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For our second dispatch from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Cristina Nord (head of the Berlinale Forum), Chloe Lizotte (editorial manager at MUBI Notebook), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of their favorites from the fest, including Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Lars von Tier’s The Kingdom Exodus, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Moyra Davey’s Horse Opera, Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, and more....

Prince Avalanche South by Southwest is a nine-day cultural smorgasbord that strives to be everything to everybody: a blogger conference with bands, a music industry jamboree that shows movies, and a plain old film festival where, hours in advance, people were already snaked around the block for the red-carpet opening-night premiere of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Don Scardino’s film was an odd start to the 20th anniversary of this festival....

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 documentaryGive Up Tomorrow, found wildly appreciative audiences, which will make their release more likely....

Casino Royale SonyRebounded from a hideous 2005 and came out on top of the box-office race last year. And it did so by releasing (mostly) profitable movies. The Da Vinci Code, Casino Royale, Talladega Night, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Pink Panther, Monster House, The Holiday, and Open Season added up to its best year ever—indeed, the highest one-year domestic gross for any studio. It also made a medium-budget title, Underworld: Evolution, into a $111 million worldwide grosser and a solid DVD performer....

Last Year in Marienbad For Alain Resnais, filmmaking is editing. It is less creation than selection and arrangement. It is an exploration of the world at one remove. All of Resnais’s films are dependent upon the initial shaping of experience by another artist, whether Van Gogh or Picasso (the subject matter of two of his documentaries) or Marguerite Duras or Jorge Semprun (the scenarists for two of his features). Unlike Godard or Fellini, Resnais does not appear to be exploring the world with his camera: he remolds the explorations of somebody else....

Cinephilia today might mean one of two things: a response to scarcity or a response to abundance. On the one hand, it can be a way of loving a disappearing object—celluloid film (whether 16, 35, or 70mm) projected in a large dark theaters—and therefore takes the form of nostalgia for the conditions that produced the first great wave of cinephilia (which could be extended to roughly a quarter century from the late Forties up through the early Seventies), the period of the economic boom, the self-conscious discovery of the American cinema as an art, and the emerging waves of postwar European cinema from Italian neorealism up to New Hollywood....

Kiss Me Deadly As I began to write about Robert Aldrich I’d just received word that his son Bill had died. Bill was a friend and a good soul who gracefully bore the difficult task of being the child of a prominent film director—a director who possessed a personality that was as legendary as the work. William Aldrich, R.I.P. I first met Robert Aldrich some 35 years ago. Not that they ever changed much, but I have total recall of my initial impressions of Bob: physically vital, brusque, massive, seething, darkly funny, explosive, direct, and very smart....

Purple Rain It’s been a bad year for people who’ve shaped the past 40-or-so years of pop culture. And while news of Prince’s premature death has only just begun the thinkpiece phase of celebrity mourning (e.g., “What did he really represent?”; “Counterpoint: what about this terrible thing he said/did?”), the main thing I associate with the great purple one (aside from the music) is his dogged preservation of the rights of the artist....

Paradise: Hope Paradise: Hope centers on Melanie, the 13-year-old daughter of the protagonist of Paradise: Love. While the latter is off to Kenya, Melanie gets to spend her summer vacation at a weight loss camp for an experience arguably even more horrifying than her mother’s. Soon after arrival, she develops a crush on the camp doctor, a lupine man whose leer alone should provide reason enough to banish him from any institution with children present....

On December 15, 1966, Walt Disney died. By the time of his death, The Jungle Book was in production, and Disney had taken a personal hand in it, expanding the role of Baloo the bear and vetoing an initial script with a downbeat ending (well, downbeat for Disney) and more of a sense of menace and violence than he believed an animated film could then contain. The result, the final movie to bear his personal touch, was therefore something of a last hurrah, if a relatively modest one: the company’s freehanded adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 story collection The Jungle Book runs a mere 79 minutes, with half a dozen songs to fill out its very thin story, and it lacks the painterly beauty of the animated features (Pinocchio, Fantasia) from the company’s first golden age....

In Marclay’s view, of course, these shots have everything to do with each other, at least when seen from the perspective of the clock. Towering over bustling city scenes like Big Ben, The Clock’s most visible star (Marclay’s rejoinder to Warhol’s Empire, perhaps), time is what governs this meta-diegesis, and it is a pernicious ruler. In the afternoon hours, people are either too late or too soon, waiting impatiently or rushing late to their appointments....

Levity plus ebullience equals buoyancy. That’s what Brad Bird proves in his Incredibles movies as they take off in the opening minutes and keep soaring for two hours. In Incredibles 2, he doesn’t merely use an introductory setpiece to hook an audience but to establish the bold outlines of his story and a pace and standard of invention for the movie to come. There may be more lyrical directors working in animated features, but no one else has Bird’s knack for crafting ingenious narratives that generate trust and affection and for filling them with feats of comedy and courage that test characters and thrill audiences....

Tormento In 1904 a 19-year-old law school dropout named Gustavo Lombardo founded a film company in Naples. Lombardo began by distributing films by Gaumont, Éclair, Vitagraph, and other foreign companies, but he soon decided to expand his business. He acquired cinemas and studios, started producing movies in 1916, and even published a monthly film magazine (Lux). The storied name of this burgeoning Italian studio—Titanus—wasn’t adopted till 1928, but it would survive wars, a relocation from Naples to caput mundi Rome in the late Twenties, political upheavals, economic recessions, and numerous technological shifts in the industry....

Now here’s an ominous juxtaposition. Austrian chiller Goodnight Mommy begins with a brightly colored archive clip—I’m guessing from the Forties—of a happy group of children, all dressed in Von Trapp Family shorts and frocks, standing around their rosy-cheeked mother as they sing a German lullaby in heart-tugging harmony. Cut to a caption, white on black: “Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion.” If you know that director’s own films, you’ll suspect that we’re in for a sobering deconstruction of Austrian social and familial values, a merciless laying bare of the dread behind the dirndls....