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Asaph Polonsky’s One Week and a Day is a surprising Israeli comedy about grief. It’s wry, irreverent, rueful, silly, and stunningly cathartic. Polonsky’s debut feature may be slender, but it boasts a smart, compelling take on the selfishness of misery and an unsentimental view of the way out of it. The movie marries chuckles to shocks of recognition. Polonsky introduces his antihero, Eyal Spivak (Shai Avivi), at the end of the weeklong Jewish mourning period, or shiva, for his 25-year-old son Ronnie, who died after a long illness (cancer, we presume)....

David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis satirizes, sloppily, the risk of adapting American politics to other nations and exporting American democracy as a “one kind fits all” form of government, even to underdeveloped countries. The film is based on the Bolivian presidential election of 2002, which exposed the rifts in a republic still struggling to meet its indigenous peoples’ needs after nearly two centuries of independence. Fictionalizing Rachel Boynton’s jaw-dropping 2005 documentary of the same name, Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) strive to catch audiences up in the adrenaline-pumping competition between American political consultants “Calamity Jane” Bodine (Sandra Bullock) and Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton)....

All images from Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019) The magic word that turns 14-year-old Billy Batson into a superman, shazam, is an acronym summarizing his powers: the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. David F. Sandberg’s nifty, exuberant Shazam! might have snuck in a third A for the joy-giving qualities of Aphrodite and a second M for the satirical humor of Momus....

Set in 1880 London, Juan Carlos Medina’s The Limehouse Golem, an eccentric murder mystery ingeniously adapted from a first-rate Peter Ackroyd novel, cuts like a straight-edge razor between the traumatic life of a rags-to-riches music-hall star, Little Lizzie (Olivia Cooke), and the gaudy career of a serial killer. This monster murders every type of citizen in an impoverished East End neighborhood: whores, a scholar, a family living above their second-hand-clothing shop....

Hounds of Love In Ben Young’s bristling true-crime horror film Hounds of Love, an unassuming couple in 1987 suburban Perth, Western Australia, put on a hip, friendly manner to lure high-school girls into their modest ranch-style home, where they drug, rape, and kill them. (The couple is based primarily on serial killers David and Catherine Birnie.) In Robin Swicord’s pungent contemporary fable Wakefield, a successful corporate lawyer in suburban New York comes home late from work because of a power outage, then delays entering his house indefinitely....

Gay Chorus Deep South (David Charles Rodrigues, 2019) A sprawling social event that tries to provide something special for young, old, and millennials, the Tribeca Film Festival, in this time age of name changes, should consider taking film out of the title and re-dubbing itself Tribeca Expanded Cinema with Live Music/Dance/Conversations. Because that’s where the action has been in this festival for a decade. Films? Perhaps one or two memorable ones every year, and a handful of interesting ones that won’t make your 10 Best list, though you’re glad you saw them....

Tomorrow One of the most embarrassing political micro-crises in recent German memory came to an end on February 17 when President Christian Wulff finally resigned. A collective sigh of relief went up, but it was soon clear that little would change—Wulff’s potential successors were, much like him, lobby-backed embodiments of the country’s political malaise. Since this occurred toward the end of the 2012 Berlinale, you had to wonder what was going through festival director Dieter Kosslick’s mind, since he’d managed to weather a similar storm five months earlier: after the thrashing that the 2011 Berlinale had received, many were calling for his head....

—Max Horkheimer Besieged by information coming at us from all angles, incessantly, we supposedly have virtual access to everything everywhere and fewer and fewer chances to experience anything in person, libidinally. Once described as windows to the outside world, screens are becoming shields behind which we hide, putting everything but the familiar and innocuous at a safe distance. When the world around us manifests itself primarily through images and the latter are used to confirm our petty theories, fears, and prejudices, how are we to break through and reclaim reality?...

Anfang 80 Michael Haneke’s Amour, which seems to have screened just about everywhere other than the FFM, is a work of undeniably exquisite craft, an unlikely hybrid of harrowing corporeality and good taste, starring some of France’s greatest living actors, but it isn’t nearly as moving or imbued with stubborn vivacity as another new Austrian-directed film about an elderly couple, one half of whom is dying. Writer-directors Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl’s Anfang 80 looks like the cuddlier, crowd-pleasing cousin to Amour—because that’s exactly what it is....

At the 2013 edition (which ran October 10 to 17), Asako Fujioka and her programming staff put on an expansive Chris Marker retrospective, a sidebar looking at the Arab Spring, and a program curated by University of Michigan professor Markus Nornes on documentary ethics. At one revealing panel discussion, The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer danced around questions about the ethical challenges of filmmaking posed by Kazuo Hara, director of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On....

Gloria Mundi Rarely screened in New York, the work of Nico Papatakis is the subject of a Film Comment Selects retrospective this year for the centenary of the filmmaker’s birth. Here, Yonca Talu, writing for Film Comment’s September/October 2017 issue, discusses Papatakis’s work with actress Olga Karlatos on his 1976 film Gloria Mundi: The final leg of The Shepherds of Disorder‘s shoot coincided with the 1967 Greek coup d’état orchestrated by right-wing colonels who abolished the Constitution and established a dictatorship that banned filmmaking....

Birds of Prey, and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Cathy Yan, 2020) As a film reviewing tool, the term ‘it is what it is’ has come into its own with the superhero genre, but now and again you get a film with just a dash of idiosyncrasy to stand out from the crowd. Ultimately, Birds of Prey—to use the short title—may be notable above all for being brasher and brighter and more coherent than the universally-reviled movie to which it’s a kind of sequel, 2016’s Suicide Squad....

Now this is what you call a truly cultured family evening. One night in their Italian villa, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) hunkers down on the sofa with his parents, (Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg), and Mom reads aloud a passage from what we’re told is a “16th-century French romance.” Mom’s copy happens to be in German, so she spontaneously translates for them into English. This is the rarefied environment in which Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is set, a world in which beautiful and/or flawlessly erudite people spend balmy summer days and nights, fall in love, ponder on the vagaries of life, in and around a stately Italian villa, while almost invisible domestics—at least, they’re occasionally glimpsed, but have next to no dialogue—tend to their needs, cooking, gardening, or presenting them with handsome, freshly caught fish....

All images from Crip Camp (Jim LeBrecht & Nicole Newnham, 2020) Crip Camp is an eye-opener of a documentary, even if the title does sound like one that the National Lampoon series thought better of and junked. It’s very much a piece of personal testimony by one of its two writer-directors, Jim LeBrecht—the other is Nicole Newnham (The Revolutionary Optimists, Sentenced Home)—but it’s also an act of collective, generational testimony and a reminder of a more radical era motivated by hope and defiance....

According to Octave, the character played by Jean Renoir in The Rules of the Game, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Whether viewed as awful or otherwise, the insight has become emblematic of a certain kind of observational humanistic cinema, and the proposition has rarely been explored so assiduously or at such calm length as in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 316-minute Happy Hour. We often associate extremely long fiction films either with a sort of expansive fabulism (as in Béla Tarr’s work) or with experimental dramas that seek their own forms as they go along (Lav Diaz, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1)....

This time Godzilla is really dead. A child of atomic blasts, it survived attacks by every conventional and fanciful weapon industrialized nations could throw at it: jets, bombs, gunships, rockets, tanks—the whole toy chest. Once, it was enclosed in a bubble and kidnapped to outer space, recruited to do another planet’s dirty work. It’s been attacked by flying saucers, the Super X2 experimental craft, an oversized King Kong, electrified pylons, Biollante the biological weapon, suspiciously penile-looking, poison-spitting Mothra larvae....