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As a filmmaker, the Tehran-based Bani-E’temad has herself been continually tested by the powers that be. Refusing to submit to strict censorship criteria imposed on Iranian cinema, Bani-E’temad took a break from fiction filmmaking in 2006 and instead pursued her social and political investigation through the documentary form, her most notable one in that period being We Are Half of Iran’s Population (09). Now she has “returned” with Tales, a panorama of the lower depths of Tehran, where economic hardship, abuse, corruption, and drug addiction coexist, in her movingly candid portrayal of social decline....

Ralph Fiennes’s The Invisible Woman is based on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 investigative biography of the same name. The book details the 13-year affair between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, called Nelly for short. The fact that Dickens had a mistress nearly 30 years his junior, for love of whom he separated from the wife who was mother to his 10 children, was a well-kept secret in Victorian England and for nearly the entire century that followed....

Raoul Coutard (L) and Georges Liron (R) while shooting The 317th Platoon © Jean Garcenot Given your own wartime experience, what aspects did you most want to capture in The 317th Platoon? When we filmed it, it was already the end of the war, and the impression of what [the soldiers] lived through and how it ended was quite sad, and there was also a very strong solidarity. Those were really the main two things that we wanted to portray and capture with the cinematography and the atmosphere of the film....

It’s the salesman’s gnarly dad who’s the charmer and scene-stealer. In both Dave Eggers’s 2012 novel and Tom Tykwer’s film version, he delivers one dynamite speech (here’s the book’s version): “I’m watching this thing about how a gigantic new bridge in Oakland, California is being made in China. Can you imagine? Now they’re making our goddamn bridges, Alan. I got to say I saw everything else coming. When they closed down Stride Rite, I saw it coming....

Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954) Lizzie Borden has made her 1986 film Working Girls available for free on YouTube, “a film about a group of escorts who live together in Manhattan, and their interactions with their exploitative employer as well as the fantasies of their leering clients.” Kelley Dong highlights the film as part of their ongoing Video Sundays column, pointing us to this career-spanning Cinema Scope interview....

Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene, Over at Hyperallergic, Bisbee ’17 director Robert Greene recounts the past decade of documentary filmmaking. In an era “partly defined by the emergence of playful chimeras,” Greene tracks how the mode has evolved stylistically, technologically, and economically—including this year’s record-setting $10m deal for Knock Down the House. Ending somewhat imminently on the topic of truth, Greene writes: “The history of documentary is one long quest to define truth onscreen ....

Caleel Harris and Ava DuVernay on the the set of When They See Us (Ava DuVernay, 2019) Next week marks the hundredth anniversary of Pauline Kael’s birth. Much has been written already to celebrate the upcoming centennial, with The New Yorker publishing this collection of some of her finest works (reviews for Bonnie and Clyde, Star Wars, and The Godfather, among them). Perhaps more importantly, the moment has brought to a head the pertinence (and paucity) of female critics today....

Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli, 2023) Fresh off of his sophomore feature Sick of Myself (2022)—a delightfully corrosive satire about a narcissistic couple, one of whom acquires outlawed Russian medication to feign disability—Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli returns to his familiar themes of notoriety and public delusion with Dream Scenario (2023). Hapless biology professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is introduced to us as a man begging for academic recognition from a former peer to no avail....

Directed by Goro Miyazaki and written by Keiko Niwa with his father, the Japanese animation great Hayao Miyazaki, From Up on Poppy Hill does not conform to the Studio Ghibli fare of fantastical creatures and magical hidden worlds for which Miyazaki the elder is so well known. Rather, the film concerns itself much more with the strictly interpersonal, sensationalizing human trials of love and family. In other words, the content here is pure melodrama....

It’s easy to imagine the elevator pitch for Spike Jonze’s latest: a man falls in love with his computer operating system. Improbable, yes, but Jonze treats the affections of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix, a manchild disguised in wool slacks) as perfectly natural rather than transgressive, forcing a comparison between the carefully crafted tomorrow of the film and our present-day world that makes the story all the more resonant. The facts are these: in a not-so-distant-future Los Angeles, Theodore upgrades his OS from the generic to “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson, in her trademark tones), artificially intelligent and with a constantly evolving understanding of the world....

In the tradition of William Castle, here’s a new cinema gimmick: nausea-o-vision. Whether you think Maniac is misogynistic crap or playfully reflexive, Franck Khalfoun’s remake is guaranteed to make you sick. It’s a nasty piece of work that goes out of its way to confirm the worst of humanity, and the POV-only camerawork—devoted to seeing through the killer’s eyes—is stomach-churning. If the non-stop teetering doesn’t get you, its commitment to providing disturbing, realistic gore will....

The conventional pitch of found-footage horror is partly as a testament from beyond the grave, sometimes even at the macabre price of its maker’s death. The reality-trumpeting frame story has existed for centuries in literature, but in the cinematic wave of empirical, pseudo-handheld affairs, the charge from watching it is fueled by a different source. The terror comes from the existential claustrophobia, fed by a visually constrained point of view and by characters whose fates seem doubly sealed already, alive only in recorded retrospect....

Donald Rumsfeld’s smile is a strange thing—more of a smirk, cold, self-satisfied, signaling a point he feels he has won. “Chalk that one up for me,” he says at one point during the extended interview that makes up Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known. Courtesy of Morris’s trademark Interrotron, Rumsfeld looks directly at us. He is crisply dressed and primed for battle as he reads from the hundreds of thousands of memos (he calls them snowflakes) that he dictated over the course of his long career in public life....

Directed by Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil, 06), West of Memphis chronicles the plight of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley Jr.—collectively nicknamed the “West Memphis Three”—who were teenagers in 1994 when they were convicted of brutal murders. Financed by the director Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh, the film tells a tale of compounding injustices. When three missing 8-year-old boys were found dead, hogtied, and mutilated in a riverbed in a Tennessee town, the police and prosecution characterized the crime as an act of a cult or a “satanic” murder....

Regular watchers of the Rotterdam Film Festival’s reliably sprawling Bright Future section—one of the festival world’s most optimistically titled programs—know that there’s no way to come close to pinning down its slate of films by first- and second-time directors. The selection can be expected to be as wide-ranging as it is inventive and challenging, and if the challenges aren’t always successful, the ways in which the young filmmakers in Bright Future question conventions, trends, and fashions uphold a kind of Rotterdam tradition, more effectively in recent years than the Tiger competition....