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Blackhat, a suspense spectacle about the hunt for a hacker who sabotaged a Chinese nuclear plant and manipulated soy futures on Chicago’s Mercantile Trade Exchange, should be a prize Michael Mann movie. Full of journalistic energy and aesthetic ambition, its argot, attitudes, and real and virtual textures emerge from Mann’s relentless quest to uncover dynamic worlds beyond and beneath tomorrow’s trending topics. Blackhat is also a woeful letdown, with soporific stretches and thin or lumpy characters who come to life just seconds before they die....

—”So That’s the Way You Like It,” in Beyond the Fringe Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, aka Falstaff, in its profound and tragicomic way, does for Shakespeare’s historical dramas what Beyond the Fringe (Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore) do in the hilarious burlesque “So That’s the Way You Like It.” It illuminates them with brilliant irreverence and gusto. Welles views kingly power plays and era-defining battles as cruel, breathtaking absurdities, just as soul-killing for Henry IV (John Gielgud) and his son, Prince Hal / Henry V (Keith Baxter), as they are murderous to that zesty rebel, the warrior’s warrior Hotspur (Norman Rodway)....

A man of a certain age is dying. The problem is his heart. Not only does it no longer pump as it should, but it has proven itself a failure in matters of love. Because the man still hungers for love, he decides to buy himself a new heart on the black market. Not just any heart but one that belonged to a young man – as young as the son he refuses to care for....

All images from Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, 1990) In Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the details that left many of my friends with flayed hearts left mine mostly intact: the too-real viscera of the film’s tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Not that I didn’t know those fraught scenes: for years, my mother and I had been caught in near-daily crossfires of screeching and 90-decibel cruelties—but not like that. Last month, when I saw Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) at Light Industry, I watched Maggie Cheung as Hueyin, a 25-year-old Chinese woman just home from grad school abroad for her sister’s wedding, locked in verbal fisticuffs with her mother, and I thought… JUST like that....

Stations of the Cross Two-thirds of the films competing for the Golden Bear have screened and the critical favorite thus far is Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross. The Stations of the Cross (episodic representations of Christ’s crucifixion that adorn the walls of most Catholic churches) provide the structural and aesthetic template for the film, which is split into 14 chapters, each shot in a single take and, in all but three cases, without any camera movement....

Harmonium “A little too cold to go swimming” proved to be the perfect temperature for filmgoing at this year’s Miami Film Festival, held March 3 to 12. Organized by the Miami Film Society and Miami-Dade College, the 34th edition offered a diverse selection of films from around the world, which, taken with the festival’s schedule (only evening screenings on weekdays), testifies to its commitment to engaging with the area’s culturally vibrant community....

Pulp Fiction Butch, the boxer (Bruce Willis), is driving away from his apartment, where an extraordinary series of events has just played out. He thinks his chapter of Pulp Fiction is pretty much over, but he’s about to be sucker-punched by another extraordinary—and increasingly deranged—turn of plot. So he’s driving this little Honda and the car radio is playing the old Statler Brothers chestnut, “Flowers on the Wall.” You know—countin’ flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all—and Butch sings along, the way a person sings along to the car radio even in the midst of deranged and extraordinary events....

Memphis ’69: The 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival (Joe LaMattina, 2019) Streaming for free via Fat Possum Records This raw, no-frills concert documentary consists entirely of footage shot over the course of a three-day outdoor festival in Memphis, Tennessee in June 1969. The lineup was particularly strong, featuring the party soul of local legend Rufus Thomas (who kicks off the show and acts as emcee), the haunting folk-blues of the 106-year-old Nathan Beauregard, and the overwrought psych of The Insect Trust, to name a few....

MANOHLA DARGIS film critic, Harper’s Bazaar / film editor, LA Weekly Chungking Express (1994)—A bliss-out of time and space, men and women, Mamas and Papas, poetry and pop, the blurred blue night: after Godard, this is what movies could be, should be, and finally are. Wong Kar-wai is one of the few filmmakers alive who makes films, not just words into pictures, which is why I could have as easily, and happily, selected Happy Together, Fallen Angels, Days of Being Wild, even Ashes of Time....

Having made his feature debut in 1997 with Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke is just a little older as a director than the 21st century itself, so it’s fitting that his cinema should be so directly a history of Chinese social change since the start of the millennium. In his last couple of films, he has found novel ways of mapping these changes: in 2013’s A Touch of Sin, he used genre crime narrative and a four-story portmanteau structure to expand his realist palette, while in the ambitious but flawed Mountains May Depart (2015), his episodic narrative about a triangle of love and different social ambitions vaulted several years at a time, finally even leaping into the future (and, rather awkwardly, into the English language and an imagined Australia)....

In any year other than 2015, I’d have been, say, 75 percent in agreement with the decision to award the Cannes Palme d’Or to Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan. If the extraordinary Son of Saul hadn’t been in competition, then yes, Dheepan would have been one of a very few credible candidates. Dheepan is nearly a superb film, but its flaws are no easier to overlook a year after its premiere. Nevertheless, Dheepan is a pretty good Jacques Audiard film, and certainly a very ambitious one....

They’re not the easiest films to get made, dramas focusing on women well into middle age; and if you try to make one, it’s probably safe practice to provide an upbeat payoff. Witness Sebastián Lelio’s fine Gloria, where the exuberance paid off in the form of an English-language remake. Diane, however, is a much tougher call, so don’t expect a moment of dizzy disco-floor release—although the heroine of Kent Jones’s drama does have a barroom moment when she lets herself soar a little to Bob Dylan and Leon Russell numbers on the jukebox....

All images from Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018) The two features of Chinese director Bi Gan are haunted by echoes and eerie recurrences: tunnels, water, clocks and watches (broken, or drawn as child-like images on walls and wrists); cars, motorbikes and trains; apples and a grapefruit-like citrus fruit called a pomelo. Rewatching Bi’s second feature Long Day’s Journey into Night, I struggled as much as on first viewing to piece together the plot, if it really is a plot....

Cinema has rarely felt so much like a son et lumière as it did in a brief period in the early ’80s, when suddenly shafts of light came shooting out of movie images, as if the screen had been slashed. It became a defining image of Steven Spielberg’s films—Close Encounters, E.T., and Poltergeist too, if you want to count that as one of his—as well as others that I can think of, including Blade Runner....

Queen of Earth is a mysterious film—and one that comes as something of a shock. If you saw Alex Ross Perry’s last feature, the brittle and somewhat savage literary comedy Listen Up Philip, and come to his follow-up hoping for something similar, then the effect is rather like turning up at a party expecting good cheer and familiar company, only to find that everyone is a stranger to you and acting very oddly, perhaps even menacingly....

Warwick Thornton’s Australian period drama Sweet Country ends with a character asking the rhetorical question, “What chance has the country got?” before the film closes on the image of an Aboriginal teenage boy. Viewers will know the answer already if they have seen Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009), a bleak but not hopeless drama which tells us what future lies ahead for that boy’s successors, the young Aborigines of present-day Australia: their chance of flourishing will be hard won....

Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán is currently making his films under the banner Atacama Productions, named after the vast Atacama Desert in the north of his home country. The desert is apparently the single most arid place on earth, but for Guzmán, it has proved a most fertile source of metaphor. In his 2010 film Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán studied the radio telescopes that have been installed in Atacama. Musing on astronomy’s status as a Chilean national obsession of sorts, he asked why his nation is so fascinated with looking millions of years into the past, gazing at stars that are long dead by the time we see them—and yet reluctant to consider its own recent past, the brutal days of the Pinochet regime....

The Bowery The Bowery is set in New York in the Gay Nineties, the period when, as an opening intertitle explains, the Bowery was “The livest mile on the face of the globe.” Our introduction to the Bowery is scored to a cacophony of song: a singing waiter accompanied by a cross-eyed violinist massacres “Daddy’s on the Engine.” A flatulent oompah band blats down the street. A tenor caterwauls “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling....

To get to 1972’s The Carey Treatment, Blake Edwards’s bitter goodbye to American studio filmmaking, we’ll begin with his even more bitter comeback. At the beginning of Edwards’s 1981 film-à-clef S.O.B., set “once upon a time in a wonderful land called Hollywood,” producer Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) has been reduced to catatonia by the failure of his latest film, Night Wind, a saccharine musical starring his wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews, whom Edwards had married in 1969)....