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The latest Greenaway film to receive a restoration is Drowning by Numbers, which has just been re-released by Severin Films on Blu-ray. Made in 1988, the film is a metaphysical puzzle, equal parts fairy tale and process piece. The story follows three women—a mother, her daughter, and her niece—all named Cissie Colpitts, as they drown their husbands one by one. They cover up their crimes with the help of local coroner Madgett and his son Smut, both of whom are obsessed with games of all stripes—moral, athletic, mathematical....

There are plenty of filmmakers whose work occupies the love-it-or-loathe-it category, but Lars von Trier is a rarity, in that his work can be loved and loathed simultaneously. You may find yourself relishing his inventiveness and audacity while recoiling from the narcissistic, sometimes bratty knowingness of his will to provoke. Many regard von Trier as simply a controversialist, out to get a rise from critics and audience alike. But there’s no denying he’s a master showman....

Chicago 10 “This year there was absolutely no rational reason to subject myself to the Cannes Film Festival, with its mostly absurd, often gruesome distortions of what film is all about . . . besides which in previous years I regularly came to the conclusion sooner or later that I would absolutely never go to Cannes again, no matter what.” So begins a brief essay by R.W. Fassbinder about attending the 1982 Cannes Film Festival as an audience member....

In 1985, a movie opened that tells the story of a frankly sexual attraction between two young people, with scenes that include the bloody death throes of a stabbing victim, as well as skinny-dipping with frontal, flapping male nudity that’s still not exactly common in mainstream cinema. Yet it’s this film—A Room with a View, the first of three E.M. Forster adaptations from producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory—that cemented Merchant-Ivory as shorthand for genteel people in pretty settings....

Behind the scenes of Gimme Shelter In 1974, after harboring dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his country home, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich was forced into exile from the USSR. Fifteen years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Rostropovich returned to Moscow to conduct a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra. In Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia (91), Albert Maysles—the late New York–based Direct Cinema pioneer whose very first film, the 14-minute documentary Psychiatry in Russia (56), was shot in Moscow—accompanied the celebrated musician and his family to document the emotional weeklong journey....

Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) and Anna (Trine Dyrholm) are both respected professionals—an architecture professor and news reporter, respectively—and when they inherit a giant house in Copenhagen, Anna encourages her husband to fill its echoing chambers with a selection of friends and strays who share their intellectual inclinations. All decisions are made through group consensus, and rent is paid according to income. The arrangement certainly seems ideal, and the film opens under the guise of a light-hearted period piece, unfolding amidst a decade-appropriate color palette of burnt umbers and eggshell blues, with plenty of boozy dinners to keep everyone happy....

I’m talking to Stone about his latest film, Savages, the story of a couple of high-end hydroponic pot growers—rock stars of the Southern California boutique marijuana scene—who run afoul of a ruthless Mexican cartel angling for a cut of their business. It is, I think, his best movie in years: a ripe, wildly energetic caper—a Stone(r) noir, if you will—that also provides a sharper snapshot of the way we live now than the more overtly topical World Trade Center, W....

Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg, 2021) Pleasure, Ninja Thyberg’s first feature, lives up to its name—though not in the carnal ways one might expect. Certainly, the film drips with sex and its sundry fluids—so much that this story of a Swedish amateur performer (played by Sofia Kappel, Scandinavia’s answer to Chloë Grace Moretz) trying to earn her keep in California’s Porn Valley was shuffled from A24 to NEON for distribution after being threatened with an NC-17 rating....

In a photo op this week at Cannes, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Chastain, and Juliette Binoche encircled jury president Pedro Almodóvar. An illustrious array of international cinema’s most famous faces were also there (including Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Maren Ade, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Andrea Arnold, and Guillermo del Toro). But it was a photo from the red carpet later that day that got more attention, and which pointed to a persistent problem tarnishing this festival’s legacy....

Under the Sun of Satan Think you’ll never experience the Cannes Film Festival? Well, I’m here to tell you that, armed with the right local library, a nearby rental store abounding in rare titles, and a region-free DVD player, you can attain an even fuller immersion in the movies at Cannes than the folks on the Croisette. You just have to settle, if that’s the right word, for an earlier vintage....

Perhaps by coincidence, the poster also set the tone for the roster of films inside the Cannes Palais. The image, for the 46th edition of Cannes, was from a film made in 1946, the year the festival began. The movie is Notorious, and Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant are trying to kiss. The poster captures a moment as awkward as it is glamorous, for the actors’ noses get in the way of their passion....

Space Jam: A New Legacy (Malcolm D. Lee, 2021) Early on in his commercial career, Michael Jordan seemed to grasp that he was best served by playing the straight man. Starting with the Spike Lee–directed Air Jordan ad campaigns in the late ’80s, Jordan’s screen presence has amounted to simply looking amazing at basketball and occasionally smirking while Lee’s Mars Blackmon acts as a relentless hype man. Space Jam (1996), directed by longtime commercial and music video director Joe Pytka, is essentially an extended advertisement for Jordan and Looney Tunes....

A Winnie the Pooh movie should be warm and fuzzy. Christoper Robin—the story of how endearingly calm Winnie the Pooh reconnects to the workaholic grownup (Ewan McGregor) of the title—is just as warm as it needs to be and a bit fuzzier than it ought to be. Although it lacks the sustained, crazy logic of a first-rate flight of imagination, it’s still witty and affecting. Director Marc Forster’s fantasia on familiar themes begins where A....

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse puts super-friend animation into dazzling modernist form while it spins a narrative of bardic proportions. To be or not to be Spider-Man—that is the alternately hilarious and harrowing question facing 13-year-old Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a talented Brooklyn street artist. Miles has revered Spidey all his young life, so “to be” is the right answer. But Miles gets bitten by a radioactive spider and assumes arachnid powers just when he’s entering an elite school and worrying about meeting his parents’ expectations....

“Incinerate” is a performance video, recorded live at SY’s second warm-up show at Le Nouveau Casino in Paris prior to their 2006 tour in support of Rather Ripped, the album these videos were made to promote. The opening shot, an unidentifiable close-up languidly panning between fragments of shoulders, a fluctuating cymbal and streaking lights, is an uncluttered summary of the aesthetic Denis has been mining since US Go Home (94)....