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Tania Cypriano’s Born to Be follows the entire process of gender reassignment surgery to articulate the complexities of a community whose health has long been treated as peripheral. Avoiding discussions of gender theory, Cypriano focuses on the purely physical and emotional journey of those whose lives have been shaped by society’s evolving relationships with gender. It’s a tightrope-walk process, and thanks to her camera, we are there when a young, teary-eyed woman declares her transition “done”—and still there when she returns to the hospital post-transition, this time as the result of a suicide attempt....

Underneath the grotesquerie and gunfire, Hill focuses unabashedly both on the gratifications of revenge and its moral consequences. “An eye for an eye would make the world blind,” goes an epigraph on the screenplay. Hill and Denis Hamill share script and story credit. On and off, Hill has been thinking about the premise since he first read Hamill’s original screenplay in the late 1970s. Hill optioned it in 1990, abandoned it, then re-optioned it a few years ago and swiftly rewrote it....

Images from Downton Abbey (Michael Engler, 2019) It’s 1927. The noble Crawley family learns that King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James) are stopping overnight at Downton Abbey on a trip through Yorkshire. The formerly middle-class Isobel Crawley Grey, Baroness Merton (Penelope Wilton), crisply declares the royal visit “a waste of money.” Her ideological nemesis, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith), responds, with exquisite weariness, “Here we go again....

Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody’s third and by far best collaboration (following 2007’s Juno and 2011’s Young Adult) starts strong and settles into a funky, amiable groove. It’s a lively big-screen sitcom about the bonding of ultra-harried Gen X mother Marlo (Charlize Theron) with super-cool millennial night nanny Tully (Mackenzie Davis). The movie doesn’t show its stretch marks until it’s two-thirds through. In that way, too, it rhymes with Sully....

Sandwiched between the groovy Sixties and the go-go Eighties, the Seventies—the decade when the detritus of the countercultural revolution washed ashore and was picked up by bored suburbanites—teemed with pop-culture horrors, from white afros and doormat-sized sideburns to deracinated disco, baby-blue eye shadow, pimp chic, candy-scented lip gloss, and sticky-lipped Penthouse Pets. But the Seventies also spawned some of the most discomfiting exploitation movies in living memory, including game-changing provocations like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (71), Sisters (73), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Emmanuelle (74), Shivers (75), Halloween (78), and Caligula (79)....

All images from Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019) Pre-Endgame Nick Pinkerton: Something I’d like to touch on, before we get into the nitty-gritty, is why should we be doing this in the first place? C. Spencer Yeh: You mean like, specifically us? NP: I mean like anyone. Because I’ve found myself butting up against a certain critical dilemma with regard to these movies. Generally speaking, I try to operate according to the Truffaut maxim “all films are created equally....

Festivals that take place in smaller cities usually benefit from buzz: with little else going on, the festival can take over. Cottbus sidewalks were cleverly painted with long blue stencils of a film strip, which visitors could follow from one festival venue to the next. Although locals flocked to actual screenings, the streets of the city were all but deserted. By contrast, last July in Wrocław (Poland), you couldn’t turn around without bumping into the New Horizons film fest....

The Divine Order Sixteen years on, the Tribeca Film Festival has found a groove that is less about showcasing new films than attracting audiences to Virtual Reality and other new media presentations, discussions and dialogues, and star-studded revivals. Thus, the highlight of the festival was the screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) at Radio City Music Hall. One of the great American film sagas, it has never seemed more an indictment of institutionalized corruption as it does now that a cut-rate Corleone clone, his family, and thuggish underlings have taken over the White House....

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? For the past 12 or so years, fall has offered the opportunity to binge-watch experimental film. I used to cram it all in at the New York Film Festival’s Projections (né Views from the Avant-Garde and its sister program Walking Picture Palace), but in recent years I’ve spread it out a bit with a headstart at Wavelengths in the Toronto International Film Festival....

In The Girl on the Train, the train in question sidles so slowly past a certain row of houses that it seems the journey has been specially timed to allow the film’s heroine to take a very close look at a particular place and particular events. They’re what’s happening in her world, and therefore they become, for the length of the film, the center of all events in the entire world....

Writing about Pedro Costa’s Horse Money in the current issue of Film Comment, Kent Jones argues that the Portuguese director’s films “have been more lauded than described.” There may be a reason for this—the difficulty of describing these increasingly complex and elusive objects. In a recent article, Mark Peranson nevertheless makes a case for the necessity of such description: “the most true-to-form analysis of Horse Money should proceed in this painstaking way, shot after shot, because to examine the film as a whole, or as a connection of scenes that flow one into the other, is an impossibility....

Back in the ’80s, they used to call it cinéma du look. But the hyper-artificed, jazzy stylings favored by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are so extreme that they make the polished images of Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson, and their peers look as if they were knocked out by Dogme practitioners on a rushed schedule. Moreover, the Belgian-based French duo, who made their name with 2009 giallo tribute Amer, are more concerned with editing patterns than their look forebears, and way more casual about story....

The ending of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was once so well-known that there’s no point issuing a spoiler warning: it would be like tripping delicately around Rosebud being a sled. So if you were going to make a new film of the 1934 Christie novel—previously adapted for cinema in 1974 by Sidney Lumet, and three times for television, once in Japan—you’d really have to change the payoff, wouldn’t you?...

I’ve seen walkouts at festivals before, for all kinds of different reasons—boredom, bemusement, incomprehension—and they’re usually pretty much the same. There’s a gradual trickle of exits, sometimes speeding up as a film goes on, because one departure encourages the waverers until, there being safety in numbers, it’s only the truly courageous, committed, or simply inert who choose to stick around. But I’ve never quite seen a reaction like the one that greeted the Polish film Playground, which showed in competition this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival....

Images from The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is an extraordinary feat of rejuvenation, and not just because of the digital effects that turned its lead actors back into young(ish) men. That technology might have been the focus of much of the film’s publicity, as well as accounting in large part for the film’s hefty $150 million budget—the main reason why The Irishman ended up financed by Netflix instead of the established studios....

Varda par Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2019) Varda par Agnès ends quietly, with the image of Agnès Varda and her photographer sidekick JR engulfed by a gentle sandstorm. “Disappearing in a blur, I leave you,” Varda says. These final moments, restating a theme of her last film, 2017’s JR collaboration Faces Places, make it clear that the “blur” engulfing Varda is as much as anything a sight problem: again, she shows us that film’s image of people holding up giant letters in comic imitation of an optician’s eye test....

In 1998, a Cannes jury headed by Martin Scorsese gave the festival’s Grand Jury Prize (traditionally seen as the “runner-up” award to the Palme d’Or) to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, kicking off a worldwide goodwill tour that culminated in three Academy Awards and more than $200 million at the global box office. This year, as Scorsese’s longtime muse, Robert De Niro, presides over the jury, another Italian filmmaker stands in contention with an even more vacuous, grotesquely sentimental Holocaust comedy....

Home video shows a cluster of tulips as loved ones speak of the missing auteur. Then intimacy turns to history with the drop of a needle. George Harrison’s majestic “All Things Must Pass” plays to an archival montage—Nazi planes bombing churches, families trudging through rubble, a Catholic baptism—and a slow pan across a family photo to the youngest smiling boy who led one of the century’s most public lives. The opening to George Harrison: Living in the Material World hits the same notes as the opening of Mean Streets because its subject is a Martin Scorsese hit parade: lower-class origins, Catholic upbringing, talent, discipline, dazzling achievement, and a struggle between the carnal and the divine....