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Like the work of the artist whose life and times it evokes, Peter Watkins’s 1974 film Edvard Munch comes off as a thing of frayed nerves, passionate resentments, and stray sexual frustrations, made on what feels like the edge of delirium and out of what seems like a desperate need to confess or exhume. The truth of the matter, in the case of Edvard Munch’s paintings and Watkins’s movie, is more complicated than that description suggests....

Its cannibalistic aggressors may be the newly risen undead, but World War Z hardly seems interested in zombies as they have traditionally been rendered. The subject is rather the unnavigable disorientation that follows when the world is swallowed up by the chaos of contagion. It follows, then, that the prevailing sense of social disorder becomes a strangely compelling structuring principle in which the film’s formal shortcomings mirror its theme. Here our hero finds himself thrust into a global pandemic so rampant that it seems beyond comprehension—and so it remains, of course, for the viewer, fixed to one man’s necessarily limited perspective and denied the illumination of a broader view....

The Shooting Filmed when Eastman was 32 years old, The Shooting was the first of her scripts to go into production. Her own invented moniker, used here and many times again, was “Adrien Joyce”—according to Nicholson biographer Marc Eliot, a nod to her literary hero, James. Her debut would be followed by Five Easy Pieces, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (both 1970), and The Fortune (75), movies which taken together constitute her brief heyday as a screenwriter....

If you’re like me, and I know I am, one of your great pleasures is visiting Observations on film art, the blog maintained by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-authors of standard textbooks Film Art and Film History. Bordwell, who introduces the entries that he’s written with the jaunty salutation “DB here,” recently stirred up a bit of controversy with a piece called “Zip, zero, Zeitgeist....

Arguably Robert Mitchum’s best Western, The Wonderful Country has been enjoying a reevaluation of late, maybe due to its new availability on cable and DVD. It’s the story of a man without a country. Mitchum plays Brady, an American pistolero in the employ of powerful Mexican patrón Cipriano Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), who sends him on a mission across the Rio Grande. When Brady breaks his leg falling from his horse, Texas Ranger Captain Rucker (Albert Dekker) gives him the opportunity to clear his name of the murder rap he has been fleeing since avenging his father’s death as a boy....

David Cronenberg places Robert Pattinson in a limousine once again. In 2012’s Cosmopolis the actor appeared as a passenger, but for the Canadian auteur’s Cannes competition entry, Maps to the Stars, he’s been moved to the front seat. Pattinson plays a limo driver in Los Angeles, shuttling famous people around town, while hoping to break into the business with his own script and considering converting to Scientology as a career move....

Remembrance of Things to Come “If a man has learned to think,” wrote André Breton, “it hardly matters what he is thinking. At bottom, he is always thinking about his own death.” Breton is a recurring presence in Chris Marker’s new video, Remembrance of Things to Come (Souvenir d’un avenir) though the filmmaker himself—an extremely agile thinker at 81—sidesteps, or at least suppressed, direct contemplation of his own mortality while searching out historic ghosts, clues, and portents of tragedy in the work of departed colleague Denise Bellon, French photojournalist and world traveler in the Thirties, a time “when post-war was becoming pre-war....

A British couple drives across France, ten years into their marriage. Exhausted by their accumulated resentments, frustrations, and grievances, they can barely find a way to converse without weaponizing their words. “We’re not going on like this for the rest of our lives,” he mutters, half threatening, half pleading. She replies, “You haven’t been happy since the day we met, have you?” They come upon a pair of newlyweds and gaze out their car window bitterly....

David Bowie once sang, “You can’t say no to the Beauty and the Beast.” He might have changed his tune if he’d lived to see the latest Disney extravaganza. Bill Condon’s live-action remake of Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), the high point of Disney’s animation renaissance, is as bloated, awkward, and aggressive as the cartoon feature is fleet and graceful. Screenwriters Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos have contributed revamps and additions that come off as heavy-handed editorial doodles....

At the time of Rocky II (79) I had a dream: I wished that Sylvester Stallone had made Apollo I instead. Thirty-six years and four more sequels later, that dream comes true with Ryan Coogler’s reboot, Creed. Apollo Creed died in the ring fighting a Russian behemoth in Rocky IV, but his presence permeates this buoyant and joyous if at times bombastic movie about the sudden rise of his illegitimate son, Adonis Johnson (Michael B....

At the risk of comparing an apple or an orange with a rotten tomato, John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden on Last Week Tonight a year and a half ago dwarfs Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden in incisiveness, creativity, and revelation. John Oliver, you may recall, traveled to Russia to interview “the most famous hero and/or traitor” of our time about releasing 1.7 million super-confidential documents that revealed the National Security Agency’s unprecedented surveillance of American citizens and civilians worldwide....

After the frenzied flamenco clapping of ghostly hands against a black void under the opening credits (this is going to be arty) the movie really begins with a series of nighttime shots in a Spanish town. And they’re good, evocative, tingly even: cobblestone plaza seen at a low angle, stark splash of light, a jealous man with a gun, two adulterous lovers shot dead. We recall here that Jules Dassin, blacklisted American turned Euro-art-house director, once flourished in film noir....

Fatih Akin is a German-Turkish filmmaker from Hamburg. Or rather, he is a German filmmaker with a Turkish name and Turkish parents. His dislike of the hyphenated identity label is such that he was reported as saying, at the time of his first success, Short Sharp Shock (98): “If I can’t be Fatih Akin, I’d prefer to be known as the German Martin Scorsese.” When Head-On, his fourth feature, was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival, and went on to win a dozen more prizes at other festivals, its director had definitely become “Fatih Akin....

“It is interesting, even funny—or weird, perhaps—to imagine people sitting in an American cinema watching my movie.” So the Russian filmmaker Aleksei German mused when he first visited New York a dozen years ago for the local premiere of his once-shelved and now-revered Soviet “nostalgia” film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin. It is even weirder, alas, to imagine an American audience watching German’s phantasmagorical Khrustalyov, My Car!—the 60-year-old director’s first feature since Lapshin, a French co-production and a world-class film maudit that, in the works for seven years, took even longer to shoot than Orson Welles’s Othello and last spring suffered a disastrous, walkout-plagued world premiere at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival....

You have to work to ignore Viola Davis. Over her multi-decade career, the 57-year-old EGOT winner has developed a reputation for holding audiences rapt, whether it be on the stage or the screen, in parts large or small. The word that follows her from job to job and character to character is “intensity.” Being unable to—or for that matter, wanting to—tear one’s eyes from her is terrifically clarifying. Someone who tries to avert their gaze from Davis is saying far more about themselves than they could ever say about her....

Get Out of the Car The title of Thom Andersen’s new film, Get Out of the Car, serves as an entreaty. The film is an insider’s guided tour of overlooked Los Angeles building facades, disused billboards, Chicano mural art, barbed-wire–enclosed sites of now-vanished historical landmarks (ranging from the El Monte Musical Hall to the South Central Farm), burger spots, and a dilapidated Baptist church designed by Rudolph Schindler. The city’s history is manifested through absence, in what amounts to a modest but insistent political stance: if we stayed put long enough, or felt personally connected to our community’s origins, we’d not only know what’s missing, we might even regret its loss....

ANDREW SARRIS film critic, New York Observer Bill Murray transcended his Saturday Night Live beginnings by rejuvenating American screen comedy with many wry, but never sick or mean-spirited, twists, most notably in the American comedy of the decade, Groundhog Day. TADAO SATO film scholar, Japan Color of Paradise (1999, Iran)—This is one of the noblest films ever made. Hayao Miyazake—a leading Japanese animation filmmaker. Films (chronological): The Dispossessed (Aravindan, India), Kae Byok (Im Kwon-Taek, Korea), Nostalgia for the Countryland (Nhat Minh Dang, Vietnam), Dukhai (Bangladesh), The Sleeping Man (Kohei Oguri, Japan), Red Persimmon (Wang Tung, Taiwan), Ferocious Saint Lord of Gobi (Mongolia), The Teacher of Cyrill Alphabet (Mongolia), The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran), Fatherless (Yoshihisa Shigeno, Japan) PETER SCARLET San Francisco Film Festival Sorry to be such a late entry, but I’m in Turin and my reference materials here are nonexistent....

Tsai Ming-liang’s recent work has taken him ever further in a minimalist direction. His last feature, Stray Dogs (13), was still visibly anchored to urban realism, depicting the life of a homeless family, but veered away from conventional narrative in a way that no doubt tested even admirers of his languid mid-period works such as What Time Is It There? (01) and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (03). In it, causality and defined character identity seemed to melt away in the endless Taipei rain as we watched; the film ended with what you might call pure gaze, with two people staring silently at a mural on the wall of an abandoned house....

All images from Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) This review first appeared in May 2019 during the Cannes Film Festival. It has been slightly amended. Two days into the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the Brazilian film Bacurau got me into a Twitter discussion with a Latin American critic and programmer who felt that certain films from certain countries get a bad response if they don’t conform to the stereotyped national image that foreign viewers are used to....