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End times for film are close, just not as close as they used to be. Cinema’s apocalypse appeared to be in full swing in Wim Wenders’s 1982 made-for-TV documentary Room 666, in which the director interviewed a series of his peers in a hotel room during that year’s Cannes festival. The question for all of them was the same: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?...

Meryl Streep, you may have heard, plays Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, and it’s necessary to say at the outset that she does a formidable impersonation. Both Patricia Hodge, who portrayed Thatcher in The Falklands Play (BBC, 02), and Lindsay Duncan, who portrayed her in Margaret (BBC, 09), which recounts her toppling in 1990, caught her energy and starchiness, but neither replicated her body language. Streep’s performance, which spans some 40 years in the former prime minister’s life, meticulously captures Thatcher’s strident public persona—her hectoring bray, her imperious diction, her piercing glare—and her aura of invincibility....

Picking up on themes introduced in his 2010 serial-killer / horror film Cold Fish (produced under Nikkatsu Studio’s now-defunct genre banner Sushi Typhoon), Sono’s Guilty Of Romance (11) has been described by many as a more female-centered approach to similar material and, like most of Sono’s films, has also been subject to accusations of misogyny. As in Cold Fish, a shy and weak protagonist is ushered into a dark world of murder, sex, and obsession by a knowing, dominant figure who leads two very different lives....

Movies were dessert. I used to read and read and read as a child. I remember seeing Captain Blood [35] with Errol Flynn in a movie theater that was 10 blocks away from my home in Brooklyn on one of the coldest winter nights New York ever had. Walking home that night, I got frostbite on my thighs that lasted for a month. My thighs got discolored it was so cold, but it was worth it because that movie was so wonderful....

Moonlight When I first read Tarell McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was radical in form and dense in meaning, and the film version of what I’ve always described as something “halfway between the stage and the screen” didn’t readily present itself. And then I remembered Three Times, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s triptych about three young couples, portrayed by the same pair of actors (Qi Shu and Chen Chang), navigating the intricacies of courtship and companionship....

Living up to the expansiveness that its Sega Genesis-like title suggests, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’s action possesses that rare ability to take on a radically different meaning as its narrative unfolds. Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is an antisocial 29-year-old “office lady” in Tokyo, badgered by her boss and mother for being so “old” and having not yet found a husband. In her free time, she religiously studies a VHS tape (and, after it breaks, a DVD) of the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film Fargo in the hopes of locating the suitcase buried by Steve Buscemi’s character around the 60-minute mark....

By virtue of its subject—the headquarters of Radio France in Paris—Nicolas Philibert’s giddily varied documentary becomes, incidentally, a cinematic curiosity. As we watch hosts and announcers talk away on the air, the movie begins to feel like a series of communications between the speakers—and unseen millions. The full panoply of Radio France programming, like some department store or zoo of sound, is on display: news (Japanese earthquakes and Tunisian upheaval), human interest oddities, interviews with novelists, a conscientious call-in request show, classical showcases, avant-scat freakouts, quiz shows, and, of course, mellifluous weather bulletins....

Before Charles Foster Kane, or even the Martian invasion, there was Julius Caesar: Orson Welles’s Fascist-styled production of the play in 1937 is the subject of Richard Linklater’s latest film. Adapted from Robert Kaplow’s historical novel, it’s a winning account of the Mercury Theatre’s debut with the boy wonder at the helm. British actor Christian McKay, who did a one-man show about Welles in London, struts as the not-quite-lean but unmistakably hungry mastermind, pushing his cast through last-minute rehearsals and leaving a trail of smacked-down egos and romantic entanglements in his wake....

If you add up the number of “stars” in Matthew Bate’s first feature they amount to, perhaps, 4.5 humans. By that I don’t mean one of them is half a man. Rather, all five seem to be a tad lacking—and that’s being generous. The documentary concerns two Midwestern college grads (Eddie Guerriero and Mitch Deprey) who relocate to San Francisco in 1987. They soon discover that Peter and Raymond, the two older men living in the apartment next door, are extremely loud and very angry—all the time....

Raquel has been in the service of the Valdes family for 20-plus years and it shows. Her face is appropriately worn for a woman devoted solely to the arduous domestic duties for a bustling, upper-class six-person clan. Her physical health is deteriorating (she suffers from unexplained fainting spells) and her mental state doesn’t seem much more sound. She scarcely disguises her discontent anymore, but only the eldest daughter really seems to notice....

While his impeccably structured, almost ashamedly entertaining documentaries Man on Wire (08) and Project Nim (11) have proven him to be a storyteller of the highest order, James Marsh’s narrative films have tended to seem handicapped, for better and worse, by other people’s writing. Following two memorably grim procedural thrillers based on novels (Red Riding: 1980 in 2009 and Shadow Dancer, 12), his latest elegantly realizes Anthony McCarten’s adaptation of Jane Hawking’s memoir about her marriage to Nobel Prize–winning physicist Stephen Hawking....

Mutant spawn of multimedia artist Ryan Trecartin and Tumblr founder David Karp, riverofthe.net is a living collage and a strange new species of found-footage détournement. Consisting of little more than a forever-reloading splash page, the site is a randomly redirected flow of brief video snippets collected and contorted within the bowels of the Web. This aggregate “river” is fed by a pool of clips uploaded by the site’s visitors—and Trecartin himself....

The Wolf of Wall Street When young people dream of making films, what filmmaker do they dream of becoming? What are the images in their heads? For some, Tarantino; for others, Fincher. For some, Scorsese; for others, Spielberg or Godard, or Cassavetes or Kubrick. Worthy images all. And how will these young men and women protect the essences of their inspirations when they come of age in the filmmaking landscape of 2028?...

Ponniyin Selvan: I (Mani Ratnam, 2022) Ponniyin Selvan: I, or PS1, the first installment in Indian filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s two-part historical epic, has reportedly become the highest-grossing Tamil-language movie of all time in the United States. This success follows the dithyrambic stateside reception of S.S. Rajamouli’s Telugu picture RRR (2022), and together they seem to have unveiled, to many cinephiles, a whole new realm in the cinemas of Southern India....

Waterloo Bridge Sidney Franklin had never set foot in England in 1940, but four years later he’d produced a trio of films that collectively comprise Hollywood’s take on Britain in wartime. Featuring little combat and even less location footage, these backlot creations—Waterloo Bridge (1940), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), as well as the post-WW1 melodrama Random Harvest (1942)—address what Franklin, a former director, saw as the “quaintness and charm” of Great Britain, and the effect of two world wars on that nation’s morale and its citizens exempt from combat....

Masterpieces are never out of date, though sometimes they take far too long to reach us. Consider Facets’ video release of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, one of the most wondrous cinema events of a still young 2000. Made in Poland in 1988 and composed of ten episodes, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, Kieslowski’s masterpiece is a film dauntingly ambitious, dazzlingly well-achieved—yet scandalously little-shown. While it’s been near-legendary since the early Nineties among serious American critics—who have seen it at film festivals and isolated showings in a few major cities—it’s still largely unknown even to most educated U....