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But it lives on in his films. Lau got his start working on Hong Kong’s Wong Fei-hung serial that ran from 1949 to 1970, shooting something like 77 installments. It was the cinematic training ground for both Simon Yuen, father of Yuen Wo-ping, and Lau Cham, father of Lau Kar-leung and third-generation disciple of the real-life Wong Fei-hung. Hooking up with Tong Kai, another action choreographer who worked on the Wong Fei-hung series, Lau and Tong choreographed action before the job even had a name....

City on Fire Not as flashy as John Woo, never as hyperkinetic as Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam is one of Hong Kong’s most underappreciated directors. He made his name with sophisticated, downbeat crime dramas that came to define a certain style of urban Hong Kong cinema in the Eighties and early Nineties. After getting his start in television at CTV and TVB, he directed five features before finding his stride with 1987’s City on Fire, the movie that provided the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs....

In the Name of the Italian People (1971) One week after Turner and Warner Brothers Digital Networks announced that streaming service FilmStruck would shut down, a petition to restore the service sped past the 25,000-signee mark. Operations for FilmStruck are still set to cease on November 29, two years after its launch. The FilmStruck news, which arrived the day before World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, continued to be seen as a serious blow to the film community and the culture at large....

Diamonds of the Night Diamonds of the Night, Němec’s debut feature, begins in the latter mode. Its opening images—of two nameless young men sprinting desperately through a field, fleeing from a pack of invisible pursuers as gunshots echo in the near distance—waste no time building momentum or laying down exposition. The effect is startling: it’s as if the film has been playing for an hour already and we, its dozing viewers, were just now snapping back into focus....

When New Yorker critic David Denby jumped the gun with his review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it only underscored the wholesale perversion that advance media screenings have become. The idea that people need criticism before they see a movie is to confuse criticism with consumerism. Enough. It’s been clear for years that critics ought to stop attending preview screenings as corporate guests and instead see a film the day it opens or soon thereafter and publish accordingly....

A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think it might be the nicest terminal in the country, although if you want to see some good airports, you’ve got to go to a major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia....

Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe, 2019) The title of Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but in this depiction of rural life in the foggy mountains of Galicia, an autonomous region in northwest Spain, men and their actions cause a much more complicated destruction of their own souls and the land than the raging fire itself. Every attempt at coexistence between man and nature is hard-earned, as the film’s protagonist, Amador (Amador Arias), knows all too well....

What drives you to keep returning to the era of the coup and military dictatorship in your films? I grew up in the middle of the dictatorship, and when I was a little bit older I started to understand what happened here. But those days remain a sealed box, and it’s absolutely impossible to open. So maybe this is a way of trying to open it. The absurd thing is that the more I dig into that time period, the farther I am from it....

Gary Raymond and Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) Coming near the end of what’s typically defined as the Golden Age of Hollywood and so after decades of movies that erased gay people, Suddenly, Last Summer, which centers around an attempt at a literal gay erasure, is the quintessential queer movie to close out the ’50s. That an American movie studio would ever even consider adapting Tennessee Williams’s unfathomable one-act, a grotesque Freudian psychodrama inspired by Euripides that functions on the level of pure metaphor, communicates a lot about how much the playwright had become a marketable cinematic brand....

Flaunting a beauty so cruel it became the stuff of myth, Alain Delon first terrified viewers with his perfection in 1960’s Purple Noon (Plein soleil). He had appeared in smaller roles for a few years before that, such as Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s satisfactory piece of period eye candy, Christine (1958), hovering around Romy Schneider and the edges of the screen like an angel in waiting or, depending on your perception, a demon ready to pounce....

THE FESTIVAL DIRECTOR: RACHEL ROSEN, SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Rachel Rosen is the outgoing Director of Programming at April’s annual San Francisco International Film Festival, which announced the cancellation of its 2020 iteration on March 13. Interview conducted by phone at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT, on Wednesday, March 18. Walk me through the decision to cancel the San Francisco International Film Festival—when did you think it might be necessary, what were the arguments before and against, were there contingency plans if you went through with it, what information were you getting from government or elsewhere, and what were the deciding factors?...

Read both winning reviews below. Grand Prize Winner Ava by Amy Chabassier Rendez-Vous with French Cinema this year brings us Léa Mysius’s debut feature film Ava, a bold coming-of-age story about 13-year-old Ava (Noée Abita in her first role), the summer she learns she will soon go blind. The film’s introductory sequence of a lively colorful beach in prime summertime in southern France is interrupted by the sudden appearance of an ominous soundtrack and a wolf-like black dog....

The New Zealand–born filmmaker Len Lye knots these tidy historical strands, being both “a filmmaker’s filmmaker”—since the animation techniques he created exploit the unique qualities of film—and “an artist’s artist,” a kind way of saying that his drawings and sculptures remained relatively unknown for his 50-year career. But to describe Lye either as a filmmaker or as an artist only partially accounts for his wide and varied output. As a corrective, then, “Len Lye: Motion Sketch,” currently on view at The Drawing Center and the Lab, attempts to bridge the divide between the artist’s works on paper, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States, and his body of experimental films, for which he is better known....

Roman Coppola’s new film, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, finds Charlie Sheen in the role of the titular protagonist: an endlessly narcissistic and inexplicably famous graphic designer whose two main loves (aside from himself) are women and booze. Though he is ostensibly acting, those traits, combined with the character’s name—almost identical to the actor’s own—make it impossible to watch Swan without feeling that Sheen is playing anyone other than himself, as made notorious by his most recent stint in the headlines....

Screenwriter-turned-director Tobias Lindholm’s second film is inspired by the real-life hijackings of Danish ships in the Indian Ocean. When the cargo ship MV Rosen is commandeered by Kalashnikov-wielding Somali pirates, it falls to the ship’s cook, Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), to facilitate negotiations between its corporate owners and the pirates for the crew’s release. Through a series of terse faxes and garbled satellite–telephone calls, the company’s hard-driving alpha-male CEO, Peter Ludvigsen (Soren Malling), and the likeable pirate boss Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) struggle to come to terms on how much money the company will pay....