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Black Caesar Come this March, Anthology Film Archives will round out the third trimester of its extensive American International Pictures series with a string of blaxploitation films representing most of its various sub-sub-genres short of kung fu, Western, pimp life, and slave uprising. Coffy, Blacula, Black Caesar, J.D.’s Revenge, and others will screen as part of the series, offering samples of the vigilante, vampire, gangster, and supernatural genera within the blaxploitation family, and nearly all of them feature exemplary original soundtracks....

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s self-destructive adaptation of Billy Moore’s 2014 memoir about his evolution from Liverpool hooligan to Narcotics Anonymous advocate zeroes in on his two years in horrific Thai prisons—roughly 60 percent of the book—and his training in Muay Thai boxing, which uses fists, elbows, knees, feet, and shins. Watching this feral no-exit film is like running a gantlet on roller skates, with blinders. “Subjective camera” usually means turning the lens into the eye of the protagonist, so that we see exactly what he or she sees and thus share the experience....

A harrowing, heart-rending portrait of a Danish company commander in Afghanistan, A War is named A War, not The War or simply War, for the same reason that Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm called his crackling film about Somali pirates A Hijacking (13). Without inflating any of it into sermonizing melodrama, this formidably talented writer-director finds the universal within the specific. He’s got great depth of focus, and even his peripheral vision is 20-20....

The image of a boyish Christian tailor befriending a man-eating lion by removing a thorn from its paw, then dazzling Caesar into mercy when they re-meet and embrace in a bloody Coliseum, made the movie version of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion a childhood favorite when it rolled out in syndication on 1950s television. (The casting also helped: Alan Young, future co-star of the talking horse, Mr. Ed, played Androcles....

Images from Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 2019) In Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood stages and times the explosion at Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta with teeth-rattling impact. The sequence contains some of Eastwood’s finest direction: he lets us drink in the mass picnic atmosphere of a pop/rock concert under the stars while an ultra-vigilant private security guard, Jewell, spots a suspicious-looking backpack under a bench near the park’s light and sound tower....

The Dark Horse is a rough beauty of a picture. Movies are often called “immersive” when they employ cutting-edge audiovisual technology to overwhelm the audience with sensations. This film’s writer-director, James Napier Robertson, approaches immersion psychologically and contextually. He brings you into the core of his characters and the center of a sociopolitical maelstrom. In the opening scene, his camera follows Genesis Potini (Cliff Curtis)—a mountain of a man draped in a colorful, sodden patchwork—as he walks a Gisborne, New Zealand street in a pounding rainstorm, reciting poetic phrases about light and dark while gesticulating manically yet somehow regally....

Marius The “girl woos boy, girl loses boy” plot at the center of Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936), playwright-turned-filmmaker Marcel Pagnol’s seriocomic Marseille Trilogy, is the steam engine that drives a marvelous old-school carousel. What makes this tragicomic merry-go-round so intoxicating is not its speed or pace (slow and steady), but the beauty of its weather-streaked, hand-carved figures as they chug up and down and come full circle....

In The President, Iranian expatriate filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf struggles to create a vital fable out of a contemporary political nightmare. Set in an unnamed fictional nation state and filmed in the country of Georgia, the movie chronicles the attempted flight of a deposed tyrant (Misha Gomiashvili) and his 5-year-old heir and grandson (Dachi Orvelashvili) from longtime foes and former allies. Makhmalbaf shades the film in colors ranging from the hypnotic reds of the imperial court to the numbing omnipresent ochre of the arid wastes surrounding it....

In Robert Eggers’s skin-crawling historical horror film, The Witch, a family strikes out on its own in 1630 New England to farm on the edge of the wilderness. The father, William (Ralph Ineson), espouses a brand of religion too pure for the Puritan community that banishes them. He and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) hope to establish a Christian homestead for their brood: adolescent daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), slightly younger son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), pipsqueak twins Mercy (Elle Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) and newborn son Samuel....

The good and bad news about Una, the film version of David Harrower’s play Blackbird, is that it makes us want to see a first-rate stage production with the same two stars. In the title role, Rooney Mara imbues a grown victim of child sexual abuse with a piercing awareness of deep psychic wounds and a frightening cool volatility. Mara keeps us guessing about Una’s shifting feelings as well as her plans and motives and, throughout, we remain invested in her fate....

It might sound overly ambitious for a superhero film to transport The Great War into blockbuster American pop culture, but Wonder Woman does it deftly and movingly. (And, to our national shame, what other form of mass entertainment has marked this momentous centennial?) The original Wonder Woman fought the Nazis, but it’s surprisingly pungent to depict her fighting “the war to end all wars.” Ending war is what she thinks she’s doing when she and Steve team up to stop the evil General Ludendorff (Danny Huston) from using a lethal gas devised by evil genius Dr....

Nunca subí el Provincia (Ignacio Agüero, 2019) As befits a festival specializing in documentary cinema with porous boundaries, the 30th edition of FIDMarseille rubbed shoulders with a media event all but unrelated to the cinema: the semi-final of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations. In this city with large Tunisian and Algerian populations, there was a special kind of charge in the air. Whereas film festivals often feel cloistered from the outside world, the twin spectacles of football match and sometimes violent Bastille Day celebrations were impossible to ignore in Marseille, even in the space of the cinema itself....

Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia (The Daniels, Hannah Fidell, Alexa Lim Haas, Lucas Leyva, Olivia Lloyd, Phil Lord, Jillian Mayer, The Meza Brothers, Terence Nance, Brett Potter, Dylan Redford, Xander Robin, Julian Yuri Rodriguez, and Celia Rowlson-Hall, 2019) There is nothing intrinsically youthful about the short film, but by virtue of the fact that so many filmmakers working in the short form during their apprenticeship period, it can sometimes be imagined, fairly or unfairly, as a kind of cinematic adolescence, a training wheels medium spent poised on the cusp of the “real world”—the feature film, that is, with its adult responsibilities and potential commercial prospects....

Sin Alas With his gorgeous second feature Sin Alas (Without Wings), Brooklyn-based filmmaker Ben Chace taps into Cuba’s long cinematic tradition of coping with memory and history. It might be an American production, but it’s the first movie filmed entirely in Cuba in more than half a century. Shot on nostalgic Super 16mm, Sin Alas is infused with close-ups and details that capture the old city of Havana, its faces and buildings inviting us to reminisce and yearn for a country, which is now on the verge of vigorous change....

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s decision to adapt a novel by the late Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon is nothing if not ironic. Simenon was wildly prolific and created tightly paced tales, while Tarr—well, you know. Sátántangó? Werckmeister Harmonies? If you IMDb Simenon, Tarr emerges as the clear database loser—by a long shot: 173 entries to Tarr’s 14. But in The Man from London Tarr achieves an uncanny re-creation of Simenon’s stifling atmosphere, oddly blacked-out characters, and dead-end narrative style....

Harvey Bernard Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America, was assassinated on November 27, 1978. He always knew he would die young; Milk’s biographer, Randy Shilts, finds evidence of his fatalism going back to his early days as a closeted Wall Street conservative. Nearly a year to the date before he was killed, the city supervisor–elect sat in the kitchen of his Castro Street apartment and recorded a political will to be played “only in the event of my death by assassination....

The Eternal Night of Twelve Moons Some of these issues, however, were offset by programs like “Cine en el Barrio,” which brought children and the elderly into select screenings (even if many kids just chatted through the movies), and by the fact that five of the seven screening sites were positioned within Cartagena’s ciudad vieja, shielded from the grinding poverty of other parts of the city. Also, the films in the documentary competition reflected a desire to incorporate a broad range of voices....

Remembrance–A Small Movie about Oulu in the 1950s The Pathé shorts, which included Cambrioleurs modernes, screened in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cineteca Bologna, the Piazzetta Pasolini. There, the blue smoke emanating from the carbon arc projector drew as much attention from the crowd as the brilliantly hand-tinted costumes of L’Obsession de l’or (1906). A few select features every evening were showcased on the giant outdoor screen in the Piazza Maggiore, a wide, portico-flanked square in the heart of the old city....

We’re pleased to announce that Black Panther will return to the big screen with free screenings at nonprofit art-house theaters nationwide on Tuesday, November 27 at 4:00pm PT/7:00pm ET. Supported by the Art House Convergence, this Film Comment event will feature a post-screening Q&A with director Ryan Coogler, taking place at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, CA, streamed live to participating theaters. A full list of theaters can be found below....

Boyhood Richard Linklater, U.S. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson, U.S. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, U.K. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance Alejandro G. Iñárritu, U.S. Ida Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch, U.S. Inherent Vice Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S. 8. Whiplash Damien Chazelle, U.S 9. Gone Girl David Fincher, U.S. 10. Nightcrawler Dan Gilroy, U.S. Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium...