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A contemporary gothic fairy tale, slight and scary, Greta is unmistakably a Neil Jordan film, if not quite on the level of The Crying Game (1992) and The End of the Affair (1999), or as idiosyncratic as The Butcher Boy (1997) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005). Set in contemporary Brooklyn and Manhattan, or rather Toronto and Dublin almost entirely standing in for those more costly locations, it is rooted in a traditional story of a generous young woman with a driving rescue fantasy whose misfortune is to have a mean, homicidal stepmother—as in Snow White, the first movie to send me hysterically weeping from the theater, the next one being Bambi....

In the cold, hard light of morning, Luca Guadagnino’s breakthrough feature feels less like a rapturous love affair than a pleasurable but functional one-night stand the details of which may grate and embarrass but over which one ends up obsessing, for good reasons and bad. On first viewing, the literally spotlit epiphany of desire that a plate of shrimp triggers in the film’s main character seems glorious—actually, it seemed a bit much at the time, too, but you went with it—yet with distance and time, it plays as blunt and more than faintly ridiculous, like many of the film’s flourishes....

“No poetry after Auschwitz,” the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared in 1951. The crisis of conscience that struck the Western world upon the discovery of Nazi concentration camps generated a profound crisis of representation; after the inconceivable, harrowing spectacle of extermination, the next step for art was unclear. The ongoing Syrian Civil War—with its mass displacement, death, and evidence of war crimes—continues to have impact today, especially in the realm of documentary....

The best Chinese documentaries of the past decade seem designed to fuel our apocalyptic imagination. Whether in the post-earthquake wasteland of Du Haibin’s 1428, the critiques of Kafka-esque bureaucracy in Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment and Petition, or the monumental portrait of a declining industrial district in Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, we discover a world in which the center is barely holding and the stakes could not be higher....

Andrew Bujalski’s entrance into the world of professional actors and state-of-the-art digital cameras happily keeps the distinguishing characteristics of America’s most idiosyncratic lo-fi auteur intact. Results is unmistakably a Bujalski film—the fifth for the 37-year-old filmmaker—but it’s a little bit funnier, a lot prettier, and slightly more adult than the others. Set in the sun-kissed, sorbet-colored environs of Austin, Texas, it’s a triangulated, stoner rom-com that’s totally unpredictable moment to moment even though, as far as the plot is concerned, it goes nowhere....

Many meals are memorable more for the first and last courses than for the main, and so it is with Step Up to the Plate, Paul Lacoste’s documentary about visionary chef Michel Bras passing his three-Michelin-star restaurant in Laguiole, France over to his son Sébastien. It all starts out so promising as we observe, through time-lapse photography, the creation of Bras’s signature dish, the Gargouillou. It truly is a thing of wonder, a painting on a plate composed of vegetable emulsions, herbs, lettuces and edible flowers arranged with all the magic and color of a Delaunay....

What makes Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest so audacious—unforgivably so, it would seem, judging by initial reviews—is that it opens up space inside Shakespeare’s play to reveal themes that the text might otherwise not have room to accommodate. Eschewing the motif of magic as a metaphor for the illusionism of theater, The Tempest instead foregrounds issues of power. Foremost is the switch from Prospero to Prospera, fiercely played by Helen Mirren....

There’s much to savor in this feature debut by British stage director Rupert Goold, who makes a well-buffed addition to a nascent two-hander subgenre: the treacherous journalistic interview. Two wayward souls meet in an Oregon jail. One, Chris Longo (James Franco), awaits trial for killing his family. The other, journalist Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill), seeks redemption. Their convergence hinges on Longo’s having used Finkel’s name as an alias to evade an FBI manhunt, a fact Finkel learns not long after his feature for The New York Times, built on fabrications, has turned his byline into mud....

Installation view of Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 19–August 13, 2023). From left to right: Disinformation, 2023; Personal Responsibility: Keith, 2023. Photograph by Ron Amstutz Early in the summer of 2009, Walgreens marked the end of the Great Recession by rolling out a national plan of renovations intended to bring their brick-and-mortar locations into greater harmony with the curiously named ethos of “customer-centric retail....

Picture this: Chiara Mastroianni catches Milos Forman and Catherine Deneuve in flagrante delicto. Yes, indeed, a bit of selfreflexive playfulness is afoot. Mastroianni’s real-life mother (Deneuve) is playing her onscreen counterpart, while the Czech-born Forman plays the role of her character’s Czech father. It’s a primal scene for cinephiles: “Dad, put on your underwear!” Mastroianni sputters. Forman’s bizarre caught-in-the-act expression (guilt-ridden glee?) is one of the many peculiar diversions in Christophe Honoré’s Beloved, a film with a few parallels to his 2007 romp-slash-oddity, Love Songs....

Abandon all hope—and prepare for an instant classic of bad-cop-no-donut cinema. Director Antoine Fuqua quickly establishes the predicaments of his three main characters: Tango (Don Cheadle), deep undercover, masterminds a massive drug transfer; Sal (Ethan Hawke) shoots the face off a scumbag colleague (Vincent D’Onofrio) and then takes a bag of dirty money; Eddie (Richard Gere) wakes up and sticks a gun in his own mouth, in what’s apparently a daily ritual-cum-rehearsal....

On paper, Europa Report is a “found footage” moon-mission movie, which may sound like a chore. Thankfully, director Sebastián Cordero has many spectacular items in his sci-fi toolbox. When was the last time someone made a staggeringly beautiful found-footage film anyway? The mission in question, to one of Jupiter’s moons, has gone awry. The viewer learns this in piecemeal fashion, from signals sent by the spacecraft’s multiple cameras. The cameras are everywhere, with some aimed directly at the crewmembers’ often awe-struck faces....

Thanks to Paul Haggis’s remake, The Next Three Days, Fred Cavayé’s 2008 debut feature, Anything for Her, remains unseen by U.S. audiences. But fortunately the French writer-director’s follow-up, Point Blank, will hit theaters before its inevitable Hollywood makeover, a redundant endeavor, considering this version is already as mainstream as they get—and as supremely entertaining. Both of Cavayé’s films feature ordinary men pushed to extremes in efforts to save their wives....

Amazing but true stories, alas, seldom make for amazing films. In Juan Antonio Bayona’s eco-disaster flick, the 2004 tsunami that devastated Thailand sets the stage. It strikes not once but twice: first, near the beginning, to get things rolling, and then close to the end, as seen in a quasi-redemptive flashback. Between these massive CGI bookends a family struggles to reunite itself. Henry (Ewan McGregor), with his two youngest children, stays mobile, searching the various cobbled-together emergency-relief outposts....

Was a teenager’s bedroom always a sanctum sanctorum, all color-coordinated and walls plastered with posters, ironic road signs, and cut-out photos—or did some savvy Hollywood art director dream up that oh-so-camera-ready look? The chicken-and-egg conundrum is, of course, more complicated than that, involving the end of the age-old child/adult dichotomy, and the seismic social shifts after World War II (suburbia, car culture, rock ’n’ roll). The Tumblr page Teenage Bedrooms on Screen goes some way toward showing the dual evolution of teenagers and their habitats....

Downstairs Before she became the gossip-column terror of Tinseltown, Hedda Hopper made her living as an actress, a fact that Turner Classic Movies is celebrating (if that is the word we want) on the evening of July 9. The four-movie night starts with George Stevens’s Alice Adams, one of the best films Hopper was ever in, and continues with Downstairs, an underseen and splendidly acid tale of servant-and-mistress intrigue that was co-conceived and co-written by its star, John Gilbert....

Images from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce, 1976) “The fact is, Chief,” Deputy Norman Ramsey tells his superior in The Town That Dreaded Sundown, “the only thing we really do know is, we’ve got a very strange person on our hands.” This report follows the first attack of a sadistic masked killer known as “The Phantom,” and “very strange person” proves to be a serious understatement. In Arkansas filmmaker Charles B....