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The first image I saw upon entering Light Industry’s 12-hour marathon of American serials was of a couple dangling over the edge of a mountain. This literal cliffhanger from The Perils of Pauline (1914) heralded the adrenaline-pumping series of death-defying stunts to come. Over 30 serial productions were represented in 16mm, one single-reel episode apiece, roughly spanning the genre’s history from 1914 to 1944 and shown in chronological order. The day provided a crash course in the development of action choreography, revealing the origins of the modern blockbuster....

To those few who are actually familiar with his work, Philippe Garrel is known for his intensive focus on a limited set of preoccupations and obsessions—suicide, drug addiction, the tension between individual freedom and responsibility, the memory of May ’68, and above all the ghost of his relationship with Nico. In 1989, Emergency Kisses inaugurated one more powerful but littleremarked strain in his art: the passage from romantic love to domesticity and its ongoing negotiations and niggling adjustments....

Legend may strike international viewers unfamiliar with the crimes of Ronald and Reginald Kray (each played by Tom Hardy) as a bland celebratory title for a film about the identical twins who so menacingly dominated London’s gangland in the Sixties that they were, in Ronnie’s words, “fucking untouchable” by the government or the police until they were convicted of separate murders in 1969 and given life sentences. Since British pop culture still issues frequent updates on the twins’ reign of terror via memoirs, TV documentaries, and tabloid newspaper articles—relatives of Reggie’s wife Francis Shea, for example, have lambasted Brian Helgeland’s new film for presenting her as more vapid than she apparently was—the U....

Adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, Lore takes as its morally ambiguous (and oft-ignored) subject the shattered illusions of four flaxen-haired siblings following the collapse of the Third Reich. Director Cate Shortland’s sophomore feature is a grim bildungsroman that takes hold of the entire sensorium as it gracefully unfolds. When her pro-Nazi mother (The White Ribbon’s Ursina Lardi) decides to turn herself in following her husband’s arrest, the teenage Lore (remarkable newcomer Saskia Rosendahl) is left in charge of leading her younger siblings to the safety of their grandmother’s home in Hamburg....

“If you leave me, I’ll kill you,” two teenage beauties whisper to each other as they kiss in front of a blazing fire, their silhouetted profiles intersecting like strange flowers. In Pawel Pawlikowski’s impressionistic, radiant, and psychologically feverish romance My Summer of Love, which is very loosely based on the central relationship in Helen Cross’s 2001 eponymous, Yorkshire-set novel, characters seek salvation by controlling others or surrendering control of their lives, but their words often fuel self-delusion and clear a path for betrayal....

Covi and Frimmel, whose first fiction feature was Little Girl (La Pivellina, 09), co-wrote the screenplay for The Shine of Day. Their visual aesthetic, infused with the legacy of neorealism, tends toward a rugged look. Instead of delighting in the surfaces of people and landscapes, the filmmakers probe the social and psychological realities that simmer beneath and occasionally bubble up to the surface. Theirs is an unvarnished working-class world of industrial neighborhoods, cramped apartments, run-down bars and harbors in decline, and many of the faces here are creased with lines of age and worry....

The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio, 2019) by Molly Haskell “Dense and brooding, but, like Scorsese’s film, vigorously told, The Traitor also unfolds under the looming shadow of mortality, of time running out for aging kingpins, and of debts coming due.” Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019) interviewed by Jordan Cronk “Shot with customary rigor and an increasingly refined and unparalleled sense of space, light, and shadow, the film invests a tragic episode in its heroine’s life with an intimacy and grace that forges new dimensions in Costa’s cinema....

Joe Wright’s polished adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (05) readied him for the convergence of the intimate and the spectacular in Atonement (07), his mobile camerawork prompting comparisons, visually if not thematically, to Max Ophuls. What’s more, Keira Knightley was pleasingly irate in both films, so all augured well for the director and the star’s attempt on Tolstoy’s 800-page masterwork. However, the fateful decision was made by Wright (not Tom Stoppard, whose script was unaffected) to set the Moscow and St....

It’s like getting cornered in an expat bar by a blowhard looking for company, except it’s a creepy motel room, and the man is a career killer. Gianfranco Rosi’s extraordinary one-man documentary stares long and hard at the practiced but no less terrifying monologues of a Mexican hit man, originally the subject of a 2009 Harper’s Magazine article and then a book by inveterate border commentator Charles Bowden. In a macabre take on the talking-head format, the setup is audaciously simple: in a bare hotel room, a masked, heavy-set man talks and, in a master touch, illustrates his points on a sketchpad....

From title on down, Le Week-End is built on cursory cultural appropriation. It’s integral to the film’s plot, in which an aging English couple alight upon Paris for a marriage-reviving 30th anniversary. But it’s also crucial to the larger game, with Roger Michell, a South African director who specializes in middlebrow English comedies and dramas, adopting a more “European” visual strategy—negative space, trombone-slide focus shifts—with the help of French cinematographer Nathalie Durand and production designer Emmanuelle Duplay....

Freaky families, shut-ins (often in the form of outsider artists), and pop-culture fandom are irresistible to documentary filmmakers. Crystal Moselle hit the jackpot with The Wolfpack, after spotting a band of long-haired youths striding down a New York street in Reservoir Dogs outfits. It turns out the brothers were leading a hermitic existence in a Lower East Side housing project—prevented by their Peruvian hippie father from going outside more than a few times a year, home-schooled by Mom, but permitted to watch countless movies....

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