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My Happy Family marks the director couple’s second feature; In Bloom (2014) tracked two teenage girls struggling to navigate what narrow and fraught paths toward agency Georgian society allowed in the 1990s. Fast-forward to the present, and My Happy Family finds its protagonist, Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), world-weary but clear-eyed. Following the unexpected advice of a student in her class, Manana flabbergasts three generations of her family by electing to move out of their cramped home and rent her own apartment....

Babi Yar. Context (Sergei Loznitsa, 2022) Sergei Loznitsa’s a new documentary about the execution of thousands of people, most of them Jews, during the German occupation of Kyiv in World War II opened in American theaters on April 1. Exactly one month earlier, on March 1, 2022, a Russian bomb exploded at the site of the Babi Yar memorial in Kyiv, as the Russian army was trying to destroy a nearby TV tower....

Granted, these hopping vampires are filtered through producer Takashi Shimizu’s gloom-o-vision gaze, and there aren’t many of them, and they don’t hop for very long. But fans of Hong Kong movies were so excited that hopping vampires were going to be onscreen again in any fashion that they fell all over themselves like three-legged puppies when this movie was announced. Why all the excitement? Allow me to explain. Chinese vampires are not sexy creatures of the night who dress like Karl Lagerfeld, speak European, and act like they know which wine to order....

Twin Peaks crossed with The Killing—and that isn’t the half of it: the seven-episode television series Top of the Lake is the toughest, wildest picture Jane Campion has ever made. Campion’s previous foray into television, An Angel at My Table, a four-part biopic about the writer Janet Frame, was focused on a single character, and though dramatically and psychologically compelling, it lacked the expressive visual style of Campion’s features. With the emotional intensity of its performances and the urgency of its drama scaled to match its vast, primal setting and six-hour length, Top of the Lake is something else again: series television as epic poem, the Trojan Wars recast as the gender war....

About a year ago at the Berlin Film Festival, Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling won acting prizes together for 45 Years. It would have seemed indecent to honor one and not the other. It’s natural, and accurate, to say they are both “wonderful” or “touching” or “expert” in the film, and participating in a kind of union. They are the Mercers, Kate and Geoff. But that’s not enough as commentary, or as a solution to the discord in those three adjectives....

Media literacy is high enough these days that most viewers understand or at least intuit that movies are made from creative and logistical choices. Yet there persists a reluctance to embrace this fact as it pertains to documentary filmmaking. The reluctance is simultaneously dissonant and understandable. Dissonant in that we readily accept the idea of man-behind-the-curtain craftsmanship from narratives that require a suspension of disbelief, while the notion is harder to accommodate with films ostensibly anchored in the real....

With thinning white hair, unruly eyebrows, and a powder-blue pullover, Michael Snow, at 84, is soft-spoken and sharp-witted. Somewhere between professorial and grandfatherly, he at once commands attention and puts you at ease, like a glass of warm milk with a shot of Canadian whiskey. This week, MoMA’s recent acquisition of Snow’s slide installations Slidelength (69-71) and Sink (70) brought the Toronto-born artist back across the border for an edition of the museum’s Modern Mondays series....

Voyage to Italy (1954) Roberto Rossellini’s tale of an English couple drifting painfully apart over the course of a single Italian holiday found the director torn between two conflicting obligations: to stay faithful to the limits of an imperfect, often unsatisfying world, and to allow for miracles that transgress those same limits. In one late-film scene, he suggests a possible solution: Ingrid Bergman’s heroine wanders through a gallery of ancient sculptures, all of which convince her that she, by comparison, isn’t long for this world—but that some things are....

The annual New Directors/New Films festival is one of the highlights of the New York film calendar, and a reliable harbinger of the defining cinematic talents of the years to come. In advance of this year’s edition, which runs April 20 to May 1 at Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, Film Comment contributors spotlight some of the must-see titles in the lineup. The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022) Photo Credit: Natalie James The African Desperate, the debut film by visual artist Martine Syms, abounds in bold text, bolder colors, and wry humor struck through with a Very-Online sensibility to explore the construction of Black feminine identity....

One of the highlights of this year’s Migrating Forms, Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s debut feature deploys an allusive network of metaphors grounded in physics, geological time frames, and the borders between the physical and the virtual. Set largely at a particle accelerator on the verge of shutting down for good, the film uncovers the similarities and discrepancies between the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the experiences of the flesh....

Of the 93 features screened, I saw about 35; none were game-changers, or even likely to turn up on many best-of-the-year lists. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy a lot of them. Perhaps what’s best about the festival as a whole is that it offers the opportunity to test one’s eclecticism. Films as dissimilar as Ed Burns’s no-budget fiction feature Newlyweds, and Michael Collins’s investigative documentary Give Up Tomorrow, found wildly appreciative audiences, which will make their release more likely....

The best actors always communicate multiple layers with or without the help of the script, and Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson is funny, alluring, and aware enough to be awash in self-loathing over her own wretched choices. Until the screenplay forces her to turn into a cliché virago at the climax, she’s by far the most compelling character in the movie. You will be glad to know that Daniel’s Bancroft is calmer and more sympathetic than the Bancroft described in Frank Langella’s memoir Dropped Names....

The Sin of Nora Moran Feverish, fragmented, expressionistic, The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) is one of the most formally daring films to come out of Hollywood in the early sound era. The plot is that old chestnut about the pure-hearted fallen woman who sacrifices herself for an undeserving man, but the narrative structure has the cracked logic of a dream, with subjectivity and chronology shifting underfoot. There are frames around frames, flashbacks within flashbacks constructing the story of Nora Moran (Zita Johann), a woman on death row....

Hitler’s Reign of Terror Reign of Terror portrays the Führer as a rare and terrible blend of Huey Long’s rapacious authority, Al Capone’s thuggish savagery, and Billy Sunday’s feverish rhetoric. I Was a Captive in Nazi Germany (1936) by contrast recounts the sensational real-life story of Isobel Steele—a journalist who was briefly imprisoned in Nazi Germany on charges of espionage. Steele stars as herself in a crude yet unusual docudrama that employs a cast and crew which remains anonymous (which, the film claims, is for their own protection)....

It’s a man’s world in Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad—specifically, Mickey Cohen’s. Loosely based on the real-life Jewish boxer turned mobster, Cohen (played by Sean Penn) has all of Los Angeles and its police, women, and money at his disposal. That is, of course, until a supergroup of rogue cops are assembled. Josh Brolin’s Sergeant John O’Mara commands said group, with the under-the-table blessing of the police chief (Nick Nolte, barely a cameo)....

Returning after a five-year absence, Hong Kong’s box-office-busting comedic auteur, Stephen Chow (best known in the U.S. for 2004’s Kung Fu Hustle), breaks even more records with Journey to the West, a frenetic fantasy flick that he directed but in which he doesn’t so much as make a cameo appearance. His big-screen absence didn’t dampen audience enthusiasm: the film has taken in $200 million in China, spawned a 173-acre amusement park, and has a sequel in the works....

The least interesting thing one can say of Maps to the Stars is that it satirizes Hollywood to a greater or lesser degree of success. Set among the vindictive squabbles, pathological careerism, and $18,000 Rodeo Drive shopping binges of various industry operators, the movie uses the Dream Factory as both material and milieu, a double function that needs to be differentiated and examined. The material dimension—Hollywood as the raw stuff of the story—can largely be indexed to Bruce Wagner’s screenplay....