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Based on a 2011 Icelandic film, writer-director David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche tells the story of stick-in-the-mud Alvin (Paul Rudd) and horndog Lance (Emile Hirsch). The pair spend the summer of 1988 repainting the highway in a forest-fire-damaged stretch of central Texas and bickering over just about everything. Besides being Alvin’s assistant, Lance is the brother of Alvin’s girlfriend, Madison. Whereas Alvin revels in the solitude of nature, Lance prattles on about his pathetic sexual conquests and near-misses (“We almost went full lamb chop!...

“Erratic” is one of the handful of adjectives that have stuck to Spike Lee throughout his career, and it’s been used in reference to both the ever-fluctuating quality of his filmmaking and his rhetorical recklessness as a public figure. In the past his excesses have fueled some of his most unforgettable work—take, for instance, the maddeningly ADD Jungle Fever (91), which all but drowns out its central biracial romance with outraged pronouncements on everything from drugs to colorism to filicide....

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021). Photo by Eric Zachanowich / A24 Films Neither a lurid Game of Thrones–style kill-fest nor an earnest Manichean struggle in the vein of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, David Lowery’s The Green Knight is high fantasy for the A24 generation. Abounding in psychotropic CGI, handsome symmetrical compositions, medieval fonts that flash like neon signage, and an eerily evocative string section that gives way to waves of droning choir vocals, Lowery’s sumptuous adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exemplifies a certain trend that mistakes formal bravado for accomplished storytelling....

When did narrative ambiguity become its own kind of formula? With the advent of cinematic modernism (mark it when you will), the unresolved plot thread, the dangling question, the elided climax, and the blurred character motive evolved from basic screenwriting gaffes into building blocks for a new sort of cinematic storytelling, one modeled after the uneven, gap-filled course of life itself—or, more accurately, what specific filmmakers took real life to be....

Call it the id unleashed or simply evil incarnate, but either way, the force that descends upon Borgman’s affluent Richard and Marina in their secluded, spacious slab of a house is definitely implacable. Once the strange tramp of the title (Rasputin-ish Jan Bijvoet) has insinuated himself into the household by provoking a beating from Richard (Jeroen Perceval), director Alex van Warmerdam, a deadpan satirist, sets a course that moves past Boudu and Buñuel into a realm of black comedy so purposefully dark it’s disorienting....

A nifty gimmick rarely translates into satisfying cinema, but Buried qualifies as an exception. In case you haven’t heard, the conceit of this minimalist film (masterfully realized by screenwriter Chris Sparling and director Rodrigo Cortés) is that it’s set entirely within a coffin, in which a man awakens, equipped only with a partially charged cell phone, a Zippo, and a few other essential items. It’s almost irrelevant that Ryan Reynolds plays the guy in the box—darkness, grime, and sweat obscure his pretty-boy looks throughout—but the usually blah actor is up to the constricting role: an American truck driver stationed in Iraq who is captured by an insurgent and held for ransom underground....

Pedro Almodóvar is the rare filmmaker who writes his own press kit notes, and I’m So Excited! is duly glossed with references to Easy Living, Luis García Berlanga, the Minotaur’s Labyrinth, and flight-path patterns over Spain. But however much informed passion went into the making of his latest film, this welcome experiment doesn’t come off. Almodóvar sets his not especially energetic farce almost entirely within the confines of an airborne plane stricken with mechanical problems....

The subjects of Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s exquisite documentary may not be able to fly, but they’re hardly just walking. Street kids who’ve been swept into an orphanage in Karachi, Pakistan, they’re individual maelstroms of action and emotion. One minute they’re taunting, slugging, and wrestling with each other, the next they’re clinched together in commiserating sobs. Most restless of all is Omar, a 9-year-old with sorrowful eyes and an untamed id who takes to running with existential abandon—into the sea, through a crowded mosque (with Mullick and his camera scampering in his wake), and around the orphanage like a pent-up cub....

Night Fare While the Cannes experience for many consists of glamming it up to watch high-profile movies in the festival’s spotlight sections—on endless lines, discussing the important things in life like celebrity sightings, selfie sticks, and red-carpet fashion rules—there are others who frequent the decidedly unglamorous Market, the underbelly of Cannes, if you will, obsessively looking to buy or program films, or simply to discover them. So as some attendees checked off their lists the latest “essential” cinema by festival mainstays and select newcomers, the Market dwellers, such as myself, experienced an entirely different Cannes....

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace “I’m a journalist, a historian. I’m not some sort of trendy filmmaker.” Adam Curtis is keen to stress this in my interview with him, and afterward I realize why. Most interviews tend to focus on the dense weave of ideas in his documentaries, but he’s rarely asked to talk about the look and feel of his work. Take his most recent BBC series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (11), which covers, among many other things, Alan Greenspan’s links to Ayn Rand; what Silicon Valley owes to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism; and how, after the collapse of the Asian miracle economies in the late Nineties, the Chinese politburo “designed a system to manage America....

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Fanon’s epochal books Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth have long been a source of inspiration for politically minded filmmakers, including Med Hondo, Claire Denis, and many others. Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam on the podcast to talk about Fanon’s interest in cinema, filmmakers who’ve engaged the theorist’s works, and what exactly makes a movie “Fanonian.” In addition to films by Hondo and Denis, we talked about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Antonioni’s The Passenger, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, and more....

One of the early and most anticipated premieres of this year’s festival was Olivier Assayas’s new film Suspended Time. It’s a kind of companion piece to his 2008 movie Summer Hours, not to mention his recent TV series Irma Vep, although Suspended Time is the filmmaker’s most direct foray yet into autofiction. The film is based on the time that Assayas spent during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 confining with his brother Etienne—and their two partners—in their childhood home in the French countryside....

Note: The Film Society of Lincoln Center is offering a special discount for Film Comment readers during the “Queer Cinema Before Stonewall” series: $4 off tickets. To redeem the discount after selecting a showtime, you must enter the promo code “queercinema” (all lowercase; case-sensitive) in the upper right corner. Listen/Subscribe: