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Cinq et la peau Michael Powell wanted to inscribe on his tomb, “Profession: amateur. Hobby: filmmaker.” On Pierre Rissient’s we could write, “Profession: discoverer. Playground: the whole world. Time periods: all of them.” And we would be omitting many things. He also directed films, notably the gripping and personal Cinq et la peau (Five and the Skin, 1982). Rissient was an eccentric character, much larger than his time. He fought against all conformities, any received opinions....

In 1932 Lilian Harvey was a superstar in Europe. Fox lured her to Hollywood with the hope of landing another Pola Negri or Greta Garbo. Harvey had made her name in a series of German operettas alongside heartthrob Willy Fritsch—the duo were dubbed the “dream couple”. The UFA studio advertised Harvey as “the sweetest girl in the world,” and Fox attempted to port over her ebullient charm into romantic musicals of their own....

A study of filial loss on an international scale, Mathieu Demy’s debut feature Americano stars the director himself as Martin, a thirty-something dual citizen of France and the U.S. whose estranged mother’s death sends him on a transcontinental quest for “Lola,” a childhood friend and his mother’s deported confidante. The film’s small cast is dominated by the offspring of legends: Geraldine Chaplin as Martin’s loopy adoptive aunt Linda; Chiara Mastroianni (lovechild of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve) as his perhaps-too-long-term girlfriend; and of course the director himself, progeny of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda....

Considering Cyrus is supposed to usher Mark and Jay Duplass into the fray of mainstream studio filmmaking, there is an admirable lack of trumpet-blaring going on. Following up the brothers’ previous efforts to locate the humorous within the awkward, Cyrus is a sweet, modest, unremarkable film, propped up by seasoned actors playing quirky and “real.” Take John C. Reilly, for starters. Aside from the camera’s little “crash-zoom” punctuation mark (you’ll understand when you see), Reilly is the most artful thing happening in this picture....

One Day Pina Asked… During a 2011 post-screening Q&A of Ishtar at the 92nd Street Y, Elaine May quipped, “Some people say it was too ahead of its time. ‘Ahead of its time’? How is that even possible!?” May’s point: the tag is nothing more than a glib sidestep, because everything is inescapably of its time, no matter how progressive. This reality comes into sharpest focus when looking at members of the avant-garde, and how they reflect and play off of each other....

—Serge Daney, “In the midst of the end of the world,” Libération, June 1983 Undertaken as interviews for a prospective documentary, Tinatin Gurchiani’s The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear transports us, as privileged observers and fellow travelers, into the everyday lives of Georgians. The commingling of journalistic questioning and grand literary themes, along with the young age of most of the subjects, makes the movie a heady excavation of this former Soviet republic’s collective unconscious, born from poverty, hope undone by that poverty, and fickle happenstance....

Ridley Scott’s improbably charming and engrossing The Martian, with Matt Damon in the title role, could have been called The American. The director told The Los Angeles Times last month: “In a funny kind of way, Matt is almost the perfect representative of the American. He’s fair, he’s sweet, he’s firm, he’s intelligent, and he’s a very can-do kind of guy.” This Yankee Doodle Dandy decency permeates Damon’s characterization of Mark Watney, a botanist in a six-person NASA space crew who’s been taking soil samples on Mars....

In the vernacular of multi-camera television events such as live sports programs and live-to-tape daytime dramas, the motion picture Time Code resembles what is known as a “quad split”: a live-television director chooses the feeds from four simultaneous camera sources, selecting on the fly the best action to air. It’s a vastly under-appreciated art that bristles with the excitement of possibilities continually lost and found, of editing a story in the moment, behind the scenes....

For the sixth entry in a formerly moribund direct-to-video cyborg franchise, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is a remarkably ambitious movie. Wrestling with the malleable nature of identity in between ingeniously choreographed brawls, it’s both a head trip and an adrenaline rush. For obsessive action film acolytes, this was no surprise. The previous entry in the series, Universal Soldier: Regeneration (09), is the most melancholy of MMA-fighter movies, emphasizing the genetically enhanced troops’ lack of free will, embodied by Jean-Claude Van Damme’s PTSD-addled UniSol Luc Deveraux....

While not to be confused with the 1987 Dudley Moore body-swap comedy, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest drama also undertakes its own kind of identity experiment, one that organically grows into something altogether more poignant. After dropping us into the controlled, respectable life shared by a white-collar professional, his homemaker wife, and their adorable 6-year-old, the film abruptly broadens after 10 minutes to admit the unexpected: little Keita was switched at birth....

Abbas Kiarostami’s second successive film made outside of Iran—following the Tuscan setting of 2010’s Certified Copy—concerns a series of minor misunderstandings in and around Tokyo. A naïve Japanese call girl arrives at the home of an elderly writer. She maneuvers herself quickly into his bed. He’s taken aback; the only thing he’s really looking forward to is dinner conversation. The next morning, when he drives her to her classes at a university, they inadvertently run into her fiancé, a seemingly unstable individual who assumes that the old man is her grandfather....

To everyone who dismisses science fiction as little more than high-concept shoot-outs in space, feebleminded pop philosophizing, retrograde sexual politics, and CGI hordes: take note. With Predestination, Michael and Peter Spierig expertly realize a fleshed-out adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s time-paradox yarn “—All You Zombies—” in which a Temporal Bureau agent attempts to stop a time-traveling criminal called The Fizzle Bomber from blowing up 10 blocks of Manhattan in 1975....

The success of many documentaries at marketing uncomfortable voyeurism does not make the airing of family dysfunction any less of a risky proposition. Kimberly Reed’s feature-length debut deserves attention for her plainspoken reflections on life as a transgendered person and for the bizarre revelation that her adopted brother Marc is the grandson of Orson Welles. But when the tensions and conflicts caused by Marc’s mental illness become the doc’s driving force, Reed finds herself with more material on her hands than one film—or at least this film—can handle responsibly....

Phillip Vance Smith, II. Courtesy of the author. Watching films has helped me make it through 22 years of a life-without-parole sentence in North Carolina. In many ways, films are the lifeblood of a society: they filter our experiences through art to teach history, to memorialize current events, and to help define our social morality. They entertain us, too. Entertainment helps break the monotony of prison life. North Carolina does not allow incarcerated residents to buy personal televisions....

There have certainly been spectacular moments of discovery at the Sundance Film Festival over the past few decades. Early films by Darren Aronofsky, Ava DuVernay, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer, Steven Soderbergh, Kelly Reichardt, Todd Haynes, and many others debuted at the Utah festival, lifting their directors to wider awareness. But rarely does a film cause the sort of stir that Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation did earlier this week....