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Let’s dispense with any sense of objectivity at the top: I’m pro-choice, and have been since I was four. I was raised that way, and I haven’t been persuaded otherwise. When life begins (or what constitutes life) seems essentially scientifically unprovable at this time, so I trust women and their partners—who are unequivocally alive—to make the call, for whatever reason. After Tiller, on the other hand, does not overtly state its position, but it is clearly made for a pro-choice audience that is either on the fence about late-term abortion (which is extremely unpopular even among pro-choice advocates), or for those who merely seek more talking points for their beliefs....

For a filmmaker whose work is mostly about the overdue onset of adulthood, it makes sense that Swanberg’s first film to zero in on the subject of aging is only interested in middle age as the flipside of youth on the existential coin. Hard up for work and begrudgingly spending her days paddling out to sea with platonic friend Rusty (Larry Fessenden), Marie (Adams) is a Hollywood actress spinning her wheels after losing a potentially lucrative role to Kristen Wiig....

Terence Nance’s debut feature and festival favorite, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, is anything but. It is a visually and aurally intricate collage that mimics quixotic, obsessive contemplation, the kind of over-thinking commonly associated with lovers and artists for millennia. A mapping would be more appropriate than a synopsis, in order to trace the strands that are woven into this film from an earlier version, How Would U Feel?, made six years prior at NYU....

Mike Mills treats love and loss with a disarming tenderness and a refusal of sentimentality that make Beginners, his second feature, something of an anomaly among male identity flicks. What a finely wrought, wryly funny, transcendently sad movie this is. At the center is a father/son story, its fiction based on Mills’s relationship with his own father, a gay man who, at age 75—and after the death of the woman who was, for over four decades, his wife—came out of the closet and enjoyed his sexual liberation until he was felled by lung cancer five years later....

Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial is an out-and-out bait-and-switch movie. But while the title and film’s opening setup may lead you to believe you’re going down the road of typical alien-invasion sci-fi, the romantic comedy journey that the film takes instead makes for a very enjoyable alternate route. Julio (Julián Villagrán) and Julia (Michelle Jenner) wake up in her apartment the morning after what may or may not have been a one-night stand....

Funny Pages (Owen Kline, 2022) There’s an anachronistic feel to Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, which follows an aspiring 17-year-old cartoonist, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), as he leaves his suburban comfort to pursue a life of real grit and hone his artistic chops on the outskirts of Trenton, New Jersey. The movie is set in the present day, yet the cartooning world it depicts is firmly that of the 1990s. A lot has happened in comics in the last three decades....

Nearly fifteen years after the hugely influential—for better and mostly worse—Blair Witch Project, its co-writer and co-director Eduardo Sanchez has delivered another brain-teasing dud. Lovely Molly, in which our “lovely” heroine attempts to start a new life with trucker hubby Tim in her less-than-idyllic childhood home, is incoherent, sexist, and derivative. While two out of three might be bearable, three out of three spells trouble. I expect no more than thinly veiled misogyny from contemporary horror films, and I’ve gladly endured atrocities of gynophobia for the sake of a few thrills, a witty death-trap, or a novel disembowelment....

Kim Ki-duk is a director infatuated, if not obsessed, with the dynamics of human relationships under extreme circumstances. Their boundaries, dimensions, progressions, and compromises (or lack thereof) compose the many fragmented wholes in his work. 3-Iron (04) contrasts the prison of abusive married life with the weightless, open possibilities of two lovers joined by a common muteness. The Bow (05) concerns a 60-year-old male and a mute teenage girl juggling their multiple connections: as kidnapper/kidnapped, mentor/mentee, and sexual partners....

Remembering Every Night (Yui Kiyohara, 2022) Tama New Town, the setting of Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night, might be better known to U.S. audiences from its appearance in two Studio Ghibli films: Pom Poko (1994) and Whisper of the Heart (1995). In the first of these, the town is a massive, tree-lined suburb that destroys the spiritually significant forests the film’s tanuki inhabit. Whisper of the Heart, however, contains none of this environmentalist ire, treating the fully built town as an idyllic backdrop for a serendipitous, whimsical romance....

In one of the more unfortunate segments of The Story of Film (in the second-to-last episode, “The 1990s: The First Days of Digital – Reality Losing Its Realness in America and Australia”), Mark Cousins rhapsodizes about Baz Luhrmann’s oeuvre for nearly 15 minutes. The prolonged interview and cooing voiceover that champions Australia as a formally inventive masterpiece seems out of place in a documentary that glosses over (or completely skips) the careers of so many more prolific directors, and also because it so blandly presents one of the 21st century’s greatest purveyors of straight camp....

It is a truth universally acknowledged that hot and wealthy New York men do not make loyal mates. The moment a heroine on screen realizes that the foxy businessman of her dreams is a cheater is never an easy one, and it often ends in divorces, or for the unlucky ones, a nervous breakdown and years of expensive therapy. But what would happen if that woman had the chance at sweet revenge—and came out victorious?...

Is Anna Wintour a malicious, vindictive, power-crazed dragon lady or merely, as one of her supporters claims, just really, really busy? Whatever the case, the imposing editor of Vogue is one of the most powerful women in the word, thereby assuring that she frequently comes under vicious, often misogynistic public scrutiny. Given her supreme prominence in the image industry, obsessive Wintour-watching is inevitable, and while her gender no doubt inflects the tone of the chatter, fashion kingpins like Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs are just as frequent tabloid and blog fodder....

We are in a desert of reddish limestone, with a scattering of sparse acacias. A group of men, all holding AK-47s, moves toward a pickup. Amidst them is a Western prisoner with an exhausted air and a several-months-old beard, his emaciated face partially hidden behind the folds of a turban. Are they going to set him free? Decapitate him? The scene could be taking place in Syria or Iraq. But we are in the center of Sahel, a holy city and World Heritage Site, a few kilometers from Timbuktu....

“The actors who appealed to me were the characters who were usually lost way down the playbill. People like Franklin Pangborn, Billy De Wolfe, Van Heflin. No one had much to say about their technique, but I learned more from them than I did from Kirk Douglas.” This gobsmacker pops up fairly early in Michael Feeney Callan’s otherwise sobersided bio-hagiography. What on earth was Robert Redford talking about? These copiously researched 468 pages, including interviews conducted over a 14-year period, provide nary a clue about why a man who to this day has never gotten lost on the playbill would say such a thing....