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The Tsugua Diaries (Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021) This article appeared in the July 22 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. While for most of us the pandemic put best-laid plans to rest, some found in it the opportunity to pursue new and unexpected avenues. For Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro, the 2020 lockdown forced the Lisbon-based filmmakers and life partners to set aside work on Savagery, their long-awaited adaptation of Euclides da Cunha’s 19th-century-set wartime novel Os Sertões, and instead embark on an experiment that could parlay the global health crisis into something uniquely contemporary, collaborative, and cinematic....

No great movie of the 1960s had a longer, stranger trip into the consciousness of American filmgoers than The Battle of Algiers. Gillo Pontecorvo’s thrilling, tough-minded, documentary-style depiction of Algeria’s fight for independence from France had its premiere in August 1966 at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion over the furious protests of the festival’s French contingent. Months later, it earned an Academy Award nomination as Italy’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film....

In the Last Days of the City A film about trying to make a film, Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016) feels at once impressionistic and monumental, a drifting collage of fragments that amounts to something singular and fully realized. As a mesmerizing, turbulent portrait of Cairo on the cusp of the Arab Spring, it gestures toward the “city symphony” genre, which goes back to Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien Que Les Heures (Nothing But Time, 1926), and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), attempts to capture the texture and soul of a metropolis with a camera....

Somewhere in the dialogical midst of the documentary Double Play, James Benning says to Richard Linklater: “I’m not interested in them making another good film . . . I’m more interested in my students finding a new language, a new way of working, of pushing to make the film culture grow.” In the July/August issue of FILM COMMENT, Holly Willis sheds some light on how Boyhood does just that over the course of its radical temporal experiment in depicting experience on screen....

Let’s just get the silly controversy out of the way: the original Ghostbusters movies were not sacred works of art and revamping the franchise with women turns out to be the new film’s saving grace. The sisterhood at the center of Ghostbusters is stronger than a proton beam, more powerful than ectoplasm, and able to leap tall tales in a single bound. Performing with zest and originality, Melissa McCarthy as resilient true believer Abby Yates, Kristen Wiig as quick-thinking academic Erin Gilbert, Kate McKinnon as gleefully eccentric engineer Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones as the ultimate can-do New Yorker, MTA employee Patty Tolan, give you four good reasons to watch this more-hit-than-miss reboot....

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is bracingly original and unexpected—a welcome shock to the system for American moviegoers who’ve grown used to seeing prosaic melodrama in topical or torn-from-the-headline movies. This fearless poetic response to the jihadist occupation of the title city and its imposition of Sharia law unfolds in charged tableaux and conveys the wreckage of a civilization lyrically and potently, in 95 spare, suggestive minutes. What a relief to see a fact-inspired, imaginative work that doesn’t start with the words “Based on a true story....

During a marvelous interlude about a fourth of the way through Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind, Richard Gere’s bereft and confused homeless man rediscovers his flirtation reflexes while talking to a nurse (Geraldine Hughes) in a hospital waiting room. Noting her gentle brogue and pert Gaelic features, Gere’s character, George, suddenly leans into her. He flicks his eyes onto their high beams as he tells her that his grandmother on his mother’s side was Irish....

Zootopia is an exhilaratingly off-balance epic comedy in cartoon form. One smart, heroic bunny cop, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), and one savvy, resourceful con-man fox, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), get 48 hours (movie reference!) to crack the case of an otter who’s gone missing from the futuristic mammal city of Zootopia. Like Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS., they start out as antagonists and become friends. They embody the movie’s utopian and you-topian themes....

The film begins in the aftermath of a car crash, and in so doing establishes its primary structural principle: the edit as ellipsis. Every cut in any film necessarily deletes something and moves things along, but in Valeska Grisebach’s moody meditation on bad love there are entire events—important elements—deliberately excised from the story’s flow. To underscore the significance of these obliterated moments, the narrative hinges on an act of infidelity that the audience does not see, and that the protagonist does not remember....

3:10 to Yuma To what extent do you think your writing was influenced by movies, even before you began selling stories to Hollywood? Probably more than I thought. When I started writing, I wanted to make money right away and I chose Westerns because of the market. You could aim for Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Esquire, Argosy, Adventure, and a number of pulp magazines, like Dime Western, that were still in business....

Boyhood It wasn’t until the festival’s penultimate day that the Competition delivered a film truly worth raving about: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Shot over a period of almost 12 years, Boyhood charts the life of the protagonist Mason from elementary school to his first day of college. Far from being a whimsical experiment, the gamble fully pays off, allowing Linklater—who won the Silver Bear for Best Director—to paint a portrait of youth every bit as delicate and expansive as the adult relationships he realized in his Before trilogy....

When we last checked, Abdellatif Kechiche was thinking about doing an update of Héloïse & Abélard. Scratch that—now his next project is The Real Wound. Let’s hope he sticks to his plans this time. It’s a coming-of-age story about 15-year-old youth, adapted from a novel by film critic François Bégaudeau, who wrote and starred in Laurent Cantet’s 2008 Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Class. For Bégaudeau, it’s a dream come true: “I adore Kechiche, I’m a total fan, he’s the greatest living French filmmaker as far as I’m concerned....

Belle (Mamoru Hosoda, 2022) A musical sequence halfway through Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, a metaverse-set spin on Beauty and the Beast, recreates the famous ballroom dance from the 1991 Disney version. Hosoda takes the homage one step further: as unlikely internet friends Belle (the world-famous online persona of ordinary Japanese high-schooler Suzu) and the Dragon (a widely hated and trolled avatar) begin their dance in the VR world “U,” their feet lift off the ground....

First presented on May 16, 1929, the Academy Awards were in large part established to give prestige to an industry condemned as sordid by religious and elected officials nationwide. However, as this list reveals, their actual cachet is sometimes…questionable. As ranked by our contributors, it’s a list of the worst “Best Picture” Oscar® winners of all-time. Crash Paul Haggis, 2005 2. Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle, 2008 3. Chicago Rob Marshall, 2002 4....

1. Pain of Love It’s surprising, given Nils Malmros’s deep, abiding interest in youthful rites of passage, that it took the Danish filmmaker until 1992 to structure a movie around an exam. “All right, Kirsten,” a high-school psychology teacher prompts his flighty, beautiful student during a pivotal examination scene in Pain of Love, the director’s sixth film: “Piaget’s theory of development. It has to do with some stages and phases....