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Wherever Williams goes, his protagonists turn out to be mostly young men and adolescents who come across as poetic drifters. In the melancholy The Sound of Stars Dazes Me, for example, they hang out in a no-man’s-land of abandoned ruins in rural Argentina. While the surrounding landscape may look enchanted, the boys’ preoccupations are mundane: gossiping about friends they have in common, taking photos of each other’s tattoos. One boy’s fainting incident sets off his two friends on a journey to fetch medication, but the result is more like Waiting for Godot: the walk is an end in itself, the resolution may never come....

Images from Wild Rose (Tom Harper, 2018) Trying to describe Jessie Buckley to people unaware of her talents is a fool’s errand. Fool that I am, I did my best in a print review of her new starring vehicle Wild Rose, calling her “neither an actress who can carry a tune nor a singer with a functional screen presence, but a protean performer of limitless potential,” and referring to her breakout turn in the 2017 psychodrama Beast as “one of the few recent portrayals deserving of the term ‘fearless....

Luis López Carrasco cut his teeth working with the audiovisual collective Los hijos. With a firm foundation in experimental filmmaking, his first solo feature film shows Carrasco pushing formal boundaries, challenging himself, and asking questions about the source of Spain’s current political, economic, and cultural malaise. El Futuro takes on these issues, not with any overt commentary, but with more oblique avant-garde strategies. It has the look of a home movie—it could be found footage—but it’s carefully staged....

In Thomas Hardy’s Victorian-era Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, lovely 18-year-old Tess leaves her poor family’s home in rural England after a series of tragedies to reach out to a wealthy female relative, but instead falls prey to her ostensible cousin, Alec, a predatory libertine. Tess later meets and falls in love with Angel, a reverend’s son and farmer, but their relationship is marred by her past....

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023) Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist, arrives with an alternate, shadow version: GIFT, a re-edited film created as a silent accompaniment to a live performance by composer Eiko Ishibashi, who also scored Hamaguchi’s smash hit Drive My Car (2021). Evil Does Not Exist and GIFT operate in conversation with each other, emphasizing different moods and ideas, but grounded in the same story about a small village whose residents reject the efforts of a Tokyo-based company to build a glamping site in their town....

The Warrior Indonesian exploitation cinema is unmapped territory, but rising above it all like a mighty mountain of machismo is Jaka Sembung aka The Warrior (81). Directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra, this story of a normal guy fighting the colonial Dutch in 19th-century Indonesia features fire-breathing martial artists, wizards whose bodies keep fighting even after they’ve been chopped to bits, and psychedelic black magic. “For me, it all started with Jaka Sembung,” Bastian Meiresonne, the director of Garuda Power: The Spirit Within, a 2014 documentary on Indonesian action cinema, said....

“We’re gonna try and avoid nostalgia tonight,” said David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Modern Image, inaugurating a panel discussion Tuesday night with former film critics of the Village Voice. But the nostalgia was palpable at the Museum, as were the passions in the candid, often rueful reminiscence concerning the rise and infuriating destruction of the Village Voice after 60 years. This past August, recent billionaire owner Peter Barbey pulled the plug on what was once a quintessential New York institution, calling the occasion “kind of a sucky day....

The Secret Sharer: Seymour: An Introduction At the height of his fame, Bob Dylan complained of a cult of fans so awestruck that they’d sift through his cigarette butts in search of enlightenment. Fifty years later there remains something attractive about a gifted artist who hates publicity. The phenomenon lies at the center of Ethan Hawke’s documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, though at first it seems to be completely absent. Seymour Bernstein is a brilliant piano teacher and gentle, nurturing mentor, who helped Hawke overcome his stage fright so quickly that the actor has now returned the favor by directing this documentary....

Mad Ron’s Prevues From Hell One of the most exciting things about growing up during the VHS era was a trip to the local video store, which allowed you to take home not only your own (temporary) copy of the latest big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, but also, for more intrepid cinematic explorers, to dig out oddities which had only had a limited or local release, or more often which never saw the inside of a movie theater at all....

The e-mail message from South Korea was not exactly reassuring: “Missiles or not, the fest will go on!” The event in question, the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, aka PiFan, marked its 10th anniversary this July—at a time when the real world was testing out new forms of old-school chaos. The press had just revealed that Iranian observers were present at the recent North Korean missile tests, Israel was shelling Lebanon in retaliation for the Hezbollah attack, torrential floods were causing massive evacuations and innumerable deaths throughout Asia, and a heat wave in NYC had caused a power outage that left over 100,000 people in the dark—some for over a week....

The spirit, as we all know, arrives at 1 a.m. It is described in a way that is entirely cinematic, five decades before cinema was born. The ghost is “like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions.” It is there and not there, as though cast from a projector or a magic lantern....

Images from The Queen (Frank Simon, 1967) Every June, it seems the queer world begins scouring contemporary and classic cinema for images of pride. Because the word has long been a centerpiece of the LGBTQ movement, it’s easy to forget how hard-won pride has been and continues to be, in both individual and wider social contexts. The queer viewer might be particularly inclined to feel a twinge of panic in seeking out those rare films imbued with positivity, whether emanating from the characters on screen or from behind the camera....

Published in 1928, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was written as a gift for the author’s lover of many years, Vita Sackville-West. If anything can be called furiously whimsical it’s Woolf’s book, which buffets its title character across centuries and between genders: Orlando starts as a man of privilege in Elizabethan England and ends as a woman of letters in the postwar 1920s. Orlando barely ages, even though he goes from lovelorn youth to frustrated poet to chic ambassador to lady of leisure to modern woman, the main constancies an artistic curiousness manifesting as a desire to write and a much remarked-upon beautiful androgyny....

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022) With 2017’s First Reformed, 2021’s The Card Counter, and now Master Gardener, Paul Schrader has completed a trilogy of films that make explicit a hallmark of his filmography: the possibility of redemption, especially for isolated, existentially tortured men weighed down by histories of violence. First Reformed’s Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a former military chaplain who became a pastor following the death of his son in the Iraq War....

Left to Right: Cecil B. DeMille, unidentified actor, Gary Cooper, and Helen Mack rehearsing “The Virginian” During the heyday of moviegoing, decades before the rise of home video, Lux Radio Theatre broadcast versions of popular theatrical releases to millions of living rooms across the nation. These came in the form of one-hour radio dramas, most often performed by the same Hollywood stars who had graced the originals. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them in their crowning vocal glory, re-creating their best film roles and often giving post-show interviews....