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Blake Lively in The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano, 2020) The bombs total three, if you count the movie. Reed Morano’s abysmal espionage film centers on a top Oxford student who falls into drug addiction and prostitution after her family dies in a plane crash. She goes into mission mode once she learns that terrorists caused the crash. Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) pleads with a rogue British op known as “B” (Jude Law) to train her so she can catch and kill the bomber, who is on the loose....

Installation view of Sunshine State (Steve McQueen, 2023). Photo: Agostino Osio “The time of the film is not life while it lives, but life after death.” These words, spoken by director Peter Schreiner in the opening moments of his intensely moving memoir film Tage (aka Days), have reverberated in my mind ever since I first encountered the movie at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. In this nearly four-hour work, which diaristically captures the homebound travails of the veteran Austrian filmmaker following a cancer diagnosis, the words are meant metaphorically—Schreiner is still alive, and in fact attended the premiere....

Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980) The cover of the August-September 1980 issue of Film Comment is emblazoned with a familiar face, eyebrows dripping with sweat, eyes screwed in concentration, a scowl painted on Robert DeNiro’s twisted mug as he circles the ring in Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull (1980). It’s an iconic performance with a rightful place in film canon. And yet, another film took home the Academy Award for Best Picture at that year’s Oscars: Robert Redford’s Ordinary People....

Cold Eyes If there’s a theme to this year’s festival, it’s surveillance. Almost all of the big-budget blockbusters on display are post-Snowden artifacts, in which police work is a matter of having enough eyes in the sky. The Korean thriller Cold Eyes remakes the 2007 Hong Kong hit Eye in the Sky, about a Special Crimes Unit surveillance team that is tracking down a ghostly team of heisters. The unit is like an all-seeing organism that circulates through the city streets ever expanding its vision, its anonymous members valorized as silent sentinels of justice....

Pasolini By then, I’d already seen a healthy chunk of the film program at this year’s edition, dutifully shuttling among the temple-like monumental theaters at the festival’s heart. And a clear standout, though not universally acclaimed, was Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, a biographical sketch that saw the self-exiled New York filmmaker continuing to lay his hands on white-hot material in European politics and culture. Making its world premiere a few months after Ferrara’s Welcome to New York in Cannes, this exquisitely tuned portrait looks at the pioneering gay Marxist filmmaker-poet-theorist through his last days on Earth in November 1975, all interspersed with fanciful/macabre scenes from his unmade film Porno-Teo-Kolossal....

Minamata: The Victims and Their World (Noriaki Tsuchimoto, 1971) Named for the small coastal Kumamoto Prefecture city where it was first identified, “Minamata disease” subverts the myths of postwar Japan’s economic miracle, revealing the brutality of capitalism on a human scale. While the Chisso Corporation expanded chemical production, including as a state-backed enterprise in colonized Korea, its Minamata factory disposed of industrial wastewater from 1932 to 1968, contaminating fish and shellfish around Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea....

Film Comment’s comprehensive best-of survey of the most plugged-in minds in film criticism inevitably includes many features that haven’t been released in the United States. In a nod to the best movies this year that warrant seeking out, with or without a distributor, Film Comment’s year-end coverage also includes the 50 Best Unreleased Films of the Year, many of which will hopefully make it to theaters in the coming year....

For its first 50 minutes or so, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark seems relatively straightforward—relatively, that is. We seem to be dealing with an easily classifiable case of that rarefied subgenre, the film about filmmaking—specifically, a film about the difficulty of making fiction films about historical realities. A few minutes into the film, we see a large group of young people held at gunpoint on the floor of a warehouse by armed soldiers....

Is it acceptable to fall asleep in movies? It’s certainly unavoidable at times, even with the best intentions and fueled by the strongest coffee, so maybe I should ask this question instead: is it acceptable for film critics to joke about falling asleep in movies? British critic Derek Malcolm tells the one about the person who dozes off in a Cannes press show, to find someone tapping their shoulder with the words, “Do you mind not snoring?...

Images from The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow, 2019) Peter Parlow’s micro-budget The Plagiarists is a concise rebuttal of the idea that all feature films need to be substantial with a capital S. It’s a curious sliver of a provocation; you may not always feel it gives you a huge deal to engage with while you’re watching it, but it certainly leaves you with plenty to chew over once its 76-minute running time is over....

Show, don’t tell, they always say—but there are times in cinema when you’re shown things and you wonder whether a little discreet telling, perhaps just an allusive whisper here and there in the script, might have made all the difference. Horror juries are still out on the question of whether the fanged, snarling apparition of Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (57) should actually have manifested itself (although there are fewer horror icons that command more affection), while Stanley Kubrick quite clearly did the right thing in removing that roomful of cobwebbed skeletons from The Shining (Kubrickians, discuss)....

The premise of the film (which had its world premiere this week at the London Film Festival) is that archive footage of the Great War has been specially processed—hand-colorized, digitized, converted into 3D, with voices and sound effects added. The effect is to make it seem as if events that took place a hundred years ago, and previously were captured in silent black and white, are actually taking place in front of us in a vivid timeless now....

Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes in A Farewell To Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932) Click on select titles to view the clips from the films under discussion. As in the silent period, in later periods the idea that the camera might move like a person took different forms in the 1930s. Most literally, the camera’s movements might represent a character’s movements, as in a point-of-view shot. More loosely, the camera might mimic the movements of an observer—a hypothetical onlooker who watches the story unfold....

The Stranger and the Fog (Bahram Beyzaie, 1974) A small boat washes up on the beach near a village; its cargo is a man, unconscious and bloodied. Once revived, he has only a vague memory of having been attacked, and a foreboding certainty that his assailants are still pursuing him. They will come out of the sea-mist, as he did. Bahram Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog (1974) is an otherworldly, cryptic, and visceral treatment of the archetypal “a stranger comes to town” story....

Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) During the height of the splatter film craze of the 1980s, Stuart Gordon’s seminal 1985 horror film, Re-Animator, based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, was something different. While many horror films of the period were presenting a fairly “paint by numbers” exercise in stalking and killing, with violent on screen death as the ultimate, grim thrill offered up to viewers, Gordon’s erudite and assured first film squirmed with a playfully anarchic psycho-sexual black comedy....

Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022) Whatever genius Andrew Dominik’s much-ballyhooed Blonde possesses has little to do with the genius of Marilyn Monroe. It has even less to do with Norma Jeane, which was Marilyn’s given name, and a persona that the film and its enormous, moving, Joyce Carol Oates–authored source novel claim as icon-Marilyn’s tortured, tragedy-prone, flesh-and-blood counterpart. The skill being flaunted here is all Dominik’s, and, channeled through Ana de Armas’s extraordinary impersonation (her vocal imitation is especially uncanny), it is sometimes breathtaking in its granular recreation of images from the real-world Marilyn picture book....

The success of Love Is the Message, which played on a loop at Gavin Brown’s Harlem gallery from November through January, is not a fluke—the video manages to hit all the right notes while simultaneously establishing its own range. A clip of a gospel singer in rapture juxtaposes a clip of the infamous video of Walter Scott, shot down by a policeman as he ran away. It’s a video made by a director with strong ideas, a precise vision, and a keen sense of rhythm....

Your voice on the phone is much younger than it is in the movie. Actually it’s different from any of your movie voices. It depends on what character I’m being this week, but it’s usually just the same old me. This is one of your strongest films and one of the most painful as well. It seems to be in part about disappointment and not realizing that, in the scheme of things, you’ve done okay, the best you can....