spelling out his opinions on World War II, Japanese nationalism, war crimes, Pearl Harbor, comfort women, the rewriting of the Japanese constitution, the sanctity of American life, the sanctity of Korean life, the sanctity of Chinese life, and whether everyone who was alive in Japan between 1940 and 1945 deserves global condemnation, plenty of other people jumped up to state his opinions for him....

Naked Killer Want to see a 25-year-old moppet roller-skate across the hood of a car and clock a maniac in the chin with her wheels? How about watching a blonde from Delaware disable four thugs with a wooden chair and a pair of handcuffs? Or witnessing a recovering addict take on a gang of dog-kicking rapists on a dock in Vancouver while she’s stark naked? Welcome to Hong Kong’s greatest forgotten film genre: Girls with Guns....

As J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum stressed in their 1981 book Midnight Movies, cults are never created—they grow organically, frequently in the least likely places. The Hunger Games, a young adult novel with sci-fi and horror elements, has sold over 800,000 copies. Many of those who have read the books are much older than its 16-year-old protagonist; indeed, any small amount of time spent on young adult blogs will reveal that a significant portion of YA novels are read by women in their twenties and later....

Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2021) You had to be there, because nothing quite describes the collective, still unmatched frenzy that welcomed a series of 148 tweets by one A’Ziah “Zola” King in 2015, detailing her disastrous road trip to Florida with a fellow stripper. In what must surely be the first film based on a viral tweet thread, director Janicza Bravo’s Zola, co-written with playwright Jeremy O. Harris, translates King’s outlandish, kinetic material into an effortlessly funny Odyssean fable: a descent into nightmare for a Black woman merely seeking reprieve from life’s monotony....

Anna Pavlova on the set It was the biggest production Universal had ever attempted, led by its highest-paid director and starring the world’s most famous ballerina. Shot in 1915 and released on a staggered schedule over the next two years, The Dumb Girl of Portici was the studio’s answer to rival epics like Intolerance and Civilization. Based on an 1829 opera by D.F.E. Auber, The Dumb Girl of Portici placed poor, mute heroine Fenella in the middle of a revolt by Italian peasants against their Spanish rulers....

The Iron Ministry An attendant pushes a cart down the narrow aisle of the train. He sells some packaged snacks and soft drinks as he goes, but mostly he disappoints those hungry for instant noodles, which are sold out. Passengers swing their legs out of the way, or stand aside in the aisle for as long as it takes the cart, and the camera, to barely squeeze past, before returning to filling every available space on the train like rain puddles reforming behind the tires of a car....

May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) One of my great pleasures in recent years has been watching Todd Haynes move gradually from pastiche and deconstruction (however gorgeously crafted) toward a more realistic and emotionally involving aesthetic, without sacrificing any of his intellectual edge. I never quite got the rhapsodic response to Far from Heaven (2002). Not that this postmodern Sirkian melodrama is without emotional payoff—the relationship between Julianne Moore’s ’50s housewife and Dennis Haysbert’s Black gardener is grounded in a yearning all the more powerful for being ambiguous and unconsummated....

Jia Zhangke on the set of Ash Is Purest White (2018). Photo by Arte France Cinéma/Kobal/Shutterstock. “Of all the fables that have grown up around the moon landing, my favorite is the one about Stanley Kubrick, because it demonstrates the use of a good counternarrative . . . It started with a simple question: Who, in 1969, would have been capable of staging a believable moon landing?” For the 50th Anniversary of our (supposed) moon landing, Rich Cohen writes for The Paris Review on the odysseys and oddities of Stanley Kubrick....

The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981) BAM’s ongoing series Punks, Poets & Valley Girls: Women Filmmakers in 1980s America provides a remarkable overview of not only the vibrant film culture of the decade, but also of ’80s pop culture more broadly. The films on view are studded with the cutting-edge fashions, and, of course, the music of the era. The series features a number of movies with stellar soundtracks: Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames (which takes its title from a Red Krayola/Mayo Thompson-produced Lara Logic track), Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization docs, Sara Driver’s dreamy No-Wave Sleepwalk, and Elaine May’s epic tale of pathetic men Ishtar....

We also have a special interview with French icon Isabelle Huppert, who spoke with Yonca Talu about Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love and working with Maurice Pialat and Claude Chabrol (with a few words about her next collaborator, Michael Haneke). Listen/Subscribe:

Vapors (Andy Milligan, 1965) Throughout most of the 20th century, the history of queer cinema was one of disreputability. While today’s most widely studied, discussed filmmakers from once verboten gay undergrounds—Anger, Genet, Jack Smith—have been steadily recouped, others have remained uncelebrated—one, Andy Milligan, was literally buried in an unmarked grave. Starting in 1965, the New York-based filmmaker, playwright, and virulent non-icon would go on to make almost 30 movies before dying of complications from AIDS in 1992, but odds are great that most people who consider themselves cinephiles haven’t seen many of them—this writer included, who has only skimmed the surface, truth be told....

It doesn’t take much description to understand why Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied was and remains a radical work of American art. Made in the late ’80s, shot on video and just shy of an hour, the film acknowledges the lives, dignity, and complexities of gay black men. But the subject matter, and the fact that it was created by an African American man living with AIDS, are hardly the only reasons for the significance of Tongues Untied, which makes vibrant, shattering art from its essential political cause: putting front and center those who have been historically erased in American culture....

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are comedy’s premier purveyors of pop surrealism, and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is their most dream-like film since 2008’s Step Brothers. Their method is a modified exquisite corpse. They compose a temporary script, but once on set McKay yells out increasingly absurdist lines for his actors to test out. Then the performers can spin off their own variations, pushing farther afield from the narrative and closer to a space of pure play....

Is there life after mumblecore—the American alt-cinema movement christened and then eulogized in publications like this before even most cinephiles had heard of it? Aaron Katz’s shaggy-dog detective story Cold Weather offers compelling evidence in the affirmative. A hipster-slacker Long Goodbye set in a rapturously wintry Portland, Katz’s third feature marries the gift for casual observation evident in his DIY boy-meets-girl stories Dance Party, USA (06) and Quiet City(07) to a vibrant narrative playfulness, an authentic tension, and an almost classical formal elegance....