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It’s a curious condition of modern cinema that few films have addressed television’s role as the most powerful entity in our lives. How television has fundamentally remolded social systems and mores—the rapid emergence of gay rights, including marriage, has been profoundly fueled by television images from Will & Grace to Glee—is of enormous interest to a realist like Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, who has singlehandedly reformed notions of classic neorealism to a contemporary climate....

Rarely has a filmmaker inherited a premise more suited for a digital-effects makeover than the Transformers animated TV show, which ran from 1984 to 1987. It was, after all, a series whose narrative component was reverse-engineered from the mechanical possibilities of a shape-shifting toy. But this seems to have been a mixed blessing for Michael Bay, a director known for “high-octane” films like The Rock, Armageddon, and Bad Boys that tend to put quippy dialogue in the driver’s seat....

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985) The restoration of Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov’s unblinking depiction of Nazi armies wreaking carnage on Soviet Belorussia in 1943, enables us to view this disturbing, mesmerizing epic with fresh eyes as it turns Klimov’s lens into a burning glass. Originally called Kill Hitler, this film ranks with Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain as a World War II nightmare of humanity pushed beyond its limits....

Flying Down to Rio Audiences knew them as Fred and Ginger. Critics call the work they did together on the ten films in the complete retrospective Fred & Ginger (running this weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), “the Astaire-Rogers musicals,” out of love and respect for two stars who, with romantic transport and zesty comedy, transformed cinematic song and dance on the RKO lot—no matter who sat in the director’s chairs or wrote the scripts....

Contemporary comic actors in dramatic roles can bring extra fillips of observation and vitality to them. They know how to use their super-sensitive antennae for the foibles and energy-packed stress-points of modern life to connect to audiences with an uncanny directness, even without laughs. Great performers like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson and Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls sink deeply into their parts without losing their transcendent bond with fans....

The Goldfinch (John Crowley, 2019) The grace and ebullience that powered Ansel Elgort through Baby Driver have nowhere to go in the lead role of high-powered New York antique-furniture salesman Theo Decker in The Goldfinch. This self-made connoisseur, skilled at passing off quality reproductions as genuine articles, can act agreeably glib in an opaque, mysterious way. (He commits fraud to cover the taxes and increase the business of a first-class restoration worker who took Theo under his wing when he was orphaned....

I went into Pierre Morel’s The Gunman with my hopes up, because Sean Penn has done some of his best acting in genre films. In Brian De Palma’s gangster movie Carlito’s Way (93), as a criminal lawyer who turns criminal, Penn is excitingly unpredictable. With circular wire-rims that narrow his eyes and an ugly perm tumbling around his shaved-back hairline, he looks like a soft-boiled egg in a hardboiled world....

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s 2013 smash This Is the End, which also starred Rogen and James Franco and gave them the clout to do The Interview, put several kinds of “joint” in the idea of “joint identity.” When the stars and their friends weren’t smoking weed, they were spanking the monkey. Depicting a fictionalized version of the “Judd Apatow gang” as a team of wankers, Rogen and Goldberg turned their scathing yet adoring eyes on the frat-boy type of male bonding that’s tantamount to self-love....

The Operative (Yuval Adler, 2019) Yuval Adler’s espionage drama, The Operative, and Claudio Giovannesi’s street-crime spectacle, Piranhas, would make an apt, moderately absorbing double-bill. These intelligent though uninspired genre movies streamline events that play out more lucidly and engrossingly in their celebrated fact-inspired source books about a female Mossad agent (Yiftach Reicher Atir’s The English Teacher) and a teenage Neapolitan gangster (Roberto Saviano’s The Piranhas: The Boy Bosses of Naples)....

Steampunk and retrofuturism—genres that look forward by looking backward (and vice-versa), or what The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction defines as science fiction that captures “the older but still modern eras in which technological change seemed to anticipate a better world”—have fared best on screen in light-fingered cartoons that bypass heavy exposition or Big Thoughts. My favorite steampunk movie is still Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky (86), a piece of undiluted euphoria about a girl who drops from the sky into a mining town and the spunky boy who catches her....

Explanatory ads and teasers, be damned! Feel relieved if all you bring away from them is portraits of the sensational Claire Foy in psychic torment and physical jeopardy. To give away anything else about Unsane is unfair. With equal splashes of wit and gore, this cool, nasty little thriller fearlessly exploits up-to-date strains of social and sexual paranoia. It also eviscerates infuriating bureaucratese, circa now, whether practiced by complacent law enforcers, a sexist bank executive, or manipulative hospital personnel....

Defining Miranda July is like trying to define a color. When confronted with the scope of her work—multimedia performance, experimental audio, single channel video, fanzines, riot grrrl film and video distribution, and now perhaps, following a cameo as a nurse with a bruised eye in Jesus’ Son, acting—the head spins. And that’s part of the plan. The 26-year-old Portland, Oregon-based artist is fascinated with systems, codes, and the fallacy of the normal perpetrated by things like education and IQ tests....

I bet Andrew Bujalski is sick of reading that he’s the voice of his generation, when most of that neo-slacker demographic has never had the opportunity to see his films. Bujalski’s debut feature, Funny Ha Ha, had a three-year festival wind-up to a privately financed 35mm theatrical release this past spring. It’s now available on a Wellspring DVD with a hilarious commentary track by Bujalski that makes it a must-purchase, even for those who’ve seen the film multiple times....

On the occasion of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective, Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6), here is a selection of FILM COMMENT’s meditations on the director’s oeuvre from the last four decades. “Douglas Sirk: Melo Maestro” By James McCourt November/December 1975 Written on the Wind Sirk, who’d left Hollywood and the U.S. behind after 1959’s Imitation of Life, found his career rejuvenated within critical circles after the 1971 publication of Jon Halliday’s seminal, book-length interview, Sirk on Sirk....

In Effi Briest—both the 1974 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 1895 Theodor Fontane novel on which the movie is closely based—an inexperienced young woman is married off to a man who cannot love. Baron von Innstetten, twice Effi’s age when she weds him at 17, is a model civil servant, a man of wide education, discerning taste, honest intentions, and, for the most part, generous motives. There is no reason to doubt him when he says he adores his young wife, and little cause to accuse him of intentionally causing her pain....

Lori Felker’s trailer for the festival offered a soothing contrast. Stroking her hair and smiling, she whispers coyly into the camera: “I hope this experience brings you much relaxation and peace.” Felker then demonstrates the projection of the Sofia Coppola film Lost in Translation in two different formats: a 35mm print carefully threaded through a projector; and then DVD, with the push of a few buttons on a player. Felker’s trailer is not only a playful take on “found footage”—Lost in Translation is never “seen” except as the physical material of celluloid film or a DVD disc—but also a mash-up of trigger video, meditation tape, and internet porn solicitation....

The Charm of Others The pleasure of PIA is discovering raw or sometimes fully formed new talent. There’s a lot of dross, usually well made, but inconsequential at best. The 16 films in this year’s main competition followed suit. By far the most exciting debut was Ryutaro Ninomiya’s The Charm of Others. The rambling story follows the uneventful lives and petty power struggles of a bunch of guys working dead-end jobs at a repair shop for broken vending machines....

Journals of Musan The conscious and artful shaping of the Tiger competition by former artistic director Simon Field, over his decade in charge—a project that dramatically raised the festival to the status of a must-see event—is now essentially absent. In its place is haphazard programming that lacks singular vision, suggesting a lineup approved by committee. This year’s competition had only three films worth thinking about: Park Jung-bum’s powerful debut, The Journals of Musan, about the brutal travails of a recent North Korean defector; Sergio Borges’s fluid and intelligent multi-portrait The Sky Above, concerning a trio of 30-year-old men living in Brazil’s sprawling Belo Horizonte; and Sivaroj Kongsakul’s Eternity, a contemplative, gentle love story that brings a dead man’s past to life through its powerful narrative....

All of this probably had less effect on my frame of mind than simple familiarity with the widely adored festival taking some of the shine off. True/False’s cherry-picked program, canny cultivation of guests, choice local eats, and entertaining group activities had all elicited reviews that sounded like wide-eyed, wow-mouthed raves about a spa retreat (my own bewildered first report included). No doubt True/False’s standing remains hard to beat for its judicious focus on the cream of the crop as well as the influence of its taste-making in programming and critical circles....

The Viennale doesn’t strive to plant world-premiere flags, and its judicious scope and discerning sense of juxtaposition distinguishes it from other festivals. While you’ll find crowned heavyweights such as Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, they don’t hog attention, leaving space for a moviegoer to piece together an idiosyncratic journey and share in the sense of freedom demonstrated by artistic director Hans Hurch, who programs the festival. Ricardo Bär And so why not pay a visit to Ricardo Bär, a Rouchian endeavor about an Argentine farmboy who is balancing studies for the priesthood with responsibilities at home?...