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The argument heightens to a mortifying degree, until at last all the pieces of Haskell Wexler fall into place: the political firebrand who vented to his family at length about the failings of government, the virtuoso cameraman and sometime filmmaker who clashed during several high-profile assignments (notably The Conversation and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the resolute octogenarian about whom longtime friend Jane Fonda muses, “I can’t believe how not mellowed he seems....

I’m curious about the artistic inspirations that fed your thinking on this movie. You looked at the photography of William Eggleston, for one thing, right? We put a lot of references together. I pulled references and then worked with the production designer [Anne Ross]. We looked at paintings and the references of Philippe Le Sourd, the cinematographer. We looked at other films, the photography and the portraiture of the Civil War, some of women and children, and William Eggleston for the mood and the color....

Dead for a Dollar (Walter Hill, 2022) Writer-director Walter Hill has made a fistful of westerns, including his lyrical retelling of the Jesse James saga, The Long Riders (1980); his epic threnody for the Chiricahua Apache, Geronimo: An American Legend (1993); and his bold modernist take on the mythic gunfighter James Butler Hickok, Wild Bill (1995). Hill says he loves westerns because “they have an elegant simplicity that masks something much deeper....

When you’re in the editing room, do you think about getting into a groove, in a musical sense? To make it move? I suppose. Well, your instinct tells you as you’re doing it. Just like if you’re a standup comic, you’re out there on the floor and your instinct tells you, “Don’t do that next joke like you’d planned, cut right to the one after it.” And so when you’re editing, your instinct says, “Don’t stop for what you thought you were going to show there....

Though convinced that the studio would never okay him, Dern nonetheless showed up for another meeting with Alexander Payne in May 2012. He agreed to do an informal screen test, reading a couple of scenes in front of a camera. Payne said he wanted Dern to be in his movie right away and telephoned him within 48 hours to say: “The part is yours. It has always been yours.” Three months of silence ensued before Dern heard another word....

Assassination In 2014, it suddenly became hip to be square in Korea. It’s the year that the cloyingly sentimental, uber-patriotic, and decades-spanning Ode to My Father became the second-highest-grossing movie of all time in Korea. Not the second-highest-grossing Korean movie. The second-highest-grossing movie. Why wasn’t it number one? That spot went to another uber-patriotic 2014 release, The Admiral: Roaring Currents, the hagiographic, inspirational, somewhat real-life story of a 16th-century Korean admiral who scored a naval victory against the nefarious Japanese....

The Dhoom movies are a lot like the Transformers films: big, dumb, crass, and capable of hoovering money from audiences’ pockets into the producer’s coffers in a 500 mile-per-hour suck-stream. But whereas Michael Bay’s babies will give you a headache, the Dhoom movies are actually fun if you approach them in the right frame of mind. Pretend that you’ve recently received a blow to the head, and you’re going to love Dhoom....

His name isn’t really Patrick Lung Kong. He’s not sure exactly how old he is because his mother isn’t confident she remembers his birthday. He says he was born in Hong Kong, but we have to take that on faith because he doesn’t have a birth certificate. His career lasted only 14 years, and he made only 14 films, but those movies are the seed from which the Cantonese film industry was reborn in the Seventies and Eighties....

Fourth installments of franchises aren’t typically associated with quality, or any ambition grander than scraping those last few dollars from the bottom of the barrel. Yet George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road upends all expectations—about how action sequences are composed, what themes a blockbuster can contain, or who a film’s actual protagonist can be—and puts most other filmmakers working on this scale to shame. In line with the postapocalyptic scarcity its characters deal with on a daily basis, the plot of Fury Road is a stripped-down there-and-back chase film....

In 1986, a young girl is raped and murdered in a field. Twenty-three years later to the day, a similar act is committed at the exact same location. All of those who are affected by the murders—the detectives, the families, the perpetrators themselves—undergo the pains of loss, obsession, and reconciliation with the past in Baran bo Odar’s debut. Based upon Jan Costin Wagner’s novel of the same name, The Silence is more a rich character study than a whodunit, with echoes of Zodiac, The Sweet Hereafter, The Vanishing, and the films of Todd Field....

Postmortem: Rabin, The Last Day In the interview preamble to Amos Gitai’s Rabin, The Last Day, a solemn Shimon Peres recalls the memory of his friend, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—then the subject of vicious censure for the Oslo Accords of 1994—and his utter fearlessness in the face of opprobrium. “Rabin went through a very difficult time before he was assassinated,” Peres notes. “That’s when I admired him most....

Donbass The Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival began last Wednesday with Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass, a kaleidoscopic look at Ukraine’s conflict region with Russia. It’s characteristically bold material, and Loznitsa isn’t letting up with his next film. In an interview with Film Comment in Cannes, Loznitsa confirmed that he is already in post-production on a new feature—an archival documentary about the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s....