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Aired to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, during a summer when many residents of New Orleans still lacked permanent, or even adequate temporary housing, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (06) chronicles a disaster that was still unfolding. Interview subjects recount events that took place mere months prior, often doing so perched in the settings of their protracted nightmares: in FEMA trailers without electricity, or a tent anchored where a house used to be, punctuated by staircase to nowhere....

Frownland Adieu, mumblecore, the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding. Here’s some history gleaned from indieWIRE and various linked websites, which, as a way of grabbing attention in a dauntingly cluttered indie landscape, flogged mumblecore as the new happening thing. The chief promoter is Matt Dentler, who heads Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival and is also a tireless blogger on behalf of the mumblecore “movement....

Urushadze hails from the Georgian film community and spoke fondly of the collaborative ethos she experienced on movie sets with her father, Zaza, director of Academy Award nominee Tangerines. Though only Urushadze’s first feature, Scary Mother was itself chosen as her country’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar, and has earned awards on the international film circuit since its world premiere last fall in Locarno. With the film’s selection for New Directors / New Films, Urushadze was brought to New York for the first time, leaving her feeling a bit like a spectral visitor: “At one moment everything is perfect and amazing, and in another moment everything is apathetic and empty....

Angela Schanelec location scouting for I Was at Home, But… (Photo Credit: Ivan Markovic) Ever since Angela Schanelec’s 1994 debut feature, I Stayed in Berlin During the Summer, the German filmmaker has been a reliable font of formal experimentation. The Dreamed Path, which premiered at Locarno in 2016, is comprised of discrete scenes that slip between multiple time periods, its fragments converging and diverging rather than unifying. This week, Schanelec told Film Comment that she has recently completed editing her next work, I Was at Home, But…, after an autumn shoot in Berlin....

To mark the film’s 25th anniversary, Béla Tarr’s 7-hour masterpiece Sátántangó has received a brand new 4K restoration, playing at Film at Lincoln Center this week only. Tarr recently sat down with MUBI Notebook to discuss the film, stating: “I spent two years in the Hungarian lowlands filming, I can tell you I know all the houses, I know all the fucking roads, I know everything in this part of the country ....

Agnès Varda When Agnès Varda received news of her first-ever Oscar nomination for Faces Places (2017) earlier this year, she was filming lectures about the film to escape traveling with it. “I’m archiving myself,” said the 89-year-old French New Wave pioneer in an interview with Vulture. It seems like her auto-archiving mission has birthed her next project. Varda is set to co-direct a TV documentary this year, titled Let’s Talk About Cinema, with longtime collaborator Didier Rouget....

In the feature-film version, the story is streamlined down to Laxe’s shoot and his character’s capture and decline. Shooting in exquisite color 16mm, Rivers captures the blistering tones of Morocco’s deserts and the repetitive banalities of being on a set, in his characteristically hypnotic, unhurried visual style. He slowly draws out the menace within a Western gaze—and what happens when its violence is returned. Reminiscent of Pere Portabella’s otherworldly Vampir Cuadecuc (shot on the set of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula) in tone and approach, The Sky Trembles… screens on October 4 in Projections at The New York Film Festival....

This year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, now in its 13th year, offered its fair share of gloom. This might reflect Greece’s worsening financial situation, which is certainly more evident with each new festival edition (docs in March; main show in November). Or it may just be that my admitted attraction to the darker side of cinema drew me to specific titles. But even upon closer inspection of the catalog I was hard-pressed to find many uplifting options....

Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) “[The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] is the sort of movie I enjoy most: it shocks one into new awareness of the world by breaking up the conventional patterns and re-molding them into something fresh and strange.” —Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, November 7, 1955 This is just one of the many references to Plath’s moviegoing in the recently published two-volume Letters of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K....

Azor (Andreas Fontana, 2021) Money talks in Azor, but it doesn’t raise its voice. With its deceptively spare, functional mise-en-scene and tamped-down performances, Andreas Fontana’s Dirty War thriller is a superlatively muted debut. It’s explained late in the film that the title translates—loosely, in banking slang—to “be quiet,” which in this context is less an imperative than a tactical strategy. It surely behooves Genevan banker Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione) to occasionally hold his tongue while dealing with wealthy clients addicted to the sounds of their own voices....

The apes-are-just-like-us conceit has its 46th birthday with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the latest entry in a franchise that spans eight movies, two television series, and an array of comic books, novels, and video games. The original 1968 film played out our similarities to our simian cousins in a deadpan critique of human supremacy and creationism—the sort of pessimistic, dialogue-heavy parable out of which its original writer, Rod Serling, made his career....

Werner Herzog returns with another profile of an outlier living on the fringe. Happy People follows a grizzled professional hunter based in the small frontier village of Bakhta, deep in the heart of Russia’s vast and forbidding Siberian hinterland. Every fall, he sets out on a solitary trapping expedition that lasts through the winter, a grueling test against the elements with no hope of help if anything goes awry (cell phones, we learn, haven’t yet penetrated the taiga)....

The weight of 20th-century Polish history, specifically the anti-Semitism of the war years and the Stalinist peak of the early Fifties, hangs over Pawel Pawlikowski’s stark, black-and-white road drama. The political is personal in the story of novitiate nun Anna, who, sheltered in an orphanage since she was a baby and now in 1962 about to take her vows as an 18-year-old, tries to find how her parents disappeared during World War II and where they were buried....

Danish director Susanne Bier and writing partner Anders Thomas Jensen have made successful careers as purveyors of melodrama, collaborating on the critically acclaimed Brothers, After the Wedding, and In a Better World. Their work pays homage to the excesses of silent era Hollywood, with an unfettered employ of coincidence, destiny, Manichean dichotomies, and frustration with the modern world. If Bier’s preceding films sometimes ended with body counts as high as the Bard’s darker plays, then her latest film can accurately be described as a Shakespearean comedy....

“What kind of bird are you?” A 12-year-old boy in a scout uniform asks a 12-year-old beauty decked in mysterious black feathers. That’s the beginning of the piercing love story at the heart of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, shown in flashback after the two have hatched a plan to run away together. A recording of Benjamin Britten’s sparkling The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, a composition meant to introduce children to the various musical instruments, serves brilliantly as a musical expression of how each character has a colorful role in the landscape and community....