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Forsythe and Pollard have collaborated on a number of projects with Cave in previous years in addition to staging full-scale “reenactments” of epic concerts by David Bowie and The Cramps. Piecing together selections from Cave’s notebooks, they were able to create something that is closer in form to an essay film than a documentary, layering Cave’s patchwork narration over their hypnogogic imagining of the songwriter’s 20,000th day on Earth—or some day at the tail end of his 54th year, to be inexact....

Swooping across sparkling azure waters, the first shots of Neil Jordan’s Ondine envision Ireland amid a sea bubbling with ancient mystical forces. When the camera settles on the boat of a glum-faced, scruffy-haired fisherman named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), we know sooner or later that something supernatural is bound to intrude upon his dreary routine. It finally arrives in the form of a beautiful amphibious female (Alicja Bachleda) curled in a fetal position in his net, a discovery whose strangeness the fisherman accepts matter-of-factly....

Like his previous film, A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past begins with a deceptively straightforward divorce. Returning to Paris from Tehran to legally terminate his marriage after a four-year absence, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) learns that his wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo), has been living with another man, Samir (Tahar Rahim). Papers may be signed with minimal fuss but the past cannot be so easily buried, and once again the Iranian director creates an opportunity to showcase his striking ability to use multiple perspectives to tell an infinitely complex story....

Tip Top begins with a white man entering a suburban French bar frequented by Algerian immigrants and unleashing a torrent of homophobic and racist insults, then hailing random figures from across the political spectrum. The bar’s patrons take him down in a single-shot rumble so finely choreographed that it passes for total chaos until the room clears and you realize the last man standing is a dog. While the notoriously opinionated filmmaker-critic Serge Bozon’s third feature begins with this hilarious provocation, the film is more startling than shocking, keeping the viewer in a state much like that of Sally Marinelli (Sandrine Kiberlain), a stork-like internal affairs inspector who jumps out of her skin every time her staccato new partner Esther Lafarge (Isabelle Huppert) makes a sudden move....

Ryan Coogler’s award-winning debut feature aptly dramatizes the 2009 killing of the unarmed Oscar Grant in Oakland by a transit cop early on New Year’s Day. The film has been seen by some as winding audiences up with its shocking tale of a young father’s senseless death. But the knockout punch comes not just from the pay-off but from a dramatically adroit build-up, a strong sense of social milieu, and the emotional range of lead actor Michael B....

As far back as his FOX sketch show, Ben Stiller’s career as parodist has been based on a love-hate relationship with pop culture and with what passes for the modern condition. And the fantasy sequences in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—which stars Stiller as a Life magazine photo editor with escapist daydreams—yield some of its funniest moments. But what lifts this studio comedy, Stiller’s fifth feature as director, is its sincere ambivalence about fulfillment in the age of iPhones and image saturation....

It’s a family affair: the (now) 24-year-old director Lena Dunham, her mother, and her younger sister play versions of themselves, and the primary location is the upscale Tribeca loft where they all actually live. The elements add up to an interpersonal chamber-piece that succeeds as well as it does thanks to the unabashed intimacy it has with its own diminutive subject matter. Call it a mumblecore mumblepiece. The action begins when Aura (Dunham) returns from college with a degree in film theory and the existential lack of self-worth that a diploma of that type confers....

The Tiger of Eschnapur A Spanish-language critical journal with a robust presence online and in print, Lumière obliquely outlines its editorial bent in a short essay praising Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb as “the only blockbusters that aren’t blockbusters… The producer really wanted to make a golden calf. And Fritz Lang made a film.” Which is to say: Lumière gives the overused term termite art fresh meaning....