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The killer shot in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (aka Turist in Sweden) arrives 10 minutes into the film, lasts some four and a half minutes, and will leave you gasping, especially if you had no idea that it was coming—just as the film’s characters weren’t expecting the event it depicts. If you’re allergic to spoilers, you might want to skip the next paragraph, but the shot has already been much discussed in reviews, and a glimpse of it even appears in the trailer and on the poster—so I don’t think Östlund is that worried about giving the game away....

Images from Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019) There are some film reviews for a which a neon-lit “SPOILER ALERT” simply isn’t sufficient. Sometimes revealing anything at all about the plot, beyond an initial setup, risks compromising the viewer’s enjoyment. These days, mind you, some voices on social media are complaining that to reveal anything at all about a film, even your opinion of its worth, constitutes a spoiler. So you’re inclined to say to hell with it, who cares about story and revelations, let’s just expose everything to the cold light of day....

Twenty-five years after it was made, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan looks very much like an artifact from another time. In one scene, hero Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) leans from a balcony of New York’s St. Regis Hotel and predicts that it will soon be torn down. In fact, the St. Regis still flourishes, but other features of Metropolitan belong decidedly to yesterday. The Scribners and Doubleday bookstores seen in the film are both long gone—where now can a curious young Manhattanite like Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina) look for a volume on the French social theorist Charles Fourier?...

In Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, Jason (Alain Chabat), a struggling French director in L.A., pitches an idea for a science-fiction movie named Waves (“Like ‘microwaves’,” he explains). In it, TV sets emit waves that suck the intelligence out of their viewers and reduce humanity to a state of imbecility. “Science fiction,” nods the producer approvingly. Satirical or otherwise—the fact that it might be doesn’t seem to have dawned on Jason—Waves is no better or worse an idea for a movie than one in which the antihero is a misunderstood rubber tire which goes on a righteous killing spree....

I wonder if Hollywood casting agents ever confuse Jeremy Renner and Jérémie Renier? It’s an easy mistake to make: they both have short hair, square heads, and a muscular intensity, but one is Belgian and the other American. But if anyone did accidentally call on the European actor to play a Bourne-style super-agent or to pick up a crossbow in an Avengers episode, they wouldn’t have to feel disappointed—anything Renner can do, Renier can do just as well, and with as much bulked-up masculinity....

There are plenty of moments in Adam McKay’s Vice—his depiction of the rise of former Vice President Dick Cheney—that make your blood run cold. And there are several others that just make you grind your teeth. One comes halfway through, when Vice imagines a moment when Cheney might have left politics and quietly retired, leaving the world a much better place. The end credits run, and then abruptly the narrative resumes: we know how things really turned out....

Here’s an amusing party game: imagining what things would have been like if there had been no Beatles. The white pop world of the 1960s might have belonged to the Kinks, or the Box Tops, or the Dave Clark Five; there would have been no Nilsson, no psychedelic-era Prince and, on the plus side, no Electric Light Orchestra; the sight of Victorian military regalia would have put you instantly in mind of the Crimean War rather than Carnaby Street; Brian Wilson might have got Smile out on time....

Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975) Writers and actors are not typically thought of as “workers”—namely, people who exchange labor for a wage. Those in the culture industry “do what they love and love what they do,” as the neoliberal adage goes, which telegraphs the classist idea that “work” is something unlovable, undesirable, and, for members of the middle class, vaguely unseemly. But more recently, white- and pink-collar cultural workers at museums, cinemas, publishing houses, universities, and nonprofits have been joining historic unions like the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers (UAW)....

Vagabond In a moment of fleeting and uncharacteristic tenderness, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), the title character in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985), writes her name and that of her lover, David (Patrick Lepcynski), with one finger on a dusty mirror in the deserted chateau where they are squatting. David promptly rubs out the names, admonishing her, “No traces.” But Vagabond is all about traces. A fiction film posing as a lyrical documentary, it pieces together the final months of Mona—a stubborn, charismatic drifter who in the opening scene is found frozen to death in a ditch—through the memories of people whose paths crossed hers....

A Touch of Sin A Touch of Sin is not much like the script that Jia sent to the Film Bureau for pre-production approval. Across four stories inspired by recent real-life events, the film is a “state of the nation” report that poses several interesting questions. Such as, why do so many “small” incidents in China today explode into rage, violence, and even murder? Such incidents mostly go unreported in the official media, which remains state-controlled and subject to censorship at many levels....

AGGRO DR1FT (Harmony Korine, 2023) With the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in full swing, restricting the presence of stars at festivals, the Venice Film Festival managed to put together a program of big-name directors for its 80th edition. Call it serendipitous, but the lack of actors on the Lido (or at least most actors; some signed interim agreements in order to attend) put the focus on the movies and their makers rather than the red carpet, a welcome change of pace for a festival that in recent years has become something of a glorified launchpad for awards season....

Film sets can make for nerve-racking environments, but nothing was further from the truth when it came to Love in Khon Kaen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s next feature. The 31-day production, which began last October in the director’s titular hometown, was so harmonious that you had to wonder if the tranquil tone characteristic of Apichatpong’s films might simply be a record of their shooting conditions. Love in Khon Kaen (a working title) reflects on the social and political troubles that have afflicted Thailand in recent years and whose roots stretch back centuries....

Last October, Shonni Enelow, who wrote a feature on acting in our September/October 2016 issue (“The Great Recession”), interviewed Maclean and Fox together at the New York Film Festival soon after the film’s U.S. premiere. The Rehearsal is on our Best Undistributed Films of 2016 list.—Nicolas Rapold From the start of the film, you paint such a compelling and unsettling parallel between the exploitation of minors and the training of young actors....

Interweaving the couple’s seemingly disparate dramas, Schanelec masterfully condenses time and consolidates information, drawing parallels between the couples’ entwined destinies through discreet visual correlations and suggestive behavioral rhythms. The early-’80s story follows the vagabond pair Theres (Miriam Jakob) and Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson) as they attempt to maintain their relationship and artistic aspirations while family sickness and professional developments threaten to pull them apart. In the story set in present-day Berlin, Ariane (Maren Eggert) and David (Phil Hayes) deal with personal issues of their own that eventually lead to a separation....

In the opening scene of Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios, a longboat lunges in and out of the darkness, lurching through a river toward a light on the shore. After landing, figures emerge from the boat slowly, most noticeable among them a small girl in brightly colored earrings. They are part of the flood of refugees fleeing a half-century of guerilla bloodshed in Colombia’s mountains, and their destination is a wild, half-flooded island on the border between three Latin American nations....

The Assassin How did you come to the idea of making a film about Nie Yinniang? Hou: I read the short stories by Pei Xing, known as chuanqi, when I was in college. There are a lot of female characters in the stories—Nie Yinniang is one of my favorites. The Tang Dynasty had the greatest number of chuanqi, with all kinds of different characters. I’ve always wanted to make a film based on them....

A few years before he succumbed to throat cancer in April of 2012, Levon Helm proudly exclaimed to filmmaker Jacob Hatley: “I ain’t in it for my health!” If he were, he would have sang in a church choir instead of touring with Bob Dylan, drumming and singing for years in The Band, and capping it all off with a drug-fueled performance for Scorsese in The Last Waltz. While many of his contemporaries (and two of his Band-mates, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko) never made it into their golden years, Helm toned it down but kept going, playing music, puffing on joints, and telling stories up until his death at the age of 71....

FILM COMMENT sat down with Dallesandro in February, on the eve of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s presentation of Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus, a screening that reunited Dallesandro with his co-star, Jane Birkin—herself the co-subject of FSLC’s retrospective, “Jane and Charlotte Forever”—to discuss his career. The interview sadly coincided with the news that Rivette had passed away at 87, so accordingly the conversation began with the Nouvelle Vague’s incomparable night watchman....

The bulk of Of Men and War was shot during the nine months Laurent Bécue-Renard spent filming group therapy sessions at the Pathway Home, one of surprisingly few residential treatment centers available for veterans with PTSD. Their recollections play like testimonies, gut-wrenching but incapable of bringing any degree of justice or reason to the veterans’ often paralyzing suffering. Much of the drama comes not from what they say but how they deflect or struggle to keep their cool....