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—Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comprises two markedly different cinematic styles. The first, established early in the film as our species rises from starvation to civilization, is dispassionate, anthropological—in a word, Kubrickian. The second, introduced later as man grapples with the realm of space, trades anthropology for visceral sensation: shaking cameras, freeze frames, close-ups of a blinking, dilated eye....

The Turin Film Festival passed its quarter-century milestone under new management. Its new director, noted filmmaker and cinephile Nanni Moretti, faced the challenge of matching the careful, varied programming maintained by predecessors Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan and Roberto Turigliatto. Among the award winners this year were The Elephant and the Sea by Malaysian director Woo Ming Jin and Lenny Abrahamson’s Cannes-premiered Garage. A perennial highlight has been the festival’s thorough retrospectives, but with this year’s programs devoted to John Cassavetes and Wim Wenders, the real discovery was to be found in an Italian sidebar....

Le Joli Mai During a career that spanned almost the entire second half of the 20th century, Pierre Lhomme shot films for a knee-weakening array of auteurs: Robert Bresson (placidly capturing the ebb and flow of chance encounters on the streets of Paris in Four Nights of a Dreamer), Jean-Pierre Melville (composing Army of Shadows with a pallor of faded blue and ash-grey that evokes Luis Márquez’s hand-tinted photographs in its tremulously delicate color and texture), Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore: Bernadette Lafont lying in bed, filling the length of the frame, dressed in all black, hands covering her face), Dušan Makavejev (Sweet Movie), and close friend Chris Marker—whose Le Joli Mai, a miniature solar system of exploratory documentary techniques, Lhomme also co-directed....

Dragnet But I don’t want to oversell this image of a two-fisted Bresson either, because I increasingly feel that the problem lies less with the choice of -ism or adjective than the desire to come up with any encapsulating formulation “Bresson is [X].” It’s common to both Schrader/Sontag and some of their critics, with the value of [X] either overturning into its opposite (transcendentalist into materialist, for example) or making a similar large-scale shift on a dubious evolutionary timeline (believer to atheist, say)....

The Interview The movie industry today faces a genuine threat to its existence. Thanks to a decade of willful blindness, the studios have failed to create a coordinated response to the transformation of almost every aspect of its century-old way of doing business imposed by digital technology. Distribution fiefdoms are a relic of the past. Copyright protection is under assault, increasingly from legitimate, not just illegitimate, sources. Most crucially, an industry that has sold its products on an à la carte basis through a series of carefully spaced windows that—in theory—maximized its profits is now facing the reality of all-you-can-eat subscription pricing in the form of Netflix and others....

Mulholland Drive David Lynch, U.S. In the Mood for Love Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong The Royal Tenenbaums Wes Anderson, U.S. Ghost World Terry Zwigoff, U.S. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence Steven Spielberg, U.S. Fat Girl Catherine Breillat, France Waking Life Richard Linklater, U.S. In the Bedroom Todd Field, U.S. The Gleaners and I Agnes Varda, France Werckmeister Harmonies Bela Tarr, Hungary Memento Christopher Nolan, U.S. The Circle Jafar Panahi, Iran Moulin Rouge Baz Luhrmann, U....

Seventh Code 1:02pm Arrived at the brand-spanking-new Rotterdam Centraal railway station, checked in at Citizen M, a futuristic state-of-the-art hotel (an iPad in every room to control Wi-Fi, television, blinds, temperature, and mood lighting with Business, Relaxation, Television, and Romance settings), paid 40 euros for press accreditation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam HQ, and got down to the business at hand. 4:45pm In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Seventh Code, a seemingly clueless girl (Japanese pop star Maeda Atsuko) arrives in Vladivostok, Siberia, to stalk a guy who stood her up on a date....

I got the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen and Nirvana’s In Utero in the mail on the same day, one of those BMG or Columbia House eight-CDs-for-a-penny deals. This would’ve been in the fall of 1993, when I was 12 years old, pubescent, and particularly susceptible to the sway of pop music as one perhaps can never be again. Everyone’s heard of the latter band, but for those who don’t know the former, a bit of context....

This interview took place at the 2017 Camerimage Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Laustsen, a compact, modest man, began by talking about his unlikely path into cinema, launched by a newspaper ad and an insistent older sister. Nightwatch [1994] Can you talk about why you became a cinematographer? I was educated in fashion commercial photography when I was very young. I did that from when I was 18 to 21....

After a desultory first 24 hours, it took a speedy walk down the Croisette to Espace Miramar—home of Critics Week, the festival’s all-too-easily overlooked independent sidebar—to catch the festival’s first truly good film: Salvo, the debut crime drama from Sicilian filmmakers Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. A sharply chiseled intelligence is on display from the first, wordless scene, which shows hit man Salvo (Saleh Bakri) in bed as his air conditioner conks out during a brutal Palermo summer heat wave....

American films were a rare breed in Cannes this year, but in competition there was one such selection with a uniquely American story. Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a look at the strange life of strange millionaire John du Pont, had its premiere last week at the festival, where its filmmaker was awarded the Best Director prize over the weekend. Months after releasing the 2005 film Capote, Miller says he received a letter from Harper Lee....

Mountains May Depart Two hotly anticipated films by Asian auteurs were widely discussed in the final few days of the 68th Cannes Film Festival. Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin and Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart each look at China from a unique vantage point: one film concludes with a look into the future, while the other travels back to a rich time in the country’s past. Mountains May Depart opens at the optimistic dawn of a new millennium: it’s 1999 and a group of young men and women are dancing in a choreographed sequence set to the early-Nineties pop anthem “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys....

Despite the imploding Spanish economy, Spanish commercial moviemaking seems to continue, unabated. But it’s a plodding kind of continuity, as uninspired as it is relentless. A prime example is The Clan, the feature debut by director and co-writer Jaime Falero, who’s previously made television nonfiction and shorts. Set in the early era of Franco’s fascist regime (specifically 1944) but hardly alluding to it, the movie begins as a caper, transmogrifies into a character drama, and shifts yet again into a thriller faintly inspired by The Most Dangerous Game....

Todd McCarthy: I didn’t expect it to be this way but I’ve really liked the American films. I think they’ve had a great showing. I loved the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra. I liked James Gray’s The Immigrant, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, James Franco’s As I Lay Dying, and James Toback’s documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which I’m in, so I’m prejudiced. But I think it’s been a really good year for the Americans....

In 1947, James Agee began his review of Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine by roughing out a definition of humanism, then noting parenthetically, “I can most briefly suggest what I mean by a genuine recognition of human beings as such by recommending that you see the Italian movie Shoeshine and that you compare it in this respect with almost any other movie you care to name.” In his extended, rapturous consideration (“one of the few fully alive, fully rational films ever made”), Agee eventually gets around to a brief critical analysis of the film qua film, but his response is unabashedly emotional, moral, and philosophical—he illustrates his own first principles by reacting as a human being, not just a movie critic....