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But you can’t keep a canny exploitation movie down, and this one has a hook that’s a doozy: a handful of left-wing one-percenters kidnap a dozen “deplorables” and use them as targets in cathartic blood sport. The creative team—director Craig Zobel and cowriter-producers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (all worked together on HBO’s The Leftovers)—stretch that hook into a hanger for outrageous blood-soaked slapstick and broad political jests. The film has almost no setup and precious little follow-through....

Lightning Over Braddock In 2009, when producers were seeking locations for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic cannibalism nightmare The Road, they found their ideal wasteland not in the Australian outback, the Ozark nether regions, or the northern Canadian tundra, but a few miles outside of Pittsburgh in the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. A flourishing Carnegie steel town with a population close to 20,000 in the postwar years, and with a robust retail trade (it was known as “Pittsburgh’s shopping center”), Braddock saw its fortunes plummet with the decline of the steel industry in the 70s and 80s and a concurrent crack cocaine epidemic....

The main character in Pascale Breton’s hypnotic debut feature has an unusual, yet intuitively spot-on name, Ildutt. As played by Clet Beyer he’s a very French, very shaggy existential antihero: a nowhere man completely adrift, even when he’s in his own ramshackle bedroom at his family home, ensconced in the dreary and forever-damp landscape of Brittany. A part-time fisherman, he gets more than a touch of clinical melancholia when, for example, it comes time to reluctantly gut his piscine prey; and he’s fallen hard for Christina (Mélanie Leray), a visiting nurse who tends to his grandmother....

The Future Perfect My last visit to Locarno, I think, was back in 1992, and I don’t remember too much except for baking, humid nights dozing off during open-air screenings in the vast, stately Piazza Grande. So for all intents and purposes, this was my first visit. Getting the hang of an unfamiliar festival can be difficult, but my ride was made easier by the fact that I was doing jury service for the Swatch First Feature Award: build your viewing around a strict timetable of 20 films, and everything else slots into place easily....

Ossessione Ossessione (Luchino Visconti) In a smudged and spottily bleached 16mm print—apologetically offered to the press by the Festival’s grand vizier, Richard Roud, and then to the general public by the Festival prince of ’76, winsome François Truffaut—Ossessione finally surfaced, by way of epitaph: by hook, crook, or cabalistic summons, to thunder, to trumpet, to shimmer, to triumph. The bewildering cinedustrial political circumstances which have for three decades kept this crucial full-blown masterpiece out of the general American public view are material for incitement to riot....

Power Trip The 21st-century condition of globalization, with all its promise and peril, was a theme that ran through many of the films at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival and resonated with the mostly local audiences. The collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, has been a prime catalyst for millennial melancholia, and Paul Devlin’s Power Trip, a documentary on the privatization of electrical power in the former Soviet state of Georgia, captures the frustrations of life in a transition economy....

The Sheik and I The steady rain that blessed the opening weekend of this year’s South By Southwest put a damper on a festival where long lines build buzz for even the most micro of indies. But at least the weather gave people waiting plenty to talk about, both this year and, presumably, next (“Were you here The Year It Rained?”). Inside references are the coin of the realm in Austin, and those who run the festival, are even more committed to growth through devaluation than the Federal Reserve: the bumper trailers that played before each feature dramatized “How Not to Be Lame at SXSW,” with wink-nudge vignettes of outsiders chasing “authentic” Austin barbecue and behaving presumptuously at post-screening Q&As....

Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2021) Welcome to Setouchi Kinema, please take a seat. It’s the last picture show for this theater in the backwater of Onomichi, Japan, and three young men (an aspiring yakuza, a serious “movie history fanatic,” and a romantic, wide-eyed cinephile called Mario Baba) are about to be magically transported into the war films they’ve come to watch. Hopping from movie to movie in Sherlock Jr....

All images from Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019) “If Mars had life on it, I might find my wife on it,” Brian Wilson once sang—which isn’t that far, come to think of it, from the premise of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Brad Pitt’s intrepid spaceman in Ad Astra does spare a few haunted thoughts for the wife he’s left behind, but whom he’s really hoping to find out in the great beyond is his dad....

In 2008, Charlotte Roche—a British-born, German-raised TV presenter—shocked Germany with a book about women’s bodies and dissident hygiene. Her novel Wetlands became a best-selling succès de scandale, its German title Feuchtgebiete roughly meaning “damp areas” and referring to its heroine’s nether regions, front and back. The narrator is 18-year-old Helen, whose lifestyle is a militant affront to traditional German ideals of cleanliness and female propriety. Joyously upfront about her sexual activity and erotic sovereignty over all her applicable orifices, Helen wages guerrilla war against society on the level of hygiene—her discourse a celebratory hymn to her holes and everything that comes out of them, or goes in, liquid and solid alike....

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Decadent novel of 1884, Against Nature (À Rebours), the aesthete hero des Esseintes cultivates a taste for all that is artificial. One of his particular predilections is for plants that don’t look remotely natural, but appear to have been expressly crafted to look like imitations of plants—with buds that look more like jewels, or leaves that resemble fabric, or better still, rotten flesh pretending to be foliage....

Read Amy Taubin’s Top Ten from Sundance 2013 The weather was frigid. the movies kept us warm. They were sexier than usual and generous to their characters as well as to us, the viewers who could decide their fates, slumped in our seats, the many outer layers of clothing we’d donned against the cold filling our laps or scattered about our feet. If you want comfortable, the Sundance Film Festival has never been the place....

So we come to The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie that must seem to writers of original screenplays the way those “invisible” fences you can install in your yard seem to dogs wearing electrified collars. And yet this umphundredth origin story of a nerdy outsider turned unlikely crime fighter is surprisingly enjoyable—the surprise being that it’s one of those rare superhero movies that doesn’t mount a full-frontal assault on the audience’s senses....

The Depression-era circus story Water For Elephants may be the most unapologetically old-fashioned melodrama to emerge from Hollywood since Memoirs of a Geisha (albeit without any race politics to muddy the waters). That is to say, except for the names and faces of the actors, you could have found the exact same movie, shot for shot and line for line, playing at a theater near you circa 1950—the last decade when “circus movies” were still a viable Hollywood sub-genre....

Ernie Gehr has an intimate relationship with the moving image. Like no other artist, the 76-year-old filmmaker has balanced his own poetic and autobiographical impulses with a careful and detailed exploration of what makes the moving-image medium uniquely its own. These impulses have been part of Gehr’s art since his earliest 16mm works (preceded by 8mm works which in Gehr’s own estimation owe much to the work of Stan Brakhage)....

By now, the lesson of Douglas Sirk should be clear: an auteur is to be measured not by his or her accomplishments outside a system, but by his or her accomplishments within a system. What makes Sirk a point of reference, as well as a continuing subject of retrospective analysis, is that his career seems to represent the possibility of creative transcendence, the prevailing of the individual artist within a colossal machine....

Bette Davis’s cigarette. Photo by Jim Herrington Alright, the title got your attention but this isn’t a confession of homicide. My crime is not punishable by law. But it did end the life of Hollywood’s greatest female star. I never meant Bette Davis any harm. Just the opposite. It began as an effort to help her resurrect her dormant career and ended with the final nail in the coffin of a legend....

Celebrated for the distinctly evocative, magnetic visuals she has crafted throughout her three-decade collaboration with Claire Denis, Agnès Godard practices cinematography as an alchemical art of transformation that combines rigor, immediacy, and transcendence. Freshly returned from New York, where she was a guest of honor at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series The Female Gaze, which runs through August 9, presenting three of her films with Denis—Beau Travail (1999), The Intruder (2004), and 35 Shots of Rum (2008)—Godard welcomed me into her Parisian artist’s loft (a former boilermaking factory) for a conversation about the evolution of her craft and her primal, symbiotic relationship with the camera that echoed the sensitivity and soulfulness of her images....