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How you feel about Lola Versus will largely depend on how you feel about Greta Gerwig and her particular brand of mush-mouthed mumblecore charm. There’s a reason the title leaves her adversary unnamed: Lola Versus never specifies what Lola is combating, focusing instead on her and her alone. By the opening credits, it’s clear that Lola hasn’t fought against a whole lot in her life, so when her perfect fiancé calls off the engagement and she’s forced to move out of their perfect rent-controlled studio apartment (which gets great light!...

The subject of Robert Kenner’s documentary Merchants of Doubt is the catastrophe of global climate change, which is engulfing us even faster than predicted. Kenner doesn’t waste time proving, in this terse, brilliantly argued movie, that climate change is happening or that our dependence on fossil fuels has a causal relationship to it. Employing data compiled by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their investigative nonfiction book of the same name, he quickly shows that there is zero argument among actual scientists about either of these conclusions....

The couple and their coworkers spend their days managing the kids’ sudden outbursts, escape attempts, and crises, some of which are quite violent. When an intelligent but troubled tween named Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever, in a standout performance) arrives at the facility, Grace identifies with the girl too closely for her own good, which threatens the stability of her already challenging adult life and puts her relationship with Mason in jeopardy....

The strong-willed lass is as recognizable a type in frontier literature as the lone, vengeful gunslinger. Mattie Ross, the no-nonsense narrator of Charles Portis’s serialized novel True Grit, combines the two roles. Old before her time, the teenage girl seeks to track down and punish her father’s killer, but instead of doing so herself, she hires Rooster Cogburn, a rambling lawman whom she accompanies. In the Coen Brothers’ new adaptation of Portis’s stylized 1968 book, Mattie’s own sense of justice and desire for vengeance, sentiments so central to the Western, manifest themselves in feats of tenacity rather than gunplay—by a prerogative constantly earned, rather than the gunslinger’s mix of tough and bluff....

For his third feature as director, French hotshot multi-hyphenate Guillaume Canet has a go at the sadly sparse subgenre of the friendship comedy-drama, à la The Big Chill. But because his cast of characters is composed of selfish, boring people doing selfish, boring things, Little White Lies is less a portrait of the poignance and beauty of lasting, mostly platonic relationships than a lesson in how to be a shitty friend....

Onetime indie stalwart Joe Carnahan takes his rather cartoonish brand of testosterone into the wilds. The Grey follows a gnarly group of oil-rig workers—“Men unfit for mankind”—who survive a plane crash and find themselves trapped in the Alaskan forest in subzero temperatures and hunted by ferocious wolves. Continuing his transformation into current cinema’s most unlikely bad-ass action hero, Liam Neeson (who also starred in Carnahan’s The A-Team) plays the gruff, foulmouthed leader of the pack—of survivors, that is....

For the past five years, University of Chicago professor and Russian cinema scholar Yuri Tsivian has championed a free software called CineMetrics. CineMetrics tallies minimum, maximum, and median shot length, standard deviation, and other numerical nuggets, enabling more refined and dynamic calculations beyond ASL (average shot length). Findings are transposed to a bar graph displaying the length of each individual shot and a trend line tracing changes over the course of the film....

WPJ appears set to blaze an unpredictable trail out of the sometimes stale confines of dime-a-dozen online film journals. Longtime friends and founding editors Brian Price, John David Rhodes, and Meghan Sutherland describe its outlook as experimental. The project, Sutherland says, began from “a certain shared frustration with the technological specialization of film and television studies scholarship that came with the institution of the fields themselves, and with the professionalized styles of writing ....

Isabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2021) It’s never easy to find one’s calling, and it’s even harder to leave that calling behind, to admit to something like defeat, and to refashion one’s life around new, unexpected pursuits. It could be argued that this is especially hard when one has chosen to embark into that nebulous realm known as “the arts,” where success and failure are challenging to quantify, and sustaining a career can be the result of luck or connections, independent of that ever-elusive ideal called “talent....

Henry King’s camera rests outside a pretty house in the opening shot of Margie, as the Twenties song of the title spills out of an open window on the top floor. Slowly, gracefully, we’re carried up and through that window, into the attic room where Margie (Jeanne Crain), fitted with glasses to designate approaching middle age, is going through an old trunk. Daughter Joyce (Ann E. Todd) plays with her mother’s Victrola....

Tangerine Dream With the heat of summer fast approaching, BAMcinématek’s series dedicated to German synth masters Tangerine Dream is a choice pick for air-conditioned entertainment this June. The selection features a sampling of films scored by the group plus a few tangential additions: Philippe Garrel’s incredibly rare Le Berceau de cristal and Douglas Trumbull’s debut feature Silent Running. Tangerine Dream formed in West Berlin in 1967 as one of the premier bands of the unfortunately monikered “krautrock” movement that revolutionized underground music and proved a lasting influence on mainstream songwriters like David Bowie....

Room at the Top In photographs, Jack Clayton has a rather delicate, vulnerable face, yet as a filmmaker he was capable of putting his fist through a wall to express his displeasure. During his long apprenticeship as an assistant director and then an associate producer, Clayton was perhaps most influenced by the courtly and wicked John Huston, who was known for taking on varied material. And in Clayton’s films—seven features, one TV movie, all literary adaptations—it often feels as if he is a Stanley Kowalski who wants desperately to be Blanche DuBois, and sometimes vice versa....

Things to Come A few weeks having passed since Locarno, the overlapping festivals in Venice, Telluride, and Toronto provide cinematic relief for aficionados of film culture who have survived the summer movie drought. Together, the trio tee up a roster of new films that will screen at other fall festivals—including the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s own New York Film Festival—and then open in theaters in the coming months. The brief Telluride Film Festival, with its long but casual queues and distractingly beautiful Colorado mountain setting, offers attendees enough time to catch just over a dozen or so movies each Labor Day weekend....