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It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that something or someone gets kicked in every single scene of The Unjust. But it’s no exaggeration to say that every character, blood boiling, screams his head off at some point. (There’s also a fair amount of face-slapping.) The film’s title seems to refer to every level of Korea’s social hierarchy and organization: the family, the court system, the police, big business, and, of course, the press....

Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer, 2022) A musician-turned-filmmaker with a background in theater, Amanda Kramer has—with only four features and four shorts to her name—put together one of the most idiosyncratic and original filmographies to come out of the American indie scene in recent years. It’s a body of work populated with outcasts fumbling after repressed desires, and filled with unhinged performances, eerie set designs, and extravagant costumes. Kramer’s films straddle multiple genres and modes, from the girls-only Lord of the Flies retelling of 2018’s Ladyworld to the nightmarish TV-variety-hour format of Give Me Pity!...

How did you come up with this project? It’s a book I had read decades ago—one decade ago, something like that—that I had loved, and I remembered I had used bits and pieces of it in Kings and Queen. I knew that there was a project—this idea which haunted me. After A Christmas Tale, there was this big fear of making a remake of La Vie des morts—it was this threat on me, and after that the plot was just all these people coming from the same family trapped in a house, so it was really between the characters coming from the same background, all of them being Caucasian, being from the North of France, Roubaix....

Abuse of Weakness has a steady undercurrent of tension throughout, and Huppert’s emotionally clamped down performance combined with the alternately placid and disturbing textures of Maud’s life give it the feel of a waking dream, with hints of the Gothic. FILM COMMENT spoke with Breillat about the film recently in a spirited and lengthy Skype session. One of the first things I want to ask you about is the scene when Maud says, while being fitted for orthopedic shoes, “The handicapped need an S&M look....

At first blush, Frankie (wide-eyed newcomer Harris Dickinson) seems to be a typical beach rat: unemployed, blonde, and buff. He spends most of his time getting high with friends and wandering around Jacob Riis Park, but there’s an undercurrent of insecurity and unhappiness that his swagger can’t hide. Frankie’s father is dying (which provides him with a steady supply of painkillers), and at night he frequents a ChatRoulette-like gay cruising site....

—Simone Weil, from “Void and Compensation” section of Gravity and Grace The great Prussian writer, Heinrich von Kleist, on the verge of losing his patronage, given to clenching his fists in awkwardness, is coming on to his cousin, Marie, at a tea party. “Would you care to die with me?” he asks her by way of a pick-up line. Marie (Sandra Hüller) rebuffs him, with a scrunched-up smile and touch of his arm, as if she were responding to a boyishly imprudent method of flirtation....

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019) In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s new film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, an elephant’s tusk becomes an object of dramatic intrigue. Furthering the Argentinian-British artist-filmmaker’s interest in nature, zoology, and the art of preservation, this globetrotting work of creative nonfiction—Rinland’s first feature following a decade of formally adventurous short and medium-length films, gallery work, and photography—skillfully traces the production of a replica pachyderm tooth dating from the late 19th century....

The wittiest line in Birdman is a quote from Roland Barthes: “The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters.” Few contemporary movies transform comic-strip characters into mythic heroes and propel them into resonating odysseys as thrillingly as the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise. Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (11) questioned the ethics of animal testing and conveyed the catalytic impact of a chattering creature learning language....

“There are two types of people,” Sebastian Silva said following the Sundance premiere of Nasty Baby. “People who care about spoilers and people who don’t. I don’t give a shit. This movie should work even if people know the ending.” Ostensibly a breezy dramedy about a progressive Brooklyn trio trying to get pregnant, it’s no spoiler at this point to reveal that the Chilean director’s latest film takes a hard left in its final act....

First: Why Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror? The Mirror moves me so powerfully it is impossible to express. The experience of viewing the multi-layered visual sequences with their diverse sound effects, the very particular use of music (electronic, classical, and flamenco) and voiceover amounts to an epiphany. Near the beginning, we hear the disembodied voice of the filmmaker’s poet-father Arseniy Tarkovsky reciting his poem “First Meetings.” “Ordinary objects are at once transfigured / Everything—the jug—the basin—when placed between us like a sentinel / Stood water laminary and firm....

Filmed from 2008 to 2010 in Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad, El Said’s film is part diary and part documentary, its tone by turns dusky meditation and volcanic alarm. His Cairo—and, by extension, his life—sprawls, twists, and spills over. We meet Khalid’s mother, confined to a hospital bed; Laila, his girlfriend, who’s preparing to leave Cairo (“I want to kiss you in public and feel it’s normal. All we do is hide....

Winners and Sinners Sammo Hung is often called the greatest action director in the world. Why? The backstory: Sammo went to a Peking Opera School called the Chinese Drama Academy as a child and his class spawned Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao (an acrobat considered the little brother of the group), Yuen Wah (who became Bruce Lee’s stunt double and a frequent onscreen villain), Corey Yuen (an award-winning director famous for working with women), and frequent action choreographers and actors, Yuen Miu and Yuen Tak....

You Hurt My Feelings (Nicole Holofcener, 2023) There’s a moment in You Hurt My Feelings when Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is talking with her agent, to whom she’s recently sent her new novel. Over coffee, they discuss her previous book, a memoir, which did pretty well. Nevertheless, with the market what it is today, hers is an “old voice.” Not only that, but the abuse she described in her memoir was “only verbal”—nothing rough or life-threatening....

From What is Before For more than 10 years now, Lav Diaz has been using digital technology to emancipate his cinema from “the business and bullshit feudal mentality of the Philippine studio system.” It all started in spring 2003, when he and cinematographer Richard de Guzman decided to complete a several-years-in-the-making independent movie about the trials and tribulations of a Filipino family from 1971 to 1987 by shooting in digital instead of using more expensive 16mm film....

Crooked Candy As anyone who has been trapped in an interminable conversation can attest, the ability to make a long story short is a rare gift. So why is it that the short film (unlike the short story) is more frequently regarded as a stepping-stone toward feature filmmaking than a valid mode of storytelling in its own right? The 52nd New York Film Festival went a long way towards recognizing the form’s intrinsic value with their annual dedicated shorts programs, which far from being a sideshow to the main slate, sold tickets handsomely....

With his 1994 debut, the Taiwanese writer-director Wu Nien-jen looks back at his memories of paternal love as if through squinted eyes. The opening shot of A Borrowed Life is unabashedly nostalgic: the outline of a man polishing his shoes, almost imperceptible behind a gauze of soft focus. Subsequent scenes string together glimpses of father Sega (Tsai Chennan) slicking his hair back for a night on the town, joking with his friends on a hillside as the wind ruffles their shirts, and emerging from a dark tunnel after a day’s work in the coal mines....