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In Unrelated (07), the strung-out, fortyish Anna (Kathryn Worth), fleeing a traumatic event in her long-term relationship, joins an old friend and her extended clan in a Tuscan villa. Her unwise attempt to seduce the friend’s teenage nephew Oakley, a troublemaking Adonis played by Tom Hiddleston in his feature debut, brings about her humiliation. In Archipelago (10), Hiddleston plays a much less confident young man whose plan to become an AIDS-prevention worker in Africa is threatened by his well-to-do family’s disastrous holiday on Tresco in the Scilly Isles....

Unlike recent successful Israeli war movies such as Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (07) or Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (09), which play out in familiar sites of war, Youth can be seen as part of a new wave of Israeli features describing how the ongoing military conflict invades and changes the domestic sphere. In a similar manner to Nadav Lapid’s Policeman (11), Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales’s Big Bad Wolves (13) or Jonathan Gurfinkel and Rona Segal’s Six Acts (13), Shoval’s drama has a melancholic and morbid tone, guided by a suffocating sense that violence could erupt at any given moment....

You’ve often said that your approach to writing is that you accumulate material and ideas in notebooks, and find the story through the development of characters. Is that applicable here? JIM JARMUSCH: Yeah, maybe even more so to this. I mean, this came out of frustration because I had another project that took a long time to write, which means four months. I had written it for specific actors, as I always do, and it was a story for two people and one of them loved it and the other one didn’t really want to do the film, and that threw me for a loop....

Aalavandhan I fell in love with Kamal Haasan when I saw him beat himself up. This was shortly after Ronald McDonald helped him buy some heroin. I needed to know more, and so I dug into his filmography and I came to know Haasan as the Tamil actor who parlayed his massive fame into directing and starring in a musical about the man who tried to assassinate Gandhi, as the actor who starred in one film playing a dwarf, who played quadruplets in another, who played President George W....

Golden Chickensss The short answer is: Chinese culture is full of sex. Of Buddhism’s three “impious acts,” having no children is sometimes considered the worst, and that means having sex gets a lot of cultural attention. Two classics of Chinese literature are Jin Ping Mei (aka The Golden Lotus) a filthy porno book published in 1610, and The Carnal Prayer Mat, another porn novel published in 1675. Doing their part to uphold tradition, Hong Kong has been making sex films for almost 50 years....

Three months after Corneliu Porumboiu premiered Infinite Football at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival, the Romanian director is already in the midst of shooting his next film. Gomera follows a Romanian policeman whose mission takes him to the eponymous island in the Canaries, where he must learn “El Silbo”—a whistled form of Spanish used by locals to communicate across the deep ravines and valleys of the region. Porumboiu told Film Comment that he first heard about El Silbo through a TV program soon after completing 2009’s Police, Adjective....

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) Julie Dash is set to make her first feature film in 28 years, a biopic about civil rights activist Dr. Angela Davis. Shadow and Act reports that no cast has yet been announced, though filming is set to begin in June. Dash’s debut, Daughters of the Dust, was the first feature film by an African American woman to have a theatrical release, and on the film’s 25th anniversary, marked by a joint-effort restoration between Cohen Media Group and UCLA, Cassie da Costa spoke with the director about her book, teaching at Morehouse, and what it means to make history....

małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Sky Hopinka, 2020) With the Academy Awards looming, a whole host of guilds, festivals, associations, and critics’ circles have thrown out their picks for the best films of the year. 1917 is looking like a clear favorite at this stage, with the DGA, PGA, and BAFTAs all awarding the film top honors. The London Film Critics’ Circle awarded Parasite and Bong Joon-ho the best film/director combo (with The Souvenir thankfully winning Best British/Irish Film—not even nominated at last night’s BAFTAs)....

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976) The first time I saw Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was years ago in a packed theater in Chicago. The film came weighted by its own reputation. I went in intimidated (I had found much of the writing about it to be incomprehensible, albeit intriguing). I have seen the film many times since, but when I think about the first time I remember one thing and one thing only: when Delphine Seyrig, busy in her cooking routine, dropped a fork, a woman a couple of rows away from me, who was also probably seeing it for the first time, gasped in terror....

Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls (George Sidney, 1946) It’s been 50 years since her death, and Judy Garland still deserves better. The singing-through-tears, industry–victim incarnation of Garland is once again being trotted out for our morbid delectation in the new biopic Judy. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, Rupert Goold’s film focuses almost exclusively on the near-end of the icon’s career, specifically her disaster-courting late-’60s gig at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub, only months before her death at a rapidly aged 47....

Just before the Christmas of 1964, Brian Wilson suffered the most significant panic attack in pop-culture history. Triggered by in-flight turbulence, it left the fragile Beach Boy grounded for the rest of the band’s tour, unleashing a creative tsunami no one saw coming and none since has fully explained. The harmonic invention running through each song, the self-exposed yet epic vocals, and the feverish audio innovations that crested with 1966’s Pet Sounds signify an artist several exits past “ahead of his time”—just the troubled genius to inspire Hollywood’s next biopic symphony of false notes....

How much can you alter a time-honored story before it becomes something else entirely and loses its distinctive power? The irksome answer to this question lurks behind the haunting, frequently stunning compositions of Andrea Pallaoro’s Medeas, a reimagining of the myth of Medea in the American West. Though classical variations of this tale usually center upon Medea’s otherworldly powers and/or the final body count, Pallaoro and co-writer Orlando Tirado’s changes lie in the tragedy’s setup....

The corporate overlords in Resident Evil: Retribution constructed CGI simulacra of major cities to test the death rate of their viruses. Pompeii could be another room in the Umbrella Corporation’s virtual killing grounds. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest act of creative destruction is effectively a meticulous, CGI-powered incinerator for consuming the ancient metropolis. Ever the technology wonk, Anderson uses the setting to play with 3-D textures (the foreground sheets of ash are the most enveloping particulates since the windswept desert sand in Roy Ward Baker’s 1953 Inferno) and to pursue his fetish for the detailed mapping out of his settings, turning Pompeii into a roiling tabletop game board....

The title protagonist of Terri is occasionally shown reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This intertextual gesture subtly brings what is perhaps the most salient theme of Azazel Jacobs’s career to date into sharp relief. Whereas Jacobs père has been most concerned for the past four decades with using cinema as an instrument for exploring the mechanics and boundaries of visual perception, Jacobs fils is less a mad scientist than a misfit bard....

It’s only appropriate that, for filmmakers endlessly fascinated by the refusal of settled adults to just grow up already, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, the latest from prolific fraternal duo Jay and Mark Duplass, represents something of a stylistic regression. For those of us who are enthusiastic about (or at least sympathetic to) the endeavors of the mumblecore camp, this offering from the school/movement/whatever’s most visible representatives is at once underwhelming and irritating, its potentially endearing sloppiness smothered and its facile humanism amplified by a nagging sense that neither its characters nor their drama is particularly worth caring about....

There’s a telling moment in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, in which Josh, a middle-aged documentarian played by Ben Stiller, attends a party un-self-consciously sporting a woven fedora. “You’re an old man with a hat,” his friend blurts out. The line may be an easy laugh, but to Josh it’s a stinging slap in the face that forces him to reflect upon the recent vacation he’s been taking from adulthood—the hat is a stylistic nod to his new, drastically younger friend Jamie (Adam Driver)....

Peter O’Toole and Steve Railsback in The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, 1980) Richard Rush’s death on April 8 prodded me to re-watch The Stunt Man, his magnum opus. His triumph converted my grief to elation. Topical yet timeless, Rush’s fearless movie about movie-making packs as much punch as it did four decades ago. Written in the early 1970s, made in the late 1970s, and minimally released in 1980, it may be cinema’s gutsiest, most scintillating celebration of big-screen magic....