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First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019) In a virgin forest, a man hunts for bright yellow mushrooms among the ferns and mossy trees. He pauses when he sees a tiny lizard on its back, delicately flips the creature over, and watches it scurry away. The focus on this minute gesture of kindness introduces and defines both his character and the character of the film, Kelly Reichardt’s rare and lovely First Cow (2019)....

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) “Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them.” So slurs the drunken James O. Incandenza Sr. to his 10-year-old son Jim in a sodden monologue 157 pages into David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Incandenza Sr. is a bitter alcoholic, whose early promise as a tennis player was shattered by a knee injury....

Patsy Kelly, film unknown. The movies never had a better wiseacre than Patsy Kelly. If ever I had been able to tell her how entrancing I found her, she’d probably have socked me in the kisser. Always on the level, Brooklyn’s own Kelly was an unparalleled comic sidekick whose Hollywood heyday was in the early sound era of the ’30s, when the studios were smart enough to know comedy was well served in small doses....

It feels clearer with each passing year that Jodie Foster has directed one of the great queer American studio movies. Like so many worthwhile films, this one was at the time viewed only as a box-office disappointment, but, at least based on anecdotal evidence, Home for the Holidays (1995) has for many become a perennial cinematic antidote to the Thanksgiving blues. (I can confirm that watching it has been an annual ritual for at least this writer....

Pure and simple narrative genius. Fincher knew just how to handle Sorkin’s script. Eisenberg plays himself, yes, and he’s awesome at it.—Matt Logan, LaFayette, GA I have never been a David Fincher fan but I must admit that he has managed to direct two excellent films, Zodiac and The Social Network. Both films are dramatizations of true, complex events that had a significant impact on each of its generations. Fincher explores the complicated subjects of these films in vivid detail while laying clues to help the audience make sense of it all....

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024) In Cannes, the rhetoric—critical and curatorial—often revolves around the idea of “revelation.” As it tends to be used, this term implies an epiphany about the possibilities of cinema, about the eventuality that one film or another might somehow shift the ecology of the international film scene. But in a historically political festival like Berlin, a more current and perhaps apposite word would be “document”—which is not necessarily to do with documentary as a form, but with the idea of showing, in granular detail, certain things about the world that we might already know about in vague outline, but need to discover in greater depth....

For a movie so easy on the eyes, Adore is incredibly hard to watch. Adapted from a Doris Lessing novella about two childhood friends who have affairs with each other’s sons, the film never musters the humor nor the sex appeal to carry off its study of ultra-Freudian arrested development. Director and co-writer Anne Fontaine forgoes character development for mood, spending nearly all of the film’s 111 minutes lingering on the tanned pores of her four stars....

“Hurricane Billy” Friedkin is getting his mojo back, with playwright Tracy Letts in the bucket seat. After their gonzo 2006 triumph Bug, the sick soul brothers reunite not for the Pulitzer-anointed August: Osage County, but Letts’s raunchy, rowdy 1993 debut. Killer Joe evokes the hardboiled regional poetry of Jim Thompson and William Faulkner (who supplies the obligatory poetic epigraph), flirts with outright exploitation, provides game actors with roles to relish, and finds the heart of darkness in a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken....

A young woman sleeps in an apartment. A young man gets dressed and leaves without saying goodbye. He steps into the city street, very much the picture of what the well-dressed ambitious young businessman is wearing. Were it not for the distancing effect of the black-and-white cinematography, this might be the opening of a new romantic comedy. In fact the woman is Beatrice, the man is Benedick, and this wordless prelude provides interpolated backstory for Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing....

When a great director’s first feature in 21 years involves a movie-within-a-movie conceit, it’s enough to give you pause and dread a noodling, therapeutic endeavor. In the new Monte Hellman picture, a dreamy-gazed filmmaker is shooting a film—called Road to Nowhere—based on the true case of a woman who disappeared with a rich lover after a massive swindle in North Carolina, in an apparent double suicide. Besotted with his lead actress and with moviemaking, the helmer—sorry, a Peter Bart cameo makes the word okay—ignores intimations about her resemblance to her character....

There’s no reinventing the wheel in Mads Matthiesen’s Teddy Bear, a rom-com light on both the romance and the comedy. Most of the film’s humor comes from its central conceit, which sounds awfully like the setup for a joke we might’ve heard before: Dennis, a bodybuilder living with his mother, and pushing 40, goes to Thailand looking for love. Hopelessly naïve and shy, Dennis is in every sense the heart of the film....

Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), a well-respected and well-to-do Palestinian-Israeli surgeon, is always able to find the “right words at the right time,” as a friend puts it. But when his wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem), is implicated in a suicide bombing that claims 17 lives, Amin finds his diplomatic loyalties profoundly strained. Adapted from Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s best-selling novel of the same name, the third film from writer-director Ziad Doueiri (West Beirut, 98; Lila Says, 04) finds a fresh road of entry into heavily occupied thematic territory....

“They were into you, so they made you a tape” is the simple description of, and rationale for, a mixtape according to Cassette From My Ex, a website devoted to these audio artifacts. Mixtapes (distinct from dance mixes) were carefully edited compilations of obscure and familiar songs arranged to express the maker’s interests and tell an aural story, often designed for a particular and/or intimate listener. Göran Hugo Olsson’s mixtape documentary is a chronological, musically structured collage tracing the arc of the Black Power movement from its inception during the civil rights era through its dissolution as drugs began to erode black communities in the Seventies, created with rarely seen footage culled from the archives of Swedish Television....

The Damned United movie, written by Peter Morgan and directed by Tom Hooper (the two previously collaborated on Longford), has an authentic aroma of English football in the Seventies. Without exaggerating Clough’s famously elongated drawl, Michael Sheen nails his charismatic swagger; Colm Meaney is especially good as the mirthless Revie, the younger coach’s personal bête noire. The movie is fun, but “fun” is the problem—there’s nothing tormented about Clough’s trajectory, as there should be....

There aren’t many action movies that begin with their Muslim hero performing his morning prayers, but before it launches into 101 minutes of nonstop face-breaking, kneecap-shattering, and elbow-smashing, Indonesia’s The Raid does just that, giving its audience a few quiet minutes of actor Iko Uwais doing fajr. Viewers will later look back on this scene fondly as the one time in this frenetic film when they had a moment to catch their breath....

With just two features and a handful of shorts, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have nailed down a unique recipe for meta-giallo, served with a piquant retro reduction and splashed on a bed of Freudian barley. This new film comes on like a firehose of ironic style, paintbox flourishes and slivered reflections, Art Nouveau designs, and stop-motion still montages, edited together in a rambunctious associative flow that doesn’t tell a story so much as arterially spray one across a sumptuously papered wall....