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Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles), interview by Ela Bittencourt “Bacurau—like the American westerns of Ford and Hawks—brims with moral complexities because of its embrace of genre, not in spite of it. To see its protagonists exalted in widescreen—a sweeping canvas of diverse faces, bodies, skin colors, and textures—is to feel the innate strength but also the inherent contradictions of the backcountry.” First Cow (Kelly Reichardt) by Clinton Krute “With First Cow, Reichardt has managed to weave together the various concerns—social, philosophical, economic, and cinematic—that have haunted her films to date, producing a work of remarkable beauty and startling complexity....

Richard Peña and Rose Kuo How has film culture changed since you took over at the festival, in your eyes? There has been a much wider acceptance of what we used to call “Third World film,” films from non-traditional places. I arrived in 1988, when the Chinese thing was cresting. We closed that year’s festival with Red Sorghum, and that was sort of an announcement that this was a major cinema....

We (Alice Diop, 2021) There’s a moment in Alice Diop’s documentary We when the camera frames an island in the middle of a lake in Parc du Sausset, located in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. A moment later, the crisp, high-definition image is replaced by a shaky, pixelated shot of the same island. Then the camera turns away, seeking other subjects—two swimming birds, people on a jog, a train’s distant passage, and a man we know to be the filmmaker’s father....

As a director, Robert Redford has twice orchestrated impeccable re-creations of bygone eras: the Twenties in A River Runs Through It and the Fifties in Quiz Show. His latest delves further back into American history, 1865 to be precise, just as the Civil War is concluding and Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. This period, however, proves to be a trickier proposition and despite the purest of intentions, Redford’s gripping courtroom drama is also at times a clunky costumer, filmed in distractingly desaturated hues....

With his 130-minute new feature, Derek Cianfrance may imagine that he has orchestrated an audacious multigenerational epic. In reality he has effectively made three movies here where one might have sufficed in an effort that suggests his limitations as a credible storyteller. Part one stars Ryan Gosling (once again utterly unconvincing as riff-raff) as a Drive-esque cage-match motorcyclist who turns to bank robbery to support the infant son he didn’t know he had (after a tryst with Eva Mendes the previous year)....

A few years ago Bridesmaids received its share of ink as a gross-out comedy in which its female characters found themselves in unflattering situations, but it’s hard to rival Wetlands for the blithe intrepidness of its raunch. David Wnendt’s peppy adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s novel follows an extremely uninhibited teenager, Helen (a winning Carla Juri), on her bodily explorations, leaving nearly no part of her anatomy untouched. The book’s essentially stream-of-consciousness approach is anchored here by Helen’s visit to the hospital for an operation arising from hemorrhoids and a shaving mishap....

Matsuko What makes a movie musical? An enlightening and entertaining 10-film retrospective at Japan Society aims to answer that question in the broadest possible way—a necessity given that the genre has been underrepresented in accounts of Japan’s long cinema history. Through this series, programmed by film scholar Michael Raine, American audiences may be surprised to discover that the roots of the movie musical in Japan are nearly as intertwined with the rest of the country’s film history as they are in the U....

Beats Sundance 2019 is nearly half over and so far I haven’t seen any narrative fiction films as exciting as two I saw in Slamdance, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary as the alt-Sundance. Over the years the funky festival at the top of Main Street has become a bit more savvy about projection and, while its headquarters are hardly glamorous or of any use to star gazers, there is a sense of creativity at the place—as if a film festival isn’t just about deals or networking....

For this second edition of the Lecture, NYFF welcomed the filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose landmark 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, screened in a new restoration in the Revivals section of this year’s festival. Known for the political rigor and intrepid formal experimentation of her film and multimedia practice, Smith epitomizes both the ethics of care and the commitment to subversion that guided Vogel’s mission. Smith’s address is followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, the director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a Turner Classic Movies host, and is presented here for the first time....

Hélène’s talents are on striking display in Murina, a new coming-of-age film directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic. Murina tells the story of a Croatian teen (played by newcomer Gracija Filipović) navigating a treacherous passage to adulthood in an intensely patriarchal milieu. With intimate close-ups, breathtaking underwater sequences, and beautiful shots of the island where the film is set, Hélène’s images give arresting form to the protagonist’s awakening to her own desires....

Films discussed: Moonlight, La La Land, I Am Not Your Negro, Boyhood, Manchester By the Sea, Taxi Driver, O.J.: Made in America, The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, 13th, Toni Erdmann, Eastern Promises, Keanu Listen/Subscribe:

A new artist book by Trinh, titled The Twofold Commitment, traces all of these threads in her film Forgetting Vietnam, which was released in 2015, 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War. Published by Primary Information, the book features the film’s script, paired with creatively arranged stills, as well as conversations between Trinh and various scholars. To mark the launch of The Twofold Commitment in May, Trinh joined us on the Podcast for a rich discussion about the genesis of the book; the different functions of voice, text, and image in her practice; how she turns familiarity and alienness into productive ways of looking at the world; and more....

Two-Lane Blacktop Monte Hellman, 1971 Badlands Terrence Malick, 1973 Sullivan’s Travels Preston Sturges, 1941 Detour Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945 Pierrot le Fou Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 Kings of the Road Wim Wenders, 1976 Gun Crazy Joseph L. Lewis, 1950 The Straight Story David Lynch, 1999 Journey to Italy Roberto Rossellini, 1954 Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Sam Peckinpah, 1974 The Wages of Fear Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953 The Last Detail Hal Ashby, 1973...

The Hidden City (Victor Moreno, 2018) The train and the movie camera were lovers from the start. The best-remembered of the “actualities” in the Lumière Brothers’ first program of projected films in 1895 recorded a train pulling into a station—allegedly causing audience members to faint or flee, though it does not even approach the viewer head-on, but cuts diagonally across the screen, rolling to a gentle halt. It wasn’t long before early cameras, too big and unwieldy to be easily moved, were being placed at the front of locomotives traveling through scenic landscapes....

Faces Imagine if you will—just for a moment—Gena without John. Tall, blonde, Nordic-gorgeous Gena from the state of Wisconsin, alone in Hollywood. Allow your mind to play across the performances of other strikingly beautiful and gifted actresses with champagne tresses, especially those who are statuesque, with high cheekbones and remote, shaded eyes. Mostly you see gargoyles, women who represent the nightmare of some director or producer, who symbolize the collective dark side of fair-haired femaleness in American cinema....

The Third Man A titan of the airwaves, Orson Welles would reprise one of his most famous screen roles, Harry Lime of The Third Man, on radio. His grinning villain was the star of The Adventures of Harry Lime, a show produced in London and broadcast by the BBC from 1951 to 1952. The series was effectively an extended prequel to The Third Man, and in the United States, it was called The Lives of Harry Lime—a title that perfectly captures the chameleonic personality of the character....

Gone with the Wind Sure, Louis Jean Heydt was in Gone with the Wind (39), but more importantly he was in Zombies on Broadway (45). In Gone with the Wind, Heydt shows up for only a moment, as a hungry and defeated Confederate soldier, his hair dyed as red as his phony-ass Dogpatch beard; you probably won’t spot him if you aren’t a hardcore fan. In Zombies on Broadway, as a sort of lesser Walter Winchell, he radiates the Heydt his acolytes know and love: some light banter, some pallid sarcasm, never given much to do but obviously paying attention anyway, never overselling, always on time....