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I’ve never been convinced that Brian De Palma’s baroque displays of violence against women are a useful way of commenting upon misogyny—but all the same there’s something perceptive and accurate about the female vivisections in Passion. Embedded in a characteristically convoluted narrative replete with absurd twists that toy with audience expectations, said acts are no less gruesome than usual for a De Palma film, but they’re carried out by icy, corporate schemers who repurpose and manipulate feminist ideals for personal gain without batting their eyelashes....

“This is what the NGOs don’t understand—that one can have fun in Africa,” notes director Mads Brügger in The Ambassador as we see him dancing with drunken pygmy villagers. As in his earlier Red Chapel (10) Brügger has devised an elaborate and foolhardy prank, this time going undercover in the Central African Republic to buy blood diamonds. He does indeed have lots of fun, though his tastes run to high-wire thrill-seeking laced with a sense of the absurd so dry it is corrosive....

Contemporary Hollywood has steadfastly avoided the workplace—unless the jobs are particularly glamorous (Broadcast News, The Devil Wears Prada), or the workers unfairly exploited (Silkwood, North Country) or the fodder for gallows humor (the Mike Judge oeuvre). And so there’s an immediate and ingratiating novelty to the fact that so much of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air unfolds in cubicles and conference rooms in nondescript office buildings in Wichita, Kansas City, and other outposts of the great American in-between....

Route 181 is one hot latke. Filmmakers Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi went on a road trip in the summer of 2002 from just outside Gaza in the south of Israel up into the Galilee in the north. All along Route 181, the original partition boundary established by the UN in 1947 that was abrogated by the 1948 war, they let their videocam roll on the theory that the vox populi would represent a greater truth about Israel than what we’ve heard to date....

V/H/S Last year’s stellar edition of the festival was indeed a tough act to follow. The passing of the enduring indie fixture and lovable goofball Bingham Ray four days into the festival set a tone of melancholy. And even if you wanted to try to drown your sorrows in the magic of movies, that magic wasn’t all that easy to come by. There were plenty of perfectly adequate offerings but very little to get excited about—few of the kind of films Ray himself would have championed....

Five years after The Girl on the Train, André Téchiné tackles another real-life cause célèbre in which the central transgression may never have occurred. Like Chabrol, his concern is less for the crimes, or paranoid accusations, than for the emotional and interpersonal tensions they incite. The bulk of the film recounts events leading up to the 1977 disappearance of heiress Agnès Le Roux (Adèle Haenel). Her lover Maurice (Guillaume Canet), a lawyer who’d helped Agnès’s mother (Catherine Deneuve) take control of a casino and then dethroned her with help from Agnès, emigrated to Panama when she went missing....

In the last two or so months over 11,000 people have logged on to lyrics007.com to do whatever it is they do with the words to John Lennon’s song “Mother.” (Nearly 30,000 have hit on “Woman.”) It’s a startling stat—but just business as usual in the afterlife of a Beatle. So, as the lyrics go: “Mother, you had me but I never had you / I wanted you but you didn’t want me ....

Smiley, the youngest character in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s dazzling debut, gets his nickname after a brutal initiation involving the furious feet of a Central American street gang. The savage choreography is based on the moves of the Mara Salvatrucha, a real-life organization whose savagery is legendary. Smiley emerges from his ordeal with a bloody grin, and that’s how Sin Nombre sets itself up for a downward spiral of mayhem. Yet for all its raw simplicity, the film manages to conjure a veritable library of references including, but not limited to, Sophocles, Steinbeck, John Ford, Ozzy Osbourne, and, especially to these eyes, William T....

The North Dakota boomtown of Williston lies smack in the middle of a lucrative oil field that has attracted a sudden influx of capital and labor, with attendant complications. That gives Jesse Moss’s timely documentary The Overnighters the rush of capturing a small slice of American history in the making, but Moss soon goes on to focus on a Lutheran pastor who devotes himself to the plight of the migrant workers struggling to stay afloat....

Last issue we saw the fine art of theatrical trailers given due respect at Trailers From Hell. We now turn our browsers to another unsung craft-within-the-craft: the opening credit sequence. ArtoftheTitle.com has been reclaiming the grandeur of the textual overture since 2008. Diligently maintained and eclectically curated, the site contains preludes from 400-plus films. Ignoring 50 years of dissolving prologue cards and orchestral swells, the website instead focuses on stylistically integrated and graphically adventurous overtures that have evolved during more recent film history (let’s call it the Kubrick-Fincher Age of Opening Credits)....

I Love Alaska opens with a telling fact: “On August 4, 2006, AOL accidentally published a text file on its website containing three months’ worth of search keywords submitted by over 650,000 users.” Commissioned by the Submarine Channel for Minimovies.org, Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug’s episodic work simply could not have existed—as an idea, as a film, as a distributed piece—without the Internet. Consider it a remote feed from the far side of the Web, an accidental transmission from the server behind the curtain....

Kathryn Hunter in The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021) Things happen fast in The Tragedy of Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays: compact and brutal, yet spellbinding in its poetry. Joel Coen’s new film, his debut effort without his brother, catches the hurtling pace, stark lyricism, and numbing bleakness of its source material. Hewing close to the text, the film distills some of the play’s recurring preoccupations: time and fate; night, sleep, and death; and the double meaning of blood....

Gentle (László Csuja and Anna Nemes, 2022) Trying to find a unifying theme at a film festival is often a fool’s errand, not to mention a disservice to both filmmakers and programmers, but the guiding principle of most English-language fiction features at this year’s Sundance was clear: a desire to replicate the success of Get Out. More psychological thrillers than horror, these films, which were notably in the main dramatic competition instead of the genre-oriented Midnight section, centered their social critiques on race and gender with varying degrees of success....

Lust for Life Kirk Douglas acts like Vincent Van Gogh paints: with bold strokes, dazzling colors, and displays of passion sometimes alarming to witness. Proponents of understatement may blanch at the raw emotion of his performances, but there’s no denying that Douglas—who turns 100 on December 9—withholds nothing from the camera. To see him play tortured characters is akin to watching Van Gogh in his wheat field, making manifest his demons on canvas....

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