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Barbara Harris in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) To start, two moments from Robert Altman’s Nashville: Both actresses—Harris and Tomlin—came from an improv and/or comedy background. Harris was on the forefront of the new improv “scene” in the late 1950s, first with The Compass Players (a groundbreaking improv troupe), and then with the brand new Second City company. Tomlin had a successful stand-up act, and then was cast on the variety show Laugh-In, which made her famous....

Images from Olivia (Jacqueline Audry, 1951) “Now I must bid farewell to all that I love.” It’s a line that comes late in Olivia, and though it’s one of the many grandiloquent, intensely delivered emotions that buffet this strange and beautiful film along its winding way, this moment hits particularly strongly. It’s spoken by a disintegrating Miss Julie (Edwige Feuillère), headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, to a pupil, Olivia (Marie-Claire Olivia)....

“What happened? We finally get our own Vietnam and our own Nixon (or the closest thing we may get for awhile) and instead of channeling this escalating madness into urgent, ground-breaking cinema (i.e. the early Seventies), we tuned in and dropped out to whatever dope they had at the party-there were numbing empty highs, like Kill Bill or Return of the King, for some, and for others, murky lude hazes, like Mystic River or Lost In Translation, (the latter two drunk enough on their own atmosphere to distract us from how graceless, maundering and scrappy they were as films)....

Everybody is on the take or on the make in David O. Russell’s American Hustle, shifting and grifting their way through a post-Watergate, pre-Reaganomics America. The time is 1978, and the premise is rooted in fact: a real, New York–based FBI sting operation that ensnared a half-dozen United States congressmen and assorted other officials on bribery and corruption charges. But period details aside, American Hustle reaches for something timeless. It’s a portrait of palm-greasing and flimflamming as the very lingua franca of American life, a movie about the lies we tell—not least to ourselves—just to get through the day....

To say that Consuming Sprits—a meticulously constructed animated feature set in small-town Appalachia written, directed, edited, and produced by the talented Chris Sullivan—is depressing is not a value judgment so much as a fact. Over the course of its 129 minutes, this willfully disturbing, almost exultant catalogue of alcohol’s ills sketches out the intricate gradations of addiction, melancholia, and humiliation from which its three main characters—skillfully rendered in pencil drawing, cutout animation, collage, and stop-motion animation—suffer....

Before NPR, texting, and Facebook, there was WBAI, New York’s idiosyncratic, left-of-left-wing public radio station, where Bob Fass has broadcast “Radio Unnameable”—his “free-form” midnight show—for much of the past half-century. Radio Unnameable brings 50 years of its subject’s history to life, intriguingly pairing archival stills and audio with Super 8, 16mm, and Hi-8 video footage to evoke Fass’s life and times. Radio Unnameable presents an impressively cogent history of the American Left from 1963 to the present, while profitably abstaining from the pro-forma nostalgia that often saturates documentaries about the Sixties....

The latest in the series currently celebrating “50 years of Bond,” Sam Mendes’s Skyfall is the first of the Daniel Craig outings to marry what has become a hallmark of the last two films (“James Bond goes parkour” action scenes and an unforgiving non-sentimental focus toward the job at hand) to the romance and nostalgia that have kept these movies going through changing times and different actors portraying everyone’s favorite agent with a license to kill....

Everson’s inspiration for The Island of St. Matthews comes out of his aunt’s terse response to his question about their lack of old family photographs: “We lost them in the flood.” The film unfolds entirely in his parents’ hometown of Westport, a small, rural community just outside of Columbus, Mississippi. Everson first juxtaposes languorous images that are seemingly connected only by their prominent use of rippling water as a compositional element: a man waterskiing (and wiping out); a man working at a lock and dam; and a baptism....

The futuristic, melodramatic eclecticism of Björk’s music, videos and multimedia performances has made her reputation as a seer of aesthetic and emotional possibilities not ordinarily perceivable. In her first feature film role, the primarily self-funded debut of a filmmaker whose career would prove to be short on both opportunities and time, Björk played a literal visionary. Margit of The Juniper Tree (1990) is a young woman coming of age in an era of magic and witchcraft, who is sometimes overtaken with an apparition in the form of her dead mother, foretelling ominous and ambiguous hints to the mysteries of the spirit world....

“Everyone knows amnesia is bullshit,” mutters a henchman after the art heist in Trance, a film about the loss—and retrieval—of memory. The self-aware disclaimer does little to alleviate the fact that beneath all of the high-concept razzle-dazzle is a narrative spine with a bad case of sclerosis. It starts off well enough: Simon (James McAvoy), a blue-eyed auctioneer in a well-tailored suit, has collaborated with a band of thieves to steal Goya’s Witches in the Air in order to pay off his gambling debts....

City on Fire In August 1986, John Woo released A Better Tomorrow, his blockbuster crime movie that fused the heroic tropes of the wuxia genre to the gangster film, recasting triad criminals as martial-arts swordsmen. Street thugs were transformed into sworn brothers who lived by a chivalric code, with silk robes replaced by black trench coats and gleaming swords by twin Berettas. Seven months later, in February 1987, Ringo Lam released City on Fire, about an undercover cop who exploits this code of brotherhood to infiltrate a gang of trigger-happy strong-arm bandits....

World War II films tend to reflect the immensity of the conflict in the scale of the production. On a fraction of the usual budget, Canopy adopts a more modest, arty approach to the war, following a downed pilot from Down Under, stranded behind enemy lines, as he trudges through the jungles of Singapore and attempts to evade the Imperial Japanese Army. In many ways, Canopy is closer to a fairy tale than a war film, its soldier like a hero on a perilous, mystical journey through a primordial forest, with a sort of pre-linguistic logic guiding the action....

Despite an aughts revival and an eighties movie version, A Chorus Line, Michael Bennett’s groundbreaking, self-referential 1975 whoop of desperation from the “swing” set, has never broken free from the grip of its time and place (the pre-AIDS Great White Way). Some may talk up its “universal” themes of sexual tolerance and artistic struggle, but any musical theater wonk worth his salt knows that A Chorus Line has always been an unapologetically naval-gazing Nellie....

Sachs’s ever-ready eye is behind the lion’s share of entries: her “Foudroyant” response is a particularly potent rendition of the kaleidoscopic Coney Island film. David Gatten (“Rete”) and George Kuchar (“Pelagic”) contribute, respectively, a city symphony from leafily obstructed vantages and a poignant and peculiar visit to a Bronx funeral home. Beyond its homepage’s elegant interface, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums....

An experiment: should you find yourself idling through this tangled Web we weave, and it strikes you to follow the advice of this publication and peruse the annals of jonasmekasfilms.com—stop. Instead, detour to any video-sharing site. In the search bar, type something like “Visit to Grandma, 1991,” or “First Birthday,” or “Our Vacation Video,” anything, you get the idea. Play the clip. Yes, it’s someone else’s life, but after a few seconds ....

In viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis (Gianfranco Rosi, 2022) At the end of Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary, In viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, the Pope is praying. Pleading with God to “illuminate our consciences,” he asks that humankind not be abandoned to its deeds. “Stop us, Lord,” he says. “Stop us.” Those are startling words to hear out of the mouth of the most famous figure in Christendom....