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Rio Grande An eerily suspended, time-stopping moment from a filmmaker particularly skilled at them: the cavalry regiment under the command of one Lt. Colonel Kirby Yorke (John Wayne), having set up camp overnight near the Texas border, settles down for a song. The high-ranking officers are visibly worn out. Even the indefatigable Sgt. Quincannon, the bull-necked Irish career soldier unforgettably embodied by Victor McLaglen, looks creased and furrowed around the face as he requests permission for the Sons of the Pioneers—a Western vocal act who furnished dozens of the era’s films with folk tunes and cowboy ballads—to sing....

They meet cute over Albert Hammond’s easy-listening staple “It Never Rains in Southern California.” She’s just gotten out of a relationship, or so she says, perhaps hoping to seem more vulnerable. He’s just gotten out of a mental hospital, or so she’s heard secondhand. She doesn’t know the song—she’s too young. “You have to get past the kitsch,” he assures. An awkward silence follows. Noah Baumbach’s fifth feature (or sixth, depending on whether you count 1997’s pseudonymous Highball) and his first to take place in Los Angeles, the depressive comedy Greenberg is about the two months in which this woman who wants so very much to be let in crosses paths with a man who is an expert at shutting people out....

Before McEnroe’s meltdowns, Rodman’s gowns or Tiger’s windshield, there was the temper of Heleno de Freitas. The Brazilian soccer icon of the Forties was a licentious playboy, shameless self-promoter, and absolutely brilliant on the pitch. That brilliance, however, was quickly superseded by an arrogance that led Heleno to continually refuse treatment for a nasty case of syphilis. The disease wormed its way through the superstar’s body, eventually forcing him to retire to a sick house, and suddenly the once-immortal Heleno de Freitas was dead at 39 with no World Cup appearances and the bittersweet nickname “Prince Cursed....

Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer attempts to combine elements of the familiar Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant Killer fairy tales and, through the magic of 3D technology, tell a classic story for young and old. The end result works for only part of that equation—a very specific 10- to 12-year-old part. The film begins as a young boy and girl are each told the same bedtime story about Eric, the King of Cloister, who defeated an army of man-eating giants and saved his people....

“You write what’s said. you don’t lie,” says playwright Andrea Dunbar (1961-1990) in an archival clip featured in The Arbor. In Clio Barnard’s bewildering debut documentary, actors take this pocket manifesto one step further by lip-synching to audio recordings of Barnard’s interviews with Dunbar’s grown children and circle of family and friends. The performative pastiche filters and refracts the life of the alcoholic council-estate resident through several elements: the to-camera “monologues,” a plein air performance of her first play, and clips from two television documentaries about the wunderkind, one at the beginning of her career at age 15, and the other just before its premature end at age 29, due to a brain hemorrhage....

To put it in Scorsesean terms, Paul Schrader’s The Dying of the Light was supposed to be “one for them”: a commercially minded spec script that Schrader put on the market in 2009 with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder and then moving on with his career while someone else made the movie. And for a while, it seemed like that exact thing was going to happen....

Channeling Bulgaria’s malaise in the aftermath of Communist rule, writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have fashioned a morality tale that gathers force gradually. The Lesson follows an elementary schoolteacher who is driven by a righteous desire to teach her students the value of honesty, only to learn firsthand what it means to resort to desperate measures when confronted with dire economic circumstances. In the film’s opening scene, a classroom of students is confronted with a sentence written in English on a blackboard: “Somebody has just stolen my wallet....

Madame de La Fayette, writing anonymously in the 17th century, equidistant in time between Cervantes and Defoe, helped originate the novel form, bringing to its development not only a woman’s point of view but probing psychological acuity. Celebrated, more in France than here, for La Princesse de Clèves, she also wrote, in 1662, a short story called “La Princesse de Montpensier”—a roundelay of marital and sexual cross-purposes set against the 16th-century conflict between Catholics and Huguenots, so plot-driven and devoid of descriptions (hardly an adjective interrupts the action) that it reads quite like a film treatment....

If only all filmmakers could be as cheerfully frank about their opportunism. Asked in Cannes why he shot his new film in Barcelona, Woody Allen admitted that the city had offered him funding; feeling it would be a nice place to spend a summer, he wrote a script to fit. The city elders can’t say they didn’t get their money’s worth. The film offers a resounding endorsement of Barcelona’s attractions: go there, it promises, and you’ll enjoy great food and wine, see spectacular Gaudí architecture, Find Yourself, and get laid....

That the monster in question is a mixed-breed dog—and the representative in question the owner of a pound—is the central conceit of Mundruczó’s film, which takes place in a gray-cast Budapest split between a grotesquerie of callous humans and the fugitive strays over which they exercise unchecked power. Much of the movie is, on the surface, a catalog of abuses along the lines of those visited on the saint-like donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar....

Imagine a Nazi propaganda film so monstrous even a Nazi can’t stomach it. That’s one possible and highly probable scenario suggested by Yael Hersonski’s remarkable Holocaust documentary, A Film Unfinished. In 1942, about two years after the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, a German film crew began to shoot and compile footage for a project that was eventually abandoned. Some of the material has made its way into the standard repertoire of Jewish ghetto documentation, but now, thanks to the director’s research and her film-within-a-film strategy, the images can be seen in their original context—a frame of reference that allows for yet another new and uniquely disturbing perspective on the Shoah....

An ironic parable that both is and isn’t about faith, Lourdes might make a good “Why me?” double feature with A Serious Man. As in, why, on a group pilgrimage, is wheelchair-bound Christine (Sylvie Testud) miraculously healed, and not someone else? Neither the most pious nor the most pitiful, and inarticulate about her beliefs, she views the trip as a chance to travel, and the religious event as a plus in winning the attentions of a kind, dashing officer....

The best reason to visit is to rediscover the archival riches produced by what founder John Grierson called the “Eyes of Canada,” which includes not only its canon of artistically innovative landmarks but also the many half-forgotten and fascinating films focusing on the routine scientific rhetoric of welfare-state governance and citizenship-building. NFB’s Head of Interactive Services, Joel Pomerlau, who counts Pour la suite du monde (63) and the groundbreaking Sixties cinéma direct of Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault, and Gilles Groulx among his favorites, credits the site’s success to the online “playlists” carefully curated by collection analysts Marc St-Pierre and Albert Ohayon....

Horse Money And then there was the latest from Pedro Costa, who won the Best Director prize. Horse Money leads us into a labyrinth of endless thresholds dominated by the haunted figure of Ventura, the Cape Verdean immigrant with whom Costa previously collaborated to memorable effect in Colossal Youth in 2006. Here he’s joined on screen by the equally charismatic female presence of Vitalina Varela, and we follow the pair through hushed corridors echoing with whispers into the subterranean world of a film that defiantly creates its own sense of space and time....

Installation view of The Sky is a Gap The stated launching point for the piece is the climax of Zabriskie Point. What was your first encounter with the film? Zabriskie Point and Blow-Up are just sort of fixtures in the film and art world, sort of the community that I’m in. It’s just something that’s canonized already, you know? Whatever Zabriskie Point is as a film is secondary to it being canonized already… So I’ve been aware of the film for a really long time, but I’d never really done a piece about it....