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The Night Stalker, (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1972) Streaming may be the new “theatrical experience,” but digital platforms’ fight against big movie production companies, the theater chains, and ardent advocates like Steven Spielberg, is a tale as old as television. In the late 1960s, the studios saw CBS, NBC, and ABC as their direct competitors and gouged them for screening fees for films. ABC saw an opening to streamline operations and produce their own movies at a fraction of the cost, which birthed their famous Movie of the Week format in 1969....

Night Across the Street Night Across the Street, the final film from Chilean master Raul Ruiz, has all the common, often contradictory, characteristics of late cinematic style: an abundance of metaphors for moviegoing and moviemaking; an everything-must-go surplus of visual and thematic ideas; a blithely languid pace; a fondness for digression. In his review of the film for our January/February issue, Aaron Cutler remarks that Ruiz “respond[s] to the world’s finite number of official histories with an infinite number of imagined stories, free of all constraints, including mortality....

By now it’s accepted that the middle entries in trilogies are the prime meat in the sandwich, but what about the second chapters in duos or franchises? Frequently underrated when they appear, they are often more confident and inventive and as fresh as the originals. I’d take The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes over The Hound of the Baskervilles, Gremlins 2 over Gremlins, Spider-Man 2 over every other Spider-Man. On a higher level, I’d take Sanjuro over Yojimbo....

When François Truffaut wrote, “Bogart was a good worker,” and emphasized the “hard work” he did in John Huston’s movies, he meant to salute more than Bogie’s professionalism. In his greatest performances, the actor immersed himself in what a character does for a living, whether it was Sam Spade using quick reflexes and fast hands to strip a gunman of his sidearms or Fred C. Dobbs training his eyes for cigarette butts while on the bum in Mexico or Charlie Allnut attuning himself to the African Queen and kicking the engine to life....

You didn’t have to be a Gen Xer to champion Trainspotting when it exploded into cinemas in 1996 with an anarchic black-comic bang. And you don’t have to be gloating over a wasted generation to embrace T2 Trainspotting, a confident, quirky comedy-drama that skillfully alternates bangs and whimpers. The same creative team that brought novelist Irvine Welsh’s motley crew of losers and junkies off the Edinburgh streets and onto the big screen 20 years ago has reassembled to drag them snorting and screaming, often on the brink of death, into the mind-clouding 21st century....

In James Whale’s least-seen masterpiece, The Old Dark House (1932), a landslide in a rainstorm forces a handful of urban sophisticates off a country road in Wales. They find shelter in a rambling manse, and heart-stopping comedy-drama with its perverse inmates. A deaf religious fanatic, Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore), owns the title edifice; her desiccated brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger), hiding from police, presents the only civil face to strangers; a lurching, crazily scarred mute, Morgan (Boris Karloff), serves as family handyman, butler, and thug; and in a third-story bedroom the siblings’ 102-year-old father, Sir Roderick Femm (Elspeth Dudgeon, billed as “John”), wastes away, dreaming of bacchanals back in the day....

Images from The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor, 2020) This hybrid of an underdog teen sports movie with a middle-aged man-in-crisis film is worse than a downer. It’s an up-and-downer. Brad Inglesby’s script careens between a misfit hoops team ultimately battling for a championship, kindling fleeting sparks of rah-rah energy, and first-time coach and former high school star Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) succumbing to personal despair and alcohol and strangling his own comeback....

AI (Lucrecia Martel, 2019) Every year, the Viennale commissions a trailer from a bona fide filmmaker, and the 2019 edition brought about a doozy: Lucrecia Martel’s AI, a haunting pixelated détournement of a mid-century film documenting a psychiatric patient. The ability to garner a short from Martel—whose 2017 feature Zama sits atop Film Comment’s Best of the Decade list, by the way—speaks to the position of respect and goodwill that the festival occupies....

La Moustache To be sure, Emmanuel Carrère has worked extensively as a scenarist and has directed two very good features, though it’s notable that Retour à Kotelnitch, his 2003 documentary rumination on a harrowing double-homicide in rural Russia, began its life as television reportage, and La Moustache (05) was a well-made, perfectly faithful adaptation of Carrère’s own 1986 breakthrough novel of the same name. It’s Carrère’s literary legacy that really matters here....

Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) Films from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Zama have taught us that supposedly civilized men are destined to break when stranded in unspoiled terrain. Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland investigates this phenomenon with finesse, accumulating snapshots from a missionary’s trek through the Icelandic hinterlands during the late 19th century into an exquisite portrait of desolation. The young Danish priest at the heart of the film, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), looks to have emerged from a Munch painting, his face growing increasingly agonized as Pálmason’s sprawling script throws blow after blow at him....

This Is Not My Music (Urban Lasson, 1978) Urban Lasson’s 1978 made-for-television documentary observes and emulates the life and work of jazz musician Don Cherry, whose entire career was predicated on finding stillness in constant motion. The opening sequence alone is representative of the apparent contradictions at the heart of Cherry’s music. The camera finds the Los Angeles native—who made his name playing trumpet in Ornette Coleman’s iconic quartet—sitting in an idyllic near his home in the rural Swedish village of Tågarp, piping birdsong on an ocarina....

What’s Up Connection (Masashi Yamamoto, 1990) The hop-skip nomadism of Masashi Yamamoto’s early narrative work can be said to be defined by three salient tendencies: the late-’70s jishu eiga, or “self-made films” movement, which countered the Japanese studio system with a rush of 8mm and 16mm vérités; home-seeking, an acute desire to build or find one’s place in the world; and political anarchism, with its passion for flagrant resistance. All three strands are plaited together in Yamamoto’s jishu contributions, Prelude to the Murder of a Prison Guard (1979), about a man magpieing objects in order to construct his own miniature city, and Carnival in the Night (1981), in which a fresh divorcée traipses around Tokyo’s punk underbelly, feverishly trying to jilt domesticity and rebuild herself....

Ciné-snobs, enjoy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl while you can, because it will soon become one of those films that you roll your eyes at the mention of. The Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner at this year’s Sundance is one of those clever, energetic, inventive, affecting films that end up becoming the favorite movie of a great many people, including lots who aren’t especially movie lovers (the latter won’t be put off by the fact that Me and Earl is a cinephile movie par excellence)....

IWOW: I Walk on Water (Khalik Allah, 2020) Thank goodness for Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlin, and all the other events around the world that were our last gasp of festival-going, until further notice. How churlish I now feel after complaining that most of the cafes and restaurants around Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz were shut—at least some of them were open, and we weren’t afraid to go into them. Let’s not sound too tragedy-stricken: it’s better to lose festivals temporarily than people permanently....

Among the many parody Downfall videos on YouTube, featuring Bruno Ganz’s Hitler ranting in subtitles about every subject under the sun, there’s one about prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo. He has offended the Führer by “making the same film for 10 years . . . with his crap photography. Does he even have a DoP? . . . Always the same navel-gazing universe—and the critics love it!” As with the best of these DIY spoofs, which startle us into realizing we actually agree with Hitler, there’s a valid point being made, if a somewhat obvious one....

Images from Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019) There used to be a children’s show on British TV called Crackerjack!. It featured games (winners in the studio would win a much-prized Crackerjack! pencil), audience participation (whenever anyone mentioned the show’s title, everyone had to shout out “Crackerjack!”), and a weekly comedy sketch in which characters would intermittently burst into song, singing whichever current pop hits had arbitrarily been shoehorned into the script....

The Missing Picture Panh’s attempts as a filmmaker to come to terms with his country’s recent past include the drama Rice People (94) and several documentaries about the Pol Pot era, such as S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (03) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (12). But The Missing Picture is harder to categorize. Documentary, personal essay, historical reconstruction, film poem, therapeutic exercise—it’s something of all of these....

While Sergei Eisenstein was in Paris, the notorious artist’s-model Kiki de Montparnasse gave him a copy of a book of her memoirs with the dedication: “Moi aussi j’aime les gros bateaux et les matelots” (“I too love big ships and sailors”). Kiki was no dummy, and might have owed her great popularity not only to her good looks but to her wit. That “clin d’oeil” to the Soviet film director proved that she had a better insight into Battleship Potemkin, otherwise considered an austere film, than most of her contemporary critics and scholars with their Marxist analysis....