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Beyond the Hills At 44, Cristian Mungiu rides the crest of the Romanian New Wave, having won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 with his second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Romania’s cinematic Renaissance took about a decade to kick in after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Nicolae Ceausescu, with classic storytelling, composition, color, sound, and characters. Mungiu’s contemporaries (Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu) may shade their terrain a bit more freely with comic brushstrokes, but this generation of directors seem to have mostly modern roots, in Czech film and the New German Cinema....

Bastards Actually, it’s no laughing matter. This year, alongside their riveting coverage of the latest acquisition deals and who ate at what restaurant, the daily trades were filled with reports of apartment and hotel room robberies, jewel heists, muggings, and scams (some unwary industry folk arrived to find that the accommodations they’d booked online didn’t exist). As well as catering to all manner of vice, Cannes has always attracted the criminal element, and I’ve heard tell of epidemics of muggings back in the good old days....

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024) My first real shock of this year’s Cannes came courtesy of Jacques Audiard’s ludicrously misjudged narco-musical Emilia Pérez—and I don’t mean the film itself, though it certainly aims to inspire awe with its soapy subject matter and color-saturated bursts of song and dance. What flabbergasted me is that the film has champions, at least according to early reactions and the dubious measuring stick of the standing ovation (eleven minutes, among the longest of Cannes 2024 to date)....

The Young Master Tiny and coiled, with a scrapper’s bright black eyes framing a comic’s prominent nose, Jackie Chan is Asia’s biggest movie star, and with his growing popularity in South America and Europe, he may be one of the biggest draws in the world. And yet, despite the strong backing of Hong Kong’s prosperous Golden Harvest studios, Chan still hasn’t been able to make a dent in the U....

A squadron commander erases dead men’s names from a chalkboard. The time is 1915, “when a great country was forced to entrust its salvation to its youth.” Major Brand (a barking, exhausted Neil Hamilton), the Commanding Officer of the 59th Squadron of Britain’s Royal Flying Corps, drinks to relieve the pain of sending boys to be shot down each day, while the survivors, led by flying ace Dick Courtney (a quiet, hooded-eyed Richard Barthelmess), drink to pass whatever time remains for them....

Soon after the world premiere of Good Time at Cannes, its star, Robert Pattinson, could finally sit still for a moment for an interview in a hotel on the Croisette. He was affable, thoughtful, and talking just like a film nerd. What’s your favorite Claire Denis film? I really love No Fear, No Die. I didn’t know who she was when I saw White Material, when I was shooting one of the Twilight movies....

Beware of a Holy Whore Spanning appearances of both the man and his music, the upcoming tribute to Leonard Cohen at Anthology Film Archives is short but sweet. “Darker: Celebrating Leonard Cohen” pairs McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), and Donald Brittain’s documentary Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965) with two Canadian shorts, Derek May’s Angel (1966) and Josef Reeve’s Poen (1967)....

Ex Machina is a high-IQ sci-fi film that connects viscerally and on every other level to audiences of all kinds. It’s exhilarating to see this movie in a theater packed with people rapt in the taut spell of its life-or-death drama and rippling with nervous laughter at its frisky, kinky sexuality and absurdist undertones. The subject is artificial intelligence, but the writer, Alex Garland, in his debut as a director, makes it about traditional intelligence and emotional intelligence, too....

Launching a bright, rousing entertainment about a real-world subject onto thousands of movie screens is a major feat. The creators of Hidden Figures, a fictionalized history of the black female math wizards who helped get NASA off the ground in the 1960s, make it look as easy as one, two, three. The director, Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), imbues his complicated narrative with a three-part clarity that allows his cast—not just his gifted leads, Taraji P....

Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris takes a taut, engrossing, and surprising nonfiction book—the most complete and genuine account of an act of real-life heroism that enthralled the whole free world—and turns it into a flaccid, bewildering docudrama. The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes, written by those heroes, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone, with freelance journalist and author Jeffrey E....

The Call of the Wild (Chris Sanders, 2020) This flimsy adaptation of Jack London’s 1903 Klondike Gold Rush classic, the first film to sport the “20th Century Studios” label (without the “Fox”), offers a soft-edged rendering of a St. Bernard/Scotch shepherd mix reverting to a wolf-like state. Though it’s packed with CGI, it plays like any old mid-level, live-action Disney movie. And now it actually is one, since Disney bought the studio....

Mad Fate (Soi Cheang, 2023) Over the course of the past two decades, Hong Kong action director Soi Cheang has built an oeuvre that stands shoulder to shoulder with the finest work of the late-’80s/early-’90s “golden age” of Hong Kong cinema—even though he emerged in the wake of the 1997 handover that decimated the former colony’s film industry. His closest analogue is Johnnie To, whose movies similarly straddle art-house and genre-film paradigms....

In 2012 the seniors at Flint Northern High School in Flint, Michigan had made it: They were graduating and, even more importantly, they were headed to prom. In a year their school would be closed. In two years, their city would come under nationwide scrutiny, for by the time they donned their gowns and caps, county officials had already announced plans to switch the city’s water source and begin the process that would expose hundreds of thousands to contaminated water....

As mentioned in the previous post on the 2013 edition of the Los Angeles Film Festival, the centerpiece competition slates are split between narrative and documentary. There’s a palpable fit between progressive festivals and their progressive cinema, and, inversely, it’s also noticeable when a festival that separates fiction and nonfiction selects a film that’s an in-betweener: at LAFF, Kevin Jerome Everson’s The Island of St. Matthews only serves to underline the retrograde nature of such a programming structure....

Losing Ground Although it isn’t widely recognized, Melbourne’s historical status as the cradle of online film criticism—as signaled by the founding of Screening the Past in 1997, Senses of Cinema in 1999, and Rouge in 2003—remains a significant part of its film culture, so highly developed and serious that not once, during 14 festival screenings, did I ever notice any viewers activating their mobiles. It’s equally evident that the pioneering websites which helped to foster this kind of seriousness were neither accidental nor coincidental....

Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey One shouldn’t force connections among the films one sees at a festival, and certainly not at one as bursting at the seams with movies of differing temperament and quality as the Toronto International Film Festival, but it’s perhaps worth noting that Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey and The Human Surge captured my imagination in unexpectedly similar ways. The former is the most maximalist work yet by the U....

Hustle (Jeremiah Zagar, 2022) Adam Sandler’s new basketball-centric passion project sets itself apart from its sports-movie kin with its documentary-like attention to the rules of the game—both on and off the court. Taking a cue from the grounded and soulful performance of its star, the film exudes a disarming sincerity and rough-hewn charm. The Sandman plays the absurdly named NBA scout Stanley Sugerman, a doughy, bearded schlub whose appearance belies his well-honed instincts and expertise....