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Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises completes two different trilogies this summer. It is, of course, the third film after Batman Begins (05) and The Dark Knight (08), but it also follows, and serves to anchor, the season’s superhero must-see films, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man. As part of The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan’s latest reaches back to the first film as well as continuing the storylines from the second, addresses character questions and issues more than satisfactorily, and plays out themes to well-thought-out conclusions....

I’ll just get it out of the way now: The Paperboy is unbelievably awful. It’s easily the worst movie of the year, and, given its budget and high-profile cast, will likely be counted among the worst movies ever made. Most commonly known as “That Movie Where Nicole Kidman Pisses on Zac Efron,” The Paperboy is so remarkably, jaw-droppingly bad that it’s not even enjoyable on a camp level. The crime mystery/dirty, drawling melodrama is filtered through the perspective of Anita Chester (Macy Gray), former maid to the Jansen family, who own the local newspaper....

“Life’s a bitch and then you don’t die,” grumbles a straight-faced Ethan Hawke as prized hematologist Edward in Daybreakers, a slick, violent, and intensely gloomy horror/action/sci-fi hybrid that stands out in a crowded field of end-of-mankind movie scenarios. The twist this time is that he and most of Earth’s remaining population in 2019 are highly functional vampires, protected by state-of-the-art sun-proof glass and networks of tunnels. But now that humans are near-extinct, their food supply is running dangerously low, and, contrary to Edward’s statement, their hunger causes them to degenerate into destructible ravenous beasts, attacking their own kind for as little as a drop of blood....

It’s a family affair (in more ways than one): Leopold Mozart’s world-famous son had a supremely gifted sister (nicknamed Nannerl) whose story has been largely forgotten. René Féret’s film serves as corrective. In her youth Nannerl was told repeatedly that musical harmony, counterpoint, and composition were beyond the purview of delicate female minds (and that if she had any yearnings for art her only way into that world would be as a model)....

“It completely overwhelmed me. I was shaken to the core.” So said Ingmar Bergman of The Phantom Carriage, a time-encrusted film from 1921 that deserves all the renewed attention it can manage to attract. It promises to accrue more, by way of a recent Criterion release that restores Swedish director Victor Sjöström’s spectral vision, abstract for the era and disarming even still. But just as enticing, for those coming to the film more than 90 years after it was realized, is a modern score that slinks back through history to reify its mystery and reestablish its mystique....

The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie Tam Lin Strait-Jacket The Escapees Also fresh out of the loony bin are the two teenage girls at the center of Jean Rollin’s 1981 The Escapees (Netflix; quality: decent, with the occasional image flaw and missing subtitle). This is one of the fantastique filmmaker’s more reality-based works, and one of his most obscure (I can’t say if that’s for good reason or not, as I’m admittedly not all that familiar with his oeuvre—yet)....

Ross served as a basketball coach and GED instructor during the years he lived in Hale County, and developed intimacies with his subjects that made filming their lives organic to the experience of being with them. After the film’s premiere at Sundance, he said he had ”wanted to make a film that was made up of moments. Made up of the sort of beautiful nuances that are banal and epic simultaneously, that every person in the world has and participates in....

There are many reasons that it’s worth paying attention to politics, but perhaps the most important of these is that what goes on in the political sphere has the potential to kill or cause grievous physical harm to you, the people you know, or people who you don’t know who nevertheless deserve better. This fact is something grasped intuitively and communicated on a gut level by The Phenix City Story, a movie with a real-life ripped-from-the-headlines premise made by genre utility man Phil Karlson and released in 1955 by Allied Artists Pictures—the gussied-up rebrand of Poverty Row mainstay Monogram Pictures....

Purchase a digital or print copy 2. January/February 1986 Purchase a digital or print copy 3. May/June 1976 Purchase a digital or print copy 4. November/December 1975 Purchase a digital or print copy 5. January/February 1977 Purchase a digital or print copy 6. September/October 1973 Purchase a digital or print copy 7. January/February 1982 Purchase a digital or print copy 8. September/October 2001 Purchase a digital or print copy 9....

To kick things off, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with our contributor Beatrice Loayza (stay tuned for her dispatch next week) and Sight and Sound’s Isabel Stevens. The three critics debated their differing reactions to the festival’s opening night selection, Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, as well as Sophie Fillières’ This Life of Mine, Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, and Abel Gance’s newly-restored silent epic Napoléon (1927), before looking ahead to the films they’re most excited to see as the festival continues....

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