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Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk, 2023) The artist duo Soda Jerk (the alias of siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro) formed in Australia in 2002, and has been based in New York since 2012. Their collaboration to date has sparked numerous short works built from sampled images and audio from television shows, films, and other media ephemera that are stitched together and digitally altered to construct entirely new narratives. Describing them as something like the very online descendants of Bruce Conner and Craig Baldwin comes close to capturing the spirit of the work, but special attention should be paid to Soda Jerk’s foregrounded politics....

Image from On and Off-Screen Imaginaries by Tiffany Sia (Primary Information, 2024) In her first book of essays, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, artist, filmmaker, and writer Tiffany Sia brings together her enduring preoccupations: stubborn visual imaginaries of the Cold War, Hong Kong as it is both experienced from within and mythified from without, and cinema’s role in all of this. The book’s six essays, several of which previously appeared in other contexts, are joined together by a propulsive logic that brings the reader from Sia’s sharp analyses of works by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers collective, Chan Tze-woon, An-My Lê, and others to her refutation of “visibility” as a political goal (first presented as a talk at a symposium on Asian-American art and aesthetics) to her drives along the misty highways of Taiwan while making her 2023 film The Sojourn, and her confrontations with her family history and professional milieu....

That opening image is followed by cinematographer Drew Daniels’s elegantly mapped bravura Steadicam shot, which follows Krisha as she parks her SUV, searches bumblingly for the house of her sister Robyn (Robyn Fairchild), and is finally reunited with a battery of cheerful relatives, the last of whom is Trey (Shults), her long-estranged son, who is more cordial than affectionate. It’s Thanksgiving, and this is Krisha’s first encounter with family in over a decade....

I. KINO-EYE BY PAUL ARTHUR Paul Arthur addresses Chris Marker in letter form, exploring the influence of experimental Soviet cinema, both aesthetically and politically, upon the director’s works. II. GHOST WORLD: JAPAN THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS BY OLAF MÖLLER Japan has a special meaning for Chris Marker. It’s the one place this eternal traveler—once of the physical world, now mainly of the mind, soul, and Net—has returned to time and again, filming, pondering, and remembering experiences that in some cases he might never have had....

As the film navigates the sensitive subject matter of underage sex without ever exploiting it, it’s hard to believe this is Heller’s debut feature as both a writer and director. Her passionate attachment to the material comes through in every detail from the carefully outfitted period costumes to the impeccable casting. “I really understood the story,” Heller said, “and that’s the most important aspect of directing for me.” Drawing on her acting background, Heller elicits a truly staggering performance from newcomer Bel Powley, who carries the weight of the movie on her slight shoulders as Minnie discovers her sexuality can be a means to both self-worth and self-destruction....

Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary entered wide release last Friday, but pre-production is already underway on his next project, tentatively titled Midsommer. “It’s an apocalyptic breakup movie,” Aster told us at his Film Comment Talk last Thursday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, on the eve of Hereditary’s premiere. The story follows a young couple visiting an isolated Swedish village; over the course of their vacation, they discover that its residents participate in an eccentric set of seasonal traditions....

Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024) Tennis is an intimate duel defined by the prohibition of touch. Each point involves a dance across a 78-foot court, with players responding to each other’s every movement, forming an improvised choreography that culminates in one of two ways: an error or a winner. Challengers—Luca Guadagnino’s tennis love triangle—draws out the tensions that underlie this dramatic setup. The film unfolds over the course of a challenger-level match between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), held in New Rochelle ahead of the 2019 U....

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) In the fifth episode of the celebrated 1976 mini-series I, Claudius, Augustus (Brian Blessed) has premonitions of his death. He begins to suspect he has been poisoned. (He’s right.) He refuses food touched by human hands, including his wife Livia, a sociopathic Siân Phillips. Finally, in one scene, Livia stands over his death bed, delivering a lengthy monologue. At first Blessed stares up at her, wide-eyed with horror....

The Language of Faces That characterization, however, does not untangle the Kortian knot. The 78-year-old filmmaker has made shorts and features in a range of forms: animation, commercials, documentary, telefilm, and Web short. Similar to avant-garde colleagues, especially Bruce Conner or Craig Baldwin in their collage-based work, John Korty is a montage artist, slicing and dicing his narratives, bringing out the gestures, rhythms, and textures in them. Even in his debut, The Language of Faces (61), a short about a Quaker vigil in Washington D....

The proverbial pain in the ass that plagues Niko throughout the film is that nobody will give him a cup of coffee. It’s supposed to be funny, but the gimmick feels almost patronizingly clichéd, distracting from the stronger aspects of the film. Some stylistic flourishes liven things up—an original jazz score by Cherilyn MacNeil and The Major Minors (which is sweet and snappy but could use a little heat), and crisp black-and-white vignettes of Berlin, shot in digital by Philipp Kirsamer....

The first 20 minutes of Augustine—a film about 19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most famous patient—are promising. In the title role, songwriter/actress Soko is every bit as unfettered and affecting a presence as Asia Argento or Björk, and director Alice Winocour knows how to shoot her. Augustine is sick, but what is her malady? Judging by the first scene one might surmise that she is suffering from intense anxiety attacks brought on by her under-class position....

To my eyes, Black Nativity is the cinematic equivalent of a Christmas tree ornament: shiny, hollow, sheathed in decorative, artificial linings, mass-produced and, given the cost of today’s movie theater tickets, overpriced. The singing, however impressive, has been smoothed out into oblivion in post-production. The songs themselves play like over-saturated music videos, and their blunt insertion into the narrative suggests a TV changing stations or a web browser toggling between tabs....

Léa, a professional who has never foolishly given her own heart, suddenly finds herself besotted with a callow young man, through maternal tenderness and the desire to freeze time by holding onto the devotions of youth. It is the classic Lady with Lapdog/Earrings of Madame de . . . template of shallow seducers surprised by love. The young man is the son of another courtesan (played with malicious glee by Kathy Bates), and the real and surrogate mothers duke it out over the boy, with Oedipal undertones suggested but never fussed over....

Mia Hansen-Løve’s intimate chronicle of the development of the French electronic music scene ends in daylight, but it opens in radiant darkness. It’s the night of a rave held in a submarine, and snatches of conversation and distant music can be heard as cigarettes glow in the darkness. As morning approaches, Paul (Félix de Givry) walks into a nearby forest. He looks up and imagines an animated bird, bright as stained glass, fluttering through the blue early-morning sky, before he is found by his friend Cyril (Roman Kolinka) and rejoins the others....