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Twenty Days Without War Aleksei German is 73 years old. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, but ended up a lifelong filmmaker—but one who’s made only six films. The first of these, The Seventh Companion (68), was co-directed with the loyal Soviet director Grigori Aronov, and therefore German (pronounced with a hard “G”) doesn’t consider it truly his. He conceived his latest film, The Chronicle of the Arkanar Massacre, over 40 years ago, began shooting at the end of the last century, but as of writing, still hasn’t completed it....

As we approach the new year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is laying the foundation for a period of change at its 50-plus-year-old magazine, Film Comment. Senior Editor Nicolas Rapold has been named the interim editor of Film Comment as Gavin Smith concludes his run as editor of the publication effective with the January/February 2016 issue. Launched in 1962 by founding editor Gordon Hitchens (and quickly given its current name), Film Comment was subsequently edited by a young Richard Corliss starting in 1970....

While Žilnik’s body of work is often discussed in terms of the Yugoslav Black Wave, this director of documentary/fiction hybrids remains distinct in the region for his uncommon spotlight on unconventional and subversive expressions of gender and sexuality. But his films also aspire to broader social critique. Besides Marble Ass, another notable example is the Kenedi trilogy, in which the struggles by Serbian Roma for a better life leads them to exploit the more liberal EU laws on gay marriage....

A History of Violence David Cronenberg, U.S. 2046 Wong Kar Wai, China/Hong Kong/France Kings and Queen Arnaud Desplechin, France Caché/Hidden Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy Grizzly Man Werner Herzog, U.S./Canada The Squid and the Whale Noah Baumbach, U.S. Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee, U.S. Tropical Malady Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand The World Jia Zhangke, China Capote Bennett Miller, U.S. 20 BEST UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2005 Good Night, And Good Luck. George Clooney, U.S....

The Wonders Alice Rohrwacher, Italy Hill of Freedom Hong Sang-soo, South Korea Pasolini Abel Ferrara, U.S. The Iron Ministry J.P. Sniadecki, U.S. From What Is Before Lav Diaz, Philippines Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait Ossama Mohammed & Wiam Bedirxan, Syria/France Don’t see your favorite here? Proceed to the Best Distributed Films of 2014. Approaching the Elephant* Amanda Wilder, U.S. The Kindergarten Teacher Nadav Lapid, Israel Stray Dog Debra Granik, U.S....

Taza, Son of Cochise Douglas Sirk’s Taza, Son of Cochise (54) is one of those Production Code Hollywood movies that’s a lot more interesting if you just ignore the last couple of minutes, which attempt to settle all of the insoluble uncertainties stirred up throughout its runtime. The film, a Western, was Sirk’s second collaboration with Rock Hudson, who plays the title role, the eldest son of the Chihuicahui Apache chief, and I was able to see it recently as part of Anthology Film Archives’ ongoing “This Is Celluloid” series....

At last! Along with the 2012 Jolly Frolics box set, Shout! Factory’s long-anticipated collection of 53 Mr. Magoo titles means that the entire theatrical output of United Productions of America (UPA) is now available on DVD. UPA shook up the animation industry and delighted audiences and critics alike with its distinctive marriage of animation and modern design. Films such as Gerald McBoing-Boing (50) and Rooty Toot Toot (51) featured a “limited” style of animation that included minimal movement and an emphasis on color and contemporary design elements....

During this interview held at the 2017 Camerimage Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, Christensen displayed a self-assurance that suggested someone who could go toe-to-toe with strong directing personalities such as Denzel Washington and Aaron Sorkin. As we turned the tape recorder on, she was still enthused from the previous night’s screening of Molly’s Game. The Hunt Is there something about looking or the visual image that drew you to cinematography?...

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021) There is a point in every journey when you’ve come too far to go back, but the end is not yet in sight. For Laura (Seidi Haarla), star of Juho Kuosmanen’s lovely Cannes Competition title Compartment No. 6—a film evocative of the social awkwardness and absurdity of long-distance solo train travel—it’s when she speaks to her lover Irina from a phone booth in St....

A salad bowl of mixed references and forms, Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau’s Approved for Adoption marks the latest example of the animated documentary, a form whose most interesting example remains Richard Linklater’s Waking Life but which likely received its greatest exposure with Waltz with Bashir. There seems to be something about such hybridization that results in films drained of animated’s sentimental side, and this is the case in the Henin-Boileau project....

Ryan Coogler first traveled outside the United States in 2009, when he brought his six-minute student short Locks to the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival. Four years later, his debut feature, Fruitvale Station, was selected for the festival’s Un Certain Regard lineup, and this year, in the wake of the astounding recent worldwide success of his Black Panther, Coogler returned again, this time for a master class, moderated by Elvis Mitchell—an event that saw some folks waiting in line for three hours to attend....

August: Osage County You can carp about omissions, sure, but taste is not necessarily the reason for the conspicuous absence of Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis, Jimmy P., All Is Lost, and Jealousy. And while you can roll your eyes at the usual quota of awards-season launches—18 credible contenders this year—most of them were of a higher-than-usual standard and some of them were top-notch. But not all: Bill Condon made like he was David Fincher to unconvincing effect in the Julian Assange quasi-thriller The Fifth Estate, but Benedict Cumberbatch (as Assange) and Daniel Brühl (as his comrade in arms) made it watchable....

Nina Produced at the behest of the Nina Simone estate in response to the early rumors surrounding Nina’s production, Liz Garbus’ 2015 Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, was nominated for an Academy Award, while a second documentary, Jeff L. Lieberman’s The Amazing Nina Simone is about to be released (and will screen at Metrograph on Saturday with Lieberman and Simone’s brother, Sam Waymon, in attendance). In addition to the decades of radio play, steady record sales, and live performances across the globe, Nina Simone’s music has continued to play out in hundreds of film and television soundtracks since the early ’90s....

Images from Daniel Isn’t Real (Adam Egypt Mortimer, 2019) Daniel Isn’t Real, director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s febrile, erratic phantasmagoria, centers on a troubled college freshman named Luke Nightingale (Miles Robbins), his schizophrenic mother, Claire (Mary Stuart Masterson), and his fear that he’s turning out to be as delusional as his mom. The issue hinges on the title character: his imaginary friend turned fiend (Patrick Schwarzenegger). In the prologue, Luke is five years old (and played by Griffin Robert Faulkner) when a madman rampages through a neighboring café shooting a rifle....

A half-dozen people in Sarasota, Florida go through the daily motions of their lives before they enter the site of a midnight movie-house slaughter in Tim Sutton’s luminous, self-destructive Dark Night. Sutton must think American suburbia serves simply as an active incubation chamber for atrocities like the 2012 mass shooting at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight show of The Dark Knight Rises. Sutton, who lives in Brooklyn, recently said on the Criterion Collection website: “I was looking for a very generic America” and that he first intended to shoot “in a series of strip malls and parking lots....

The title may be Leon Morin, Priest, but Emmanuelle Riva is the heart and soul of Jean-Pierre Melville’s potent World War II film about political oppression, religious conversion, and romantic frustration. Riva’s portrait of a Communist office worker and single mother striving to maintain her own integrity and her daughter’s safety provides the film with a startling cumulative force. In this 1961 production, two years after she supplied the emotional ballast for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Riva delivers a great unpretentious performance in a part that could have turned affected or bathetic....

The second effort by fashion designer turned writer-director Tom Ford (A Single Man) is a roadside horror film wrapped inside a chichi relationship movie. That could have made a good combination for a go-for-broke black comedy, but there are only isolated laughs in this exquisite, alienating picture. It isn’t scary-funny—it’s scary-stultifying. Amy Adams plays a cutting-edge Los Angeles gallery owner who receives a not-yet-published novel in the mail from her struggling-writer first husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), just when she happens to be questioning the passion, commitment, and values of her “handsome, dashing” but also materialistic and empty second husband (Armie Hammer)....

The Imitation Game is a tremendously engaging work of historical fiction about Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius who was key to cracking the military codes of the Nazis’ “unbreakable” Enigma machine. Unlike self-consciously unconventional biopics, The Imitation Game melds fact and invention with lucidity and sweep. The movie time-jumps among three periods in Turing’s life: his misfit schoolboy days, his top-secret service as a trailblazing code-breaker, and, a half-dozen years after the war, his arrest for “gross indecency” as a gay man because of homophobic laws....

In the hands of writer-director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines), M.L. Stedman’s engrossing 2013 Thomas Hardy–inspired novel about a World War I veteran who becomes a lightkeeper on Janus Rock, 100 miles off the western coast of Australia, has been transformed into little more than a pious tearjerker. The title The Light Between Oceans derives from Janus Rock’s location, where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Southern Ocean....

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s first feature The Mustang opens with exhilarating, heartbreaking images of a helicopter rousing mustangs from their lordly nuzzlings and slumbers to race across a Utah plain and get herded into vans. Few films capture the wildness of feral horses so bluntly: they embody a vaulting kind of freedom and respond with confusion and fury when corralled. That’s a lot to get from a fictional movie these days....