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Roland Barthes famously said of two mythical actresses, “Garbo’s face is an Idea, [Audrey] Hepburn’s an Event.” By the same token, you could say that Nicole Kidman’s face is a Gamble, a throw of the dice. You never know what you’re going to get: Kidman gives good performances and bad ones, but she also gives good and bad face. One of the great close-ups in this century’s cinema comes in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth; it holds tight on Kidman’s face as her character sits watching an opera performance, and the slightest tremors (and they are slight, just delicate vibrations) speak volumes....

If Saving Mr. Banks has the effect on you that it’s so craftily engineered to have, you may come out wanting, as the song says, to go fly a kite. Of course, the kite is heavily emblazoned with the Walt Disney corporate logo. Directed by John Lee Hancock, Saving Mr. Banks is the story behind the making of Mary Poppins: it’s at once an extraordinarily lavish brand-awareness exercise and the origin myth of a singularly durable film property (it would make an interesting double bill with last year’s Hitchcock, about the overcoming of the obstacles that nearly scuppered Psycho)....

Traditional wisdom has it that the more culturally specific a story, the more likely it is to attain universal resonance. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox could be used as Exhibit A to support that proposition—and the phenomenon on which the film is built is very specific indeed. Set in the everyday working world of Mumbai, Batra’s feature is built on the Indian custom of lunchbox deliveries. In Mumbai particularly, armies of food delivery men, known as dabbawallahs, bring lunchboxes to the workplace: these are round, stacking metal boxes filled with hot food usually prepared by an office worker’s family or meal suppliers; at the end of the day, they collect the boxes and take them back home....

Hard times continue: Louise (Yolande Moreau) and Michel (Bouli Lanners) are the not-altogether-agreeable-looking duo at the center of Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern’s brazen third feature. They meet randomly in this madcap story—which takes its name from the 19th-century feminist-anarchist Louise Michel—and forge ahead as would-be assassins. Their mission? To track down and kill the factory owner who’s left a disgruntled mob of sweatshop employees high and dry. A decision has been made to pool meager severance packages into a lump sum....

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (Dani and Sheilah Restack, 2017) Dani and Sheilah ReStack met in 2013 in Columbus, Ohio and began making art together shortly afterward. Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, a homegrown science-fiction film that is in part a record of their love affair, was completed in 2017, followed by Come Coyote (2018) and Future From Inside (2021). Together these would become the “Feral Domestic” trilogy, an offbeat record of the artists’ entwined domestic and creative lives....

Jeannette Catsoulis summed up her New York Times review of Partly Fiction with “You won’t learn much, but you’ll be strangely happy that you didn’t”—a catchphrase that Stanton immediately latched onto, repeating it proudly to an adoring audience at the film’s New York premiere. After decades of partying and flower-child philosophizing, Stanton remains an old-fashioned man, protective of his privacy. Like the lyrics in his friend Kris Kristofferson’s song, he’s crafted a persona that’s “partly truth and partly fiction” with a spaced-out demeanor that obscures a rusty internal filter—trickling out tidbits of information that are both everything and nothing, his own Eastern-inflected pearls of wisdom....

Daughters of the Dust was originally met with confusion about its portrayal of a part of African American history that was, up to that point, unrecognized in the mainstream. The film’s focus lies firmly on the lives of the Peazant women, interweaving narratives of the past, present, and future and using two narrators (Nana and “the Unborn Child”). Its images are as immersive as they are elusive, with bodies always carefully situated in relation to each other as generations intermingle, conflict, and ultimately make their peace....

Rejtman sustains a unique energy across all of his work, which combines droll dialogue with screwball-inspired situations and chance. In Two Shots Fired, 18-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman) finds a revolver in his mother’s house and shoots himself in the stomach and head, but survives without lasting physical effects, save for an odd harmonic that’s only audible while he plays in a medieval flute quartet. His distraught mother (Susana Pampin) insists that he carry her clunky old cell phone with him at all times, even though it constantly emits shrieking reminders of long since missed calls....

Itim: isang eksplorasyon sa pelikula [Itim: An Exploration in Cinema] (Clodualdo “Doy” del Mundo Jr., 1976). Courtesy Mike De Leon An eminent filmmaker of the so-called Second Golden Age of Philippine cinema, Mike De Leon was a peer of Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal. But where Brocka made what some regard as “poverty porn,” drawing attention from the European festival circuit with Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), and Bernal celebrated the social lives of his own urban middle class with films like City After Dark (1980), De Leon both embraced and scathingly critiqued the upper-class, film-literate world from which he came—a powerful dynasty of movie producers....

One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, 2019) Nanfu Wang was born in China in 1985 and grew up through the last few decades of its “one child era”—i.e., the period from the late 1970s to 2015 during which the state enforced a one-child-per-family policy through law, force, and ubiquitous propaganda. Thanks to the latter, Wang—who was the firstborn in one of the lucky rural families permitted to have a second child—never fully realized the destructive extent of the policy on her family, community, and her own self....

Set in 1979 on the eve of the AIDS epidemic, Knife + Heart follows Anne (Vanessa Paradis), a gay porn producer whose alcoholism has derailed her relationship with her girlfriend and longtime editor Loïs (Kate Moran), whose stability and support has helped her partner expand the creative potential of the adult entertainment industry. But when multiple members of Anne’s motley crew of hairy-chested, oiled-up actors begin to fall prey to a mysterious masked murderer—face obscured by Grand Guignol getup and armed with a switchblade dildo (because why not)—Anne is forced to trace the trail of bodies from the city to the countryside, where past transgressions and repressed memories obscure ever more dire secrets....

Dear Kleber, Going back to the roots of communication seems like an exciting way of talking about a film that deals so much with memory and the vestiges of time. In fact, I keep thinking of T.S. Eliot’s concept of the “historical sense” in trying to wrap my head around Aquarius. In Eliot’s words, this is the “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence....

Richard Linklater’s movie connects the characters with the audience unlike any picture I’ve ever seen. While it was centered around Mason’s “boyhood,” I became just as interested in watching his parents and siblings grow up around him and how they impacted his life. The song “Hero” by the indie band Family of the Year made this film so innocent and personable, and you often find yourself holding back tears. I think one of the many reasons this picture is raved about is that every audience member can connect something Mason went through to their own personal life, and that really hits home....

The group emerged amidst a peculiarly contradictory time for British society. On the one hand, the British Film Institute’s production board and the launch of independent terrestrial station Channel 4 provided fecund ground for artistic creativity, while the signing of the ACCT Workshop Declaration guaranteed funding and audience development for diverse filmmaking collectives like BAFC and the all-Asian group ReTake. On the other, Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing administration was busy developing its commitment to free-market ideology, and racially-motivated riots had been tearing through a number of the country’s urban areas, threatening a full-on culture war....

Film has long explored the illusion of movement created through the rapid sequencing of still frames, from cel and stop-motion animation to, in the first film shown in the series, Chris Marker’s 1962 short La Jetée. Other films in the program animate images through more unusual means, whether by alternating between stereographic views to produce the sensation of movement in Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (from 2006) and Nymph (2007), or, more literally, by burning photographs on a hotplate in Hollis Frampton’s 1971 Hapax Legomena 1: (nostalgia)....

Strange Girl (Jovan Živanović, 1962) The works presented by the Museum of Modern Art in the series Black Wave to White Ray: Yugoslav Films of the 1960s feel like strange dreams of an in-between time and place. These films capture the uncertainties of a country that, after the horrors of World War II, had struggled for its independence and was supposedly thriving as a socialist union of six republics, which would nevertheless violently break apart only 30 years later....

Twenty years off has not dimmed the dimwittedness of Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), the morons of Dumb and Dumber and now its sequel. Though their faces have become riven with wrinkles and folds of fat since their debut in 1994, age has granted them not wisdom but instead short-term memory loss, allowing them a kind of radical freedom to forgive each other’s formidable flaws. The only thing they never forget is their affection for each other, lending their infantile bond a sweetness that is central to Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s bodily-fluid-rich oeuvre....