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Everything you think you know about Bollywood—if you are unaware of Ram Gopal Varma—is wrong. In an industry best known for its song-and-dance extravaganzas Varma has become Bollywood’s biggest director with crime flicks and horror movies devoid of flashy production numbers. Bollywood movies exist to package their megastars and films can take years to complete, depending on the workload of the title celebrity. Varma either directs or produces three or more movies per year and if no big stars are available he takes second-tier talent, actors from the Telugu industry (a Southern Indian film-production nexus known for its grittiness and economy), or a fresh face plucked off the streets....

Siskel and Ebert and Disney. Richard Corliss is generally correct in his discussion of new developments in popular film criticism (FILM COMMENT, March/April 1990). The age of the packaged instant review is here, and lots of moviegoers don’t have time to read the good, serious critics—the Kaels and Kauffmanns. Thumbs, star ratings, grades, and the marvelous Franklin scale have made it unpopular, if not impossible, for critics to deliver an ambiguous or uncertain opinion of a movie (quick: Last Year at Marienbad—thumbs up or down?...

Election Alexander Payne and his writing partner, Jim Taylor, came out of the box thrillingly with their first two features, Citizen Ruth (96) and Election (99). The former skewered both sides in America’s abortion wars, and the latter scrutinized blind ambition and why it wins. Rare in the sheer idiosyncrasy of their themes, they were exceptionally intelligent acerbic comedies, complex enough to warrant comparison with Preston Sturges. In About Schmidt (02) and Sideways (04) Payne and Taylor tried admirably to deepen the emotional palette of their work, expand the realistic detail, and make the characters less comedically invulnerable....

Beat the Devil has weathered time and travails better than anyone could have expected. Director John Huston, top-billed Humphrey Bogart, and screenwriter Truman Capote had (way too much) fun making it despite multiple disasters, which included Huston’s drunken fall off a cliff and an auto accident that shattered Bogart’s bridgework. And the movie has long had devoted fans, despite opening in 1953 to bad reviews and poor box office. But in one sense the film has been cursed indeed, as it sank into public domain long ago, and it’s been years since a decent version was circulating....

BEST FILMS OF 2006 The Departed Martin Scorsese, U.S. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Cristi Puiu, Romania Army of Shadows Jean-Pierre Melville, France/Italy L’Enfant Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France The Queen Stephen Frears, U.K./France/Italy Borat Larry Charles, U.S. Half Nelson Ryan Fleck, U.S. United 93 Paul Greengrass, France/U.K./U.S. Volver Pedro Almodóvar, Spain Inland Empire David Lynch, U.S./France/Poland BEST UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2006 Syndromes and a Century Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria Three Times Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan A Scanner Darkly Richard Linklater, U....

Blue Velvet There are few scenarios so well suited to the constraints of mainstream film as the homecoming. It’s a universal experience that perfectly follows the three-act structure, as the protagonist is called back home and there has life-altering experiences that either explode or realign closely held values. But what Syd Field won’t tell you is that the manner of oak which grows from the acorn of this premise—and what sort of discovery the character makes—can vary wildly among extremes depending on the storyteller....

Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov, 2019) Of all the major film festivals, Cannes arguably offers the least in terms of discoveries of completely new or unknown talent. This is partly due to their dedication to established names, partly to the fact that the Critics’ Week sidebar—focused on first- and second-time filmmakers—tends to take more risks on adventurous visions from young directors than does the main selection committee, and partly to the curious choices they do make when elevating new names into the spotlight....

Lux Aeterna (Gaspar Noé, 2019) Following the mesmerizing final moments of Gaspar Noé’s new, 51-minute Lux Aeterna here at the Cannes Film Festival, I was surprised to immediately encounter the director himself. Not onstage, but alone in the audience. I was seated in the back row of the theater and had watched the film all the way through the credits. As I stood to leave, I realized that Noé was behind me....

Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) In 1903, director Edwin S. Porter made what’s considered to be the first action film, The Great Train Robbery, a short caper of low-key stunts, gunplay, and brawls. That Porter began his filmmaking career as an Edison Studios cameraman before he began directing isn’t surprising—he shot the film himself, along with Jacob Blair Smith (most famous for helming the camera on the gruesome Electrocuting an Elephant)....

Which is to say what? That small-scale independent filmmaking is a crapshoot, I suppose, and that a Competition win isn’t a ticket to the big time (unless you think it was his 1999 Rotterdam prize that clinched things for Nolan). That said, I’d put money on the likelihood that Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho is on track to become a major filmmaker in the coming years. It matters not that his Neighboring Sounds was passed over by the Competition jury and only picked up a FIPRESCI prize—this is the kind of thrilling discovery that makes festival-going worthwhile....

Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2014) In 2014, Cate Blanchett collaborated with German artist Julian Rosefeldt on a 13-channel film installation, Manifesto. Blanchett plays 12 different roles in the project, each a distinct archetype: a stockbroker, a tattooed punk, a choreographer, a machine operator, and more. In separate 10-minute chapters, each unfolding in a different setting, these figures deliver fragmented monologues comprising snippets of artistic manifestos collaged from various authors, sorted by movement and theme (“Surrealism,” “Architecture,” “Film”)....

Drew Pearce’s debut as a writer-director is not merely a lemon. It’s a lemon mélange pie of contemporary action, futuristic “world-building,” and high and low cultural references. Pearce probably named his primary location—an exclusive private hospital for gangsters in a converted Art Deco hotel—after the goddess Artemis, deity of the hunt, wild animals, and childbirth. His heroine, the Nurse (Jodie Foster), has healed assassins and crooked manhunters for 22 years, and following the trauma of losing her only child, she has rarely left the downtown L....

In the first half hour of Red Sparrow, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence), a one-time Bolshoi prima ballerina, clubs a nude couple so fiercely that I assumed she’d sent them into whatever passes for the afterlife among sophisticated post-Soviet culturati. Imagine my shock a scene or two later when Dominika’s dirty uncle, Vanya (definitely no relation to Chekhov’s), a honcho with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, looks at her with his typical air of sleazy amusement and says, “You broke her jaw ....

Warren Beatty’s witty, frisky ramble through 1950s Los Angeles, Rules Don’t Apply, maneuvers Howard Hughes (Beatty) and two young Hughes employees, chauffeur and would-be real estate mogul Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) and contract starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), into an unlikely triangle. Beatty has set the film in 1958, the year the writer-director himself, like his fictional fellow Virginian, Marla, settled in Hollywood. Beatty has been promoting this picture as a comedic attack on Eisenhower-era Puritanism: Marla, “a Baptist nun” (as Hughes derisively calls her), thinks Frank is a married man in the eyes of God because he slept with his hometown Fresno fiancée....

Images from The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019) When we think of George Miller’s glorious Babe diptych, do we immediately recall how the hero’s mouth moved? No, that’s the last thing we think about because our memories are awash in the director’s robust comic vision of an empathetic young pig bringing city and country together via his Lancelot-like courage and purity of heart. Lip motion may be the main thing we remember about Jon Favreau’s dutiful remake of The Lion King....

If Truffaut’s Day for Night is about the joy of making movies and Godard’s Contempt is about the ordeal, Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (71) is about the ordeal of not making movies—the squandering of inspiration and the despair of the neutered artist. A film crew languishes in a Spanish hotel, waiting for the director to arrive, then waiting for materials to arrive, then waiting for motivation to arrive, and then… just waiting....

Quai d’Orsay Bertrand Tavernier’s latest, delightful film, Quai d’Orsay, follows a French minister of foreign affairs whose bewildering, egocentric energies kick up chaos in his office. Bursting into and out of rooms with a cartoonish breeze that sends papers flying, Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (Thierry Lhermitte) puts his hangdog chief of staff (Niels Arestrup) and freshly hired speechwriting assistant (Raphaël Personnaz) through the wringer as they deal with overseas crises and the usual array of political chores....

All images from Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) It’s two days into the Cannes Film Festival, and at this early stage a title that has polarized audiences doesn’t necessarily qualify as a full-blown controversy per se. Still, the Brazilian film Bacurau has already gotten me into a Twitter discussion with a Latin American critic and programmer who feels that certain films from certain countries get a bad response if they don’t conform to the stereotyped national image that foreign viewers are used to....