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Was this the merchandise section of the gallery? A marketing or recruitment video? Or a parody? I couldn’t quite tell at first. This slippage between satire and fact, which constantly reminds us of the all-too-real absurdity of the settler colonial project, is the modus operandi of New Red Order. As I walked further into the exhibit, one wall featured a sardonic timeline of the history of the Improved Order of Red Men, a whites-only political society that New Red Order riffs on subversively....

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What We Do in the Shadows The January/February 2015 issue of FILM COMMENT leads off with our cover story: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s hilarious documentary-style What We Do in the Shadows, an essential vampire film with a difference, and vive la différence—Jonathan Romney explains. Amy Taubin pinpoints the crushing import of Ava DuVernay’s Selma for our times. Michelle Orange dissects Force Majeure and other squirm-inducing work by Ruben Östlund, while Russian critic Anton Dolin is your guide to Aleksei German’s final, medieval-sci-fi film, Hard to Be a God, taking us to the point of no return....

Burden of Dreams Not so far from the filmmaker’s home and the base of operations for his company Flower Films, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are in the midst of a thorough retrospective, “Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank”—named after one of his most raucous, celebratory films, about various festivities and parades in New Orleans. Full of music and revelers in oversized and delightfully absurd Native American-inspired costumes, Always for Pleasure (78) is as colorful a portrait as you’ll ever see of that most atypical of large U....

Criteria for eligibility were as follows: only directors not previously well established as actors would be eligible, so out went Welles, Cassavetes, and Sjöström. Cameo and walk-on appearances were also excluded—so no Don Siegel in Play Misty for Me or Dario Argento in Innocent Blood. Lists ranked in order of preference were cajoled from a dozen game Film Comment contributors and esteemed colleagues: Gavin Smith, Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, Amy Taubin, Nathan Lee, Chuck Stephens, and Michael Chaiken in the U....

One of the challenges of making this film must have been staging the crowd scenes. What was your strategy for shooting the protest sequence? Obviously it took a lot of planning. There are established and conventional movie ways of doing those kinds of things, and how I work, irrespective of content, is to create the action and then to work out how to shoot it by being there. I don’t ever use a storyboard artist or any of those things....

Readers’ Poll: Readers are invited to stand up and be counted too! All entries will be automatically entered in our contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection. We will print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on the website. Send your ranked list of the year’s 20 best films (plus any rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll [at] filmlinc....

Crossfire Kelly’s role, his brief but extraordinary performance, his life story, and those 11 words haunt and define Crossfire, just as they haunt and define film noir, postwar America, and the midcentury male psyche. They speak of the aftermath of a war we’d just “won,” and of every war we’ve fought since; of men, not triumphant but adrift. “We made a lot of plans but they all fell through”—plans for victory and peacetime and harmony and a shining future; plans that we somehow knew at their conception would never come true....

Julieta A profound and moving study of family, guilt, and growing old, Pedro Almodóvar’s 20th feature—and one of his best recent films—is a spectacular new Competition entry (and opens in French theaters today). While he’s never taken the top prize in Cannes—he’s won Best Director for All About My Mother and Best Screenplay for Volver—Almodóvar is a rock star on the Riviera at a festival that has warmly embraced him film after film....

Ghosts Money—who has it, who lacks it, and what those who need it are willing to do to get it—is a constant, corrosive presence in the work of German filmmaker Christian Petzold. In the three movies that make up his “Ghosts” trilogy, it’s the fuel that keeps the engine of the narrative running and the obstruction that makes it stall, an object that corrupts those who have it and cripples those who don’t....

Because 1967 is now fondly recalled as the beginning of what came to be known as the New Hollywood, it’s easy to forget the harshness with which critics and audiences delivered the message “Out with the old.” That year, it hit nobody harder than Charlie Chaplin. When A Countess from Hong Kong opened in New York 50 years ago this week, reviews ranged from dismissive to savage. “Time to Retire,” snapped the headline in Time magazine....

The title character of Ang Lee’s frontline/home-front Iraq War movie, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a U.S. Army specialist (played pallidly by British newcomer Joe Alwyn), gets lionized for springing to the defense of a wounded sergeant on a video replayed endlessly on cable news, then gets flown back to America for a two-week victory tour. The movie aims to dramatize how America’s marketing of sentimental patriotism can render undeniable heroism inauthentic, not just to citizens who don’t really want to think about the war but also to the hero himself....

Laughs arrive in Hail, Caesar! like the periodic whoosh of intermittent wipers. Whenever hazy ideas and half-fermented humor fog up the screen, a blast of hilarity whisks them away. But as anyone stuck on a freeway during a rainstorm can testify, that on-and-off rhythm can get old quickly during an hour-and-45-minute ride. The Coen Brothers’ surprisingly perfunctory burlesque of Hollywood takes place in the early 1950s, when the movies had already lost regular customers to television and studios were no longer formidable trusts....

Images from Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019) Shia LaBeouf, who peaked commercially in three Transformer films and hit a creative pinnacle as John McEnroe in Borg and McEnroe (2018), has written a raw, brilliant script for Honey Boy. This fictionalized cinematic memoir is unabashed “drama therapy”: it grew out of LaBeouf’s writings in rehab after ranting at police while on location for another film in Savannah, Georgia. Whether or not it works as therapy, Honey Boy is a wonderful movie, directed confidently and intuitively by documentary-maker Alma Har’el in her first fictional feature....

All images from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019) The books behind Guillermo del Toro’s new production, Alvin Schwartz’s compulsively readable Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, collect folkloric scraps and urban myths. They include bleak and often scary-funny campfire tales like “Harold,” about a scarecrow who comes to life; open-ended horror fragments like “The Big Toe,” about what happens after a boy plucks a big toe from the family garden—it’s rooted to something underneath the topsoil—and his mom cooks it, his father carves it, and they all eat it; and grotesque fantasies like “Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker,” about a bloody talking head that drops into a fireplace—the kind of story kids tell at sleepovers before pouncing on each other and screaming (as Schwartz suggests) “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!...