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Badlands Terrence Malick (1973) The Maltese Falcon John Huston (1941) The Great McGinty Preston Sturges (1940) Story of a Love Affair Michelangelo Antonioni (1950) Force of Evil Abraham Polonsky (1948) Blue Collar Paul Schrader (1978) Accattone Pier Paolo Pasolini (1961) I Shot Jesse James Samuel Fuller (1949) Variety Lights Federico Fellini (1950) Terms of Endearment James L. Brooks (1983) Say Anything… Cameron Crowe (1989) Mauvaise Graine Billy Wilder & Alexander Esway (1934)...

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Cry of the City Richard Conte is in Mme. Rose’s “Swedish massage & reducing” parlor, getting his chicken choked. Well, he’s getting choked like a chicken, anyway. Hope Emerson is doing the choking, her mighty hands clamped around his neck in one of the key scenes in Cry of the City (48), Robert Siodmak’s onyx ode to Italian-American New York City in the days when elevated trains still crisscrossed lower Manhattan....

Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s autobiographical graphic novel A Drifting Life is an engaging tribute to the pioneering manga artist credited with creating gekiga (dramatic pictures), a genre that introduced darker and more ironic content to the field in 1957. The greatly abridged autobiographical content (the book is more than 800 pages long) is enhanced by Khoo’s inspired interweaving of animated versions of Tatsumi’s very adult short manga stories....

Androids Dream While taking stock of four films at the 2015 edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real series, I kept returning to the last line of Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” The narrator of Ellison’s novel—nameless, friendless, and voluntarily committed to his hole in Harlem—isn’t like anyone we’ve ever met, and yet his strangeness makes him instantly relatable to everyone who’s felt alone in a crowd or a subway car....

Pulp Fiction If Pulp Fiction, released twenty years ago this week, was the film cultural equivalent to Nirvana’s Nevermind in pop music—and I’ve argued this point more than once—then Quentin Tarantino was our Kurt Cobain, or at least a Cobain-caliber star with Krist Novoselic-caliber charisma. The two men were united by more than the fact of their being suddenly trampolined into iconic fame at approximately the same time thanks to a combination of diligence, talent, and good (or ill) luck....

There’s no time and there’s no repose. The minute that one screening is over, four more are about to begin. Reports must be filed, blogged, tweeted. Dinner table discussions must flow. Within days, the hypotheses and polemical campaigns become the melody and the actual films are relegated to the backbeat. Is Blue Is the Warmest Color a genuine reflection of lesbian experience or a “slutty impostor”? Does Alexander Payne love his characters or hate them?...

Deliriously theatrical, flagrantly cinephilic, unabashedly provocative, Yann Gonzalez’s You and the Night is the kind of movie that restores your faith in auteur filmmaking. Cahiers du cinéma’s tip that it was the debut feature to watch in Cannes turns to be absolutely on the mark: for this blog’s focus on discoveries, my viewing of over 20 debuts (all eligible for the Camera d’Or prize) resulted in the crystal-clear conclusion that Gonzalez’s first feature is in a class by itself, declaring a supremely gifted young artist in total control of his abilities and confident enough to ignore fashionable trends....

Loveless Strict security, bright sunshine, bleak stories, black humor, and the ongoing debate about streaming cinema are some of the threads woven through the first half of the 70th edition of Cannes. We’re at the midpoint, and half of the competition films have screened, with titles by Robin Campillo, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Bong Joon-ho, Andrey Zvyagintsev, and Yorgos Lanthimos standing out. Among these, Zvyagintsev’s Loveless proved to be one of the most distinctive....

In the fall of 1966, Scott Wilson was sitting in a jailhouse in Sparta, Illinois, talking to Sidney Poitier. Wilson was a 24-year-old parking valet for a topless bar in Southern California who had just landed a showy supporting role in his first movie: the scruffy vagrant picked up on suspicion of murder in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night—the man Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs eventually exonerates. Poitier had taken an interest in Wilson, even rewriting their interrogation scene to give the young actor more to do....

A few years ago, the cinephile social network Criterion Forum hosted a thought-provoking if unresolvable debate over “The Definition of Pure Cinema.” Some posters suggested that medium specificity was the key, that a pure film proved what cinema—and only cinema—could do. Others had a more intuitive take: pure cinema, they suggested, bypasses the intellect altogether in favor of the senses and the heart. All seemed to agree that purity in cinema couldn’t be reduced to a series of specific techniques or specifications, that it was defined, at least in part, by something ineffable and possibly undefinable....

This gorgeous cartoon epic celebrates the shapelessness of water. With designs that look like electrified woodcuts, co-directors Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang plunge us into a primordial time when water covered the earth and the only living creatures were giant fish with human souls. Then the moviemakers leap into some unspecified age of fable to tell a fish-meets-girl story. The girl, Chun, belongs to a magical group of beings known as “the Others....

In broad, fervid strokes, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour renders the soul-stirring sights and sounds of Winston Churchill seizing political power and rallying Great Britain to the anti-Nazi cause in the 25 packed days between May 9 and June 4, 1940. Franklin Roosevelt said that Churchill “has a hundred ideas a day. Four are good, the other ninety-six downright dangerous.” Wright has one idea—to treat political theater as a theater of war....

David Ayer’s Suicide Squad fritters away the piquant notion of taking a men-on-a-mission movie and peopling it with super anti-heroes. In this Dirty Half-Dozen movie based on various incarnations of the DC Comics series of the same name, Joel Kinnaman plays a righteous Navy SEALs colonel, Rick Flagg, charged by badass U.S. intelligence chief Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) with turning maladjusted freaks of nature and America’s Most Wanted costumed criminals into a fighting unit....

For a devoutly Catholic woman in 1952, deciding whom to marry could determine her entire fate. John Crowley’s Brooklyn ties the marital destiny of Eilis Lacey to the wrenching question of which country she will call home: the U.S., or her native Ireland. Such choices have shaped millions of lives, but it’s rare these days to find a film built on the gravity of a young woman’s dilemmas. Eilis is a shop clerk in Enniscorthy, Ireland, who obtains an American work visa through the offices of a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent)....

Images from Baby It’s You (John Sayles, 1983) I have lived in Schenectady, New York my entire life. Though the city is known for at least a few significant things, it’s primarily recognized as the home of General Electric. The traumatic ripple effect of that company’s collapse did not spare my family, many of whom experienced General Electric layoffs and the resulting destabilization. As I grew older, it became clear to me why the music of someone like Bruce Springsteen, an artist revered by my parents to the degree of sainthood, resonated so strongly in the region....

Trishna But what about the movies themselves? The festival’s focus is small American indies; small international art films; and a wide range of documentaries, including sports and music movies, most of them already headed for TV. At least 15 movies arrived at Tribeca with theatrical distribution sewn up and either already have opened or will very soon, among them Julie Delpy’s international comedy of manners, 2 Days in New York, starring Chris Rock, hilarious and understated, as a freelance journalist married to Delpy’s hyper-French expat....

What the festival lacks in size, however, it more than makes up for in eclecticism. As in years past, NewFest remains an essential source for LGBT cinema from around the world, with selections coming from the U.K., Chile, the Philippines, and Sweden, among others. And if none of the titles below embark in new directions on either aesthetic or political fronts, they offer visions that are occasionally electrifying, sometimes troublesome, and always plugged into the ever-shifting crosscurrents of contemporary queer experience....

In a melodrama, you might hope that things will be highly colored. But nothing quite prepares you for the ecstatic, chromatic intensity of Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life. To call the film a riot of color doesn’t begin to do it justice: color here doesn’t so much riot as surge, swoon, ebb and flow in a delirious tide of euphoria, and sometimes solemnity. It starts right from the opening sequence, as two sisters explore a forest in Rio de Janeiro, the phosphorescent green of moss on trees chiming vibrantly against the slightly chemical pinky red of the film’s titles....