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Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020) We kick things off this week with some (almost) in-house news, FC publishers Film at Lincoln Center making two big announcements. The first brings word of the new NYFF leadership, with Eugene Hernandez named as Director of the festival and Dennis Lim as Director of Programming. The two will work together “on a number of innovations to the selection process and structure of the festival,” with the expanded selection committee to be announced in spring....

Heaven Can Wait KENT JONES: It’s your first time in the new Alice Tully Hall. MARTIN SCORSESE: It’s my first time in the new Alice Tully, because the other [Film Foundation] events have been at the Walter Reade for the past few years. KJ: We were just talking backstage and I realized that Heaven Can Wait and Brooklyn, a Fox Searchlight picture, are both on 35mm. I wanted to start with the beginning, which is when you first realized the need for restoration and preservation actually had to exist....

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963) “Hollywood has created an image in the minds of the people that cinema is only entertainment and business. What we are saying is that cinema is also art. And the meanings and values of art are not decided in courts or prisons.” These words, written by Jonas Mekas, were published in the pages of Film Comment magazine in its Winter 1964 issue. The sentiment in the first of these sentences would only become more glaringly obvious as the years wore on....

Seven Up “Give me the child until he is seven,” goes the Jesuit maxim that opens Paul Almond’s Seven Up, “and I will give you the man.” That film, the first in a series that now covers half a century and counting, proposed that Britain had a class system so rigid and so inflexible that the trajectory of each of its citizens was fixed from childhood. Almond, along with assistant director Michael Apted, quizzed 14 children about their diverse economic backgrounds, their friendships, their crushes, and their hopes for the future....

Except in very rare cases, film franchises of a certain age eventually move past the challenge to build a better mouse trap every time, toward simply building a viable or interesting one. As with a long-running play, we don’t just know the key characters, we know the personality tics of the actors playing them so well that we can anticipate their likely line readings as they encounter the usual plot points or crises....

Bruno Dumont’s great theme is grace. More specifically, the French director seeks to render those showstopping moments when faith obtains in a fallen, degraded world he invariably portrays by directing inexperienced actors to appear as nonverbal and uncivilized as possible while decorating his austere mise en scène with outbursts of brutality. Dumont is an agnostic, then, with a glaze of art-house opacity. This agnosticism was most compelling in 2009’s Hadewijch, a parable about grace misapprehended, in which an intense young novitiate’s descent into extremism was depicted with astringent wit and plangent sympathy intermingled....

Who knew FDR was such a randy old man? Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson is not, as may seem at first blush, a screwball ditty in which England’s king and queen set foot in the States for the first time with the weight of a war on their shoulders. Culture clash does fuel some of the film’s gags—the queen feels certain that the hot dogs served are meant as a slight—but the scenario concerns itself far more with Roosevelt’s personal affairs than with his diplomatic ones....

An aging, afflicted, and lone filmmaker named Salvador (Antonio Banderas), his eyes closed and back marked by the scar from a spine operation, dives into the deep end of a swimming pool, submerging himself into an enchanted childhood memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz). She’s hand-washing laundry in the river with a natural detergent that attracts the attention of what she calls “soap fishes.” This evocative, nostalgic voyage back in time welcomes the viewer to Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar’s heartrending, meditative, and deeply confessional culmination of his prolonged immersion in the waters of autofiction....

By the standard of the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, hell, even Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the new movie by Francis Ford Coppola feels slight, even a bit silly, but it’s exactly because of those films, because of that legacy that I love Tetro—every earnest, awkward, overwrought, and utterly unembarrassed moment of it. Destined to be met with condescension, it’s a quintessential Late Movie: intensely, intractably personal; sure of vision but unfashionably vulnerable; at once retrospective in content and forward-thinking in form; generous in spirit yet introverted in its obsessions; theatrical; gently hallucinated; out of time....

After sending up the Sixties spy genre in OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (06) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (09), writer-director Michel Hazanavicius now turns, with a deceptively carefree manner, to another world of glamour and treachery: Hollywoodland, as the sign still read in 1927-32, the years during which The Artist takes place. A film about the demise of silent cinema, and a wholly resonant love letter to the early history of cinema, this French production shot on old Hollywood studio lots is itself a (nearly) silent film, one that comes off as both respectfully authentic and playfully modern—Hazanavicius has certainly done his homework....

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a movie of firsts, if not especially auspicious ones. It is the only production to spread out a 300-page novel over three films that will total close to nine hours, necessitating a Part One script choked with exposition. Then there is the debut of the controversial 48 frames-per-second format in which director Peter Jackson shot the movie, which doubles the amount of information that normally passes before a viewer’s eyes....

Kitsch has so thoroughly enveloped Saturday Night Fever in the three decades since its release that the film’s ultimately despairing conclusions seem to have disappeared from view below a glittering disco-light pulse, as nostalgia discourages engagement with its actual narrative. Of course this despair was likely invisible even to much of its original audience. Tony Manero finds its protagonist, Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), haunting a rundown movie theater playing Saturday Night Fever, gazing up at the screen like a pilgrim in ecstasy, parroting words in a language he can’t actually speak, his body gyrating in carefully studied imitation of John Travolta’s disco-dancing fluidity....

The film opens with the arrival of sixty-something Vic (Pierrette Robitaille) at her new residence, her indisposed uncle’s inoperative sugar shack located in the densely forested boondocks of Quebec. Vic, it turns out, is free on parole from what was apparently a life sentence. (Spoiler: we never learn what she did to wind up in the joint.) Her parole officer, Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), is a highly patient but strict customer who alternates between trusting her and sternly cracking down on her various half-truths and ex-con mishegas....

Director Jim Mickle knows the shock value of consuming human flesh: within the first five minutes of his post-apocalyptic Stake Land (10), a creature snacks on a baby. His loose remake of Somos lo que hay, Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 movie about a Mexico City family of cannibals, is a more restrained effort that largely prioritizes dread over chaos. However, Mickle is careful to balance the tension with some truly stomach-churning set pieces....

The history of American independent cinema is speckled with isolated masterpieces, one-man movements, and temporary loose alliances, many with their roots in the streets of New York. The city has a record of inspiring first features modest in scope but rich in sympathy—from Little Fugitive to Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s debut feature. Gimme the Loot follows two teenage graffiti artists (Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson) as they scrounge up funds to make the tag of their careers—a goal that’s ultimately eclipsed in importance by the pair’s banter and prickly camaraderie, the feel of summer in the city, and the film’s view of youth....