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The Portuguese title of The Double, the José Saramago novel upon which Enemy is loosely based, is O Homem Duplicado, or “The Duplicated Man.” I like “Enemy” for its punchy portentousness—this is a film in which every stammer or pause billows with suspicion, inexplicable unease, or outright doom. But Saramago’s original title is instructive when applied to this layered, blackly comical, ingeniously eerie adaptation. Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a depressed history professor shaken by the discovery of his doppelgänger, Anthony St....

The opening scene sets the tone. After a short prologue in the heavens, the camera rockets us back to earth, into a small German village—part Dürer, part Murnau—and finally settles upon the internal organs of a fresh corpse. Dr. Faust (Johannes Zeiler) is eviscerating a dead man, looking for his soul. And, in this reworking of the famous legend, loosely based on both the Goethe and Thomas Mann versions, Sokurov intends to do the same....

Hail the New Puritan (Charles Atlas, 1986) “The body is not an abstract thing,” the prolific Scottish choreographer Michael Clark told The Guardian in 2016. This sentiment is embedded in Hail the New Puritan, Charles Atlas’s 1986 time capsule of Clark’s dance company, which celebrates the exuberant anarchy of limbs moving through space. When pitching the film to Channel 4, the British public-service network, Atlas insisted that a straightforward documentary would fall flat and wanted instead to infuse a Technicolor musical with an avant-pop sensibility....

The story originated in Sylvia Chang’s 2009 stage play Design for Living, a popular four-hour drama (no relation to the Noel Coward work) about a female CEO dealing with the Great Recession. It was Chang’s debut as a playwright, after decades as a film actress in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Eat Drink Man Woman). She wanted to bring a musical version of Design for Living to the screen, and after writing the script she looked to her colleagues from the 1989 hit melodrama All About Ah-Long: Chow Yun-fat, director To, and pop star/composer Lo Dayu....

“Have you ever faced certain death?” Kenneth (Mark Duplass) demands, testing the chops of his potential time-travel partner, Darius (Aubrey Plaza). Her response is delivered with deadpan intensity: “If it was so certain, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Deriving its narrative spine from a classified ad that appeared in a mid-Nineties survivalist magazine, Safety Not Guaranteed is firmly rooted in the reality of the absurd. The film, which marks Colin Trevorrow’s directorial debut, taps into the indie zeitgeist of existential anomie with refreshing humor and optimism....

After the found-footage zombie contagion of [REC], director Jaume Balagueró maintains his penchant for single-setting metropolitan apartment buildings with Sleep Tight, a five-star creepy stalker movie. Cinematographer Pablo Rosso, the unsung hero of [REC] as the voice and eyes of “Pablo” the cameraman, shows his mettle as more than a walking camera as he captures the uncanny textures and surprising angles of what we take for granted every day: a line of mailboxes, a bathroom sink—and the enigmatic doorman....

Sophia Antipolis, the latest film from French director Virgil Vernier, is named after the real-life technopole situated along the French Riviera. Reality and fiction mysteriously blur in this neo-noir-cum-political thriller, which follows the loosely interlaced narratives of three characters; a Vietnamese immigrant enticed by a New Age–style cult; a security guard newly recruited by a right-wing vanguard; and a teenage girl whose best friend is found burned beyond recognition in a derelict warehouse....

For nearly a century, Snow White has provided a steady flow of inspiration for all manner of movie adaptations: animated and live-action, big screen and small, faithful and loose, comedic and scary—and, yes, even pornographic. But 2012 might have been the fairest of them all for the mistreated beauty, with the release of two large-scale Hollywood productions, followed by Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (Spain’s Foreign Language Oscar submission), a decidedly more mature version, grander on every level but that of budget....

After years of being met with goodwill and shrugs, Pedro Almodóvar has made a movie that has the distinction of being genuinely unpleasant. His adaptation of a novel by Thierry Jonquet unpacks the mysterious desire of a surgeon (played by Antonio Banderas with disastrous stiffness) who has imprisoned a woman for an experiment in sculpting beauty. By the time the not-so-winding path to this state of affairs has been retraced, the riffs on sexual identity endemic to Almodóvar have taken a sinister turn, all the more off-putting because of the film’s cool tone....

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s black-metal documentary is a morbidly hypnotic yet generally disorganized affair. To be fair, you could argue that it stays purposefully true to the pervasive murk of its subject. The film never explains what black metal is, nor how it differs from its related micro-genre variants such as deathcore, goregrind, or even death metal—not to mention, as a foolish neophyte might, death ambient. It seems a heavy muddle indeed, although the film’s keynote speaker, Varg Vikernes, aka Count Grishnackh, has in fact been convicted of murder....

At last, another deserving addition to the canon of Non-Cloying Movies About Girls! Based on a graphic novel written by Coco Moodysson, this wonderfully digressive and funny story revolves around Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), best friends who, on a rebellious whim, decide to form a band. Embodying a punk DIY ethos, neither girl tries to learn their instrument: they just bang out their only song, “Hate the Sport,” which combines their dislike of gym class with a protest against sociopolitical injustice....

Bucking Broadway Launched in June, Europa Film Treasures has quickly vaulted to the top ranks of online video-on-demand ventures spearheaded by moving-image archival institutions. As such, it takes its place alongside such valuable destinations as the Library of Congress’s American Memory site, the British Film Institute’s YouTube channel, and the UbuWeb Film & Video resource. At this early stage, the cleanly designed site offers visitors only 50 films for viewing, and the administrators still have to make good on their promise to improve the streaming video playback....

Prison Valley i-docs is a community of scholars, artists, programmers, activists, and enthusiasts sharing a single-minded devotion to exploring the vanguard of interactive documentary. Awash in new/trans/hypermedia of every kind, just what are we to make of such an inconspicuous classification as interactive documentary? Well, it’s as disarmingly straightforward as it sounds. The site champions and investigates a growing field in which the traditions of documentary cinema are refracted through the Internet’s manifold creative and collaborative prisms....

FACT Data, digital, and web art have inherited the tendency to demystify, détourne, and decode their medium’s dominion. The studied and stunning videos by the media-art duo Semiconductor observe a more optimistic bargain between information and the instruments that transmit it. Active since 1997, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt create videos, installations, and audiovisual projector performances that can be more comfortably aligned with (but not confined to) a long tradition of experimental science films than the vagaries of New Media....

It had been seven years since Mildred Pierce, the role Joan Crawford had to audition for at Warner Brothers after MGM terminated her contract, and the hit she rode to an Oscar. But even the greatest Hollywood careers oscillate like the stock market, and though the late 1940s saw some of her best work, by 1952 Crawford was once more in a box-office trough. She asked Warners to let her go, they did, and Crawford went to RKO for Sudden Fear—where once again, she landed an Oscar nomination and a roaring success....