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In the latest iteration of the sci-fi romcom, the protagonist of Richard Curtis’s self-declared final film can jump back in time to any moment in his past. (The ability has been, somewhat retrogressively, a birthright of the men in his beloved family.) And like the characters in Alan Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams, a certain lifestyle evolves from these rules: Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) re-plays events in his present-day life in order to perfect them but eventually develops a self-knowledge grounded in more than just romantic love....

As Occupy Wall Street entrenched itself in Lower Manhattan last fall, avant-documentarian Jem Cohen began paying regular visits to Zuccotti Park to collect HD footage and quickly turn around brief, deftly winnowed portraits of the movement. Further uptown, the IFC Center in Greenwich Village ran Cohen’s “newsreels” before their movie programs, and established a Vimeo page solely for exhibiting the first five Gravity Hill NEWSREELS in their rightful 21st-century place— amidst the cacophony of images generated by and about Occupy, freely transmitted and amplified online....

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, 1959) Murray Lerner’s Festival (1967), a film documenting the annual Newport Folk Festival between the years 1963 and 1966, begins with a group of beatnik musicians sitting under a tree. The Jim Kweskin Jug Band starts to play, but suddenly, in the middle of their performance, the camera cuts to black. One of the members remarks in voiceover that the band is interested in making music, while the filmmakers are interested in making a movie....

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) Robert Krasker collected a no-contest Academy Award for photographing Carol Reed’s The Third Man and was worshipped by his collaborators (including actors: Terence Stamp called him the “J.M.W. Turner of light”). But collaborating with directorial heavyweights like Carol Reed, David Lean, Luchino Visconti, William Wyler, and Anthony Mann has arguably consigned his name to the fine print of film history. Brief Encounter, The Third Man, and Billy Budd—a trio of black-and-white films playing on TCM this month and all lensed by Krasker—offer a reminder of this great mid-20th-century craftsman’s indelible contribution to the films he photographed and to the evolving commercial art form he helped refine....

Bobbie Gentry, the creator of that sleepy-dusty 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe,” took her stage name from King Vidor’s 1952 film Ruby Gentry. Of course she did: Bobbie Gentry, born Roberta Lee Streeter, was raised on her grandparents’ farm in Chicasaw County, Mississippi, and climbed her way to pop-music stardom after an adolescent move to Los Angeles; the heroine of the film is “born on the wrong side of the tracks” in a coastal North Carolina town, rising above her station to become Gentry-fied yet remaining untamed....

Love Crazy (Jack Conway, 1941) Chemistry is so built into the language of show business that when two actors are brought in to read opposite one another, it’s called a “chemistry read.” Chemistry doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual (buddy comedies rely on it), but romantic comedies live or die on the concept. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Cary Grant with everyone....

The Assistant (Kitty Green, 2019) The words “based on a true story” are evocative, and can be alluring, for moviegoers looking to explore real-life events or ripped-from-the-headlines narratives. But what would the words “based on hundreds of true stories” tell an audience? Such a disclaimer does not appear on screen at the start of Kitty Green’s new film, The Assistant, a searing new fiction film that was based on years of documentary research, but it might as well have been....

The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022) The most fearsome hauntings tend to come from those whom we know intimately. Suspended in spectral purgatory, the spirits of our forebears invoke a shared yet inaccessible past that destabilizes our present. In The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg teases out the inherently gothic nature of the intergenerational dynamic, contriving a ghost story out of that most primordial and murky of close unions—that of a mother and daughter....

Nicolas Rapold is the editor-in-chief of Film Comment and hosts The Film Comment Podcast.

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