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Throughout Song to Song, the latest film by Terrence Malick, movie people play music people trying to act authentic and impulsive. Motivated by Malick’s late career interest in capturing life on the fly—one glimpsed, gestured, magical moment at a time—Michael Fassbender gallops after seagulls as if he were a hunchbacked ape, Ryan Gosling leans so far back on a chair that he falls backwards, later tromping through a puddle on a scenic mountaintop to apprehend Rooney Mara, who eludes him, flashing back with a coy grin....

Wasteland No. 2: Hardy Hearty (Jodie Mack, 2019) With nine lucidly interwoven programs of short and medium-length films, the eighth edition of the Art of the Real festival, entitled “Counter Encounters,” brings together iterations of ethnographic cinema that subvert the power dynamics of the tradition. While historically ethnographic nonfiction aimed to “explain” cultures and peoples, creating an illusion of its subjects’ transparency, the visual techniques on display in “Counter Encounters” complicate and disrupt our modes of reception....

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963) Last summer, two films came together for me by purest coincidence: I caught Ben Sinclair’s Criterion video in which he discusses the films he loves, and received the dispiriting news of the death of Max von Sydow. Of the Sinclair faves I chose Bad Timing (1980), a Nicholas Roeg film I’d never seen. Labeled by Rank, its distributor, as “a sick film for sick people,” and X-rated in its limited American release, the film tells the lurid story of a psychiatrist (Art Garfunkel) obsessed with a neurotic woman (Theresa Russell) he loves and tortures (and is tortured by), until finally he rapes her comatose body after she tries to kill herself....

From the pitiful (or is that pitiless?) opening of Riley Stearns’s debut feature, in which Ansel Roth is forcibly ejected from a hotel restaurant after proffering an expired breakfast coupon, you may dismiss him as a wormy cheapskate. The lecture on cults he then delivers in a small conference room raises our suspicions that he’s also a huckster, hawking his book. The well-worn suit and ferrety, hunted look don’t help....

The premise sounds like a horror flick: a teenage girl is forced by an esoteric cult into marrying her dead sister’s husband. Except that in this case the “cult” happens to be the ultra-orthodox Jewish sect to which the girl and her family belong. In this world, a prearranged union is not only commonplace, it’s a duty that some women actually look forward to fulfilling. Director Rama Burshtein’s debut is nothing less than astonishing....

The Devil Wears Prada meets Diabolique as re-imagined by Claude Chabrol—with a musical score by saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders? Well, not exactly. Except, oddly enough, for the bit about Pharoah Sanders. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Christine, a cutthroat agribusiness exec who shamelessly takes the credit for the savvy money-making ideas devised by her seemingly innocuous gal Friday, Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier). Although a certain sexual tension grows palpable between the two women, it’s actualized by Philippe (Patrick Mille), Christine’s ostensible boyfriend, whom she is more than willing to share with Isabelle....

Over the last decade, Kirby Dick, along with collaborator Amy Ziering, have worked so intently within an investigative, truth-to-institutional-power mode, that they’ve developed their own documentary subgenre: call it Outrage Cinema (echoing the title of his 2009 exposé of closeted conservatives). These films are less interested in storytelling than in gathering mounds of testimony and snappy visual graphics, and building toward an argument for systemic change; Dick’s cinema is an agent, not an end....

Along with “smart,” “Hitchcockian,” and “awesome,” “surreal” is one of the most misapplied and overused adjectives in film criticism. It will almost certainly be misused to describe Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s second feature, even though his visually accomplished oeuvre (whose motifs include deserts, aggressively idiotic police officers, pizza, and people pretending to do things) is decidedly Dada. Less consistently funny than Rubber (11), Wrong (which is powered by a fantastic synth soundtrack) tells the story of Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick) who wakes up one morning to find his dog missing....

8 1/2 Tired of that wonky, tackily ad-infested Internet Movie Database never telling you what you really want to know? Never fear—there are other search sites full of esoteric yet vital information. Finally you can find films and filter results according to your deepest desires and strongest interests. The winner, hands down, for “most tears saved” is doesthedogdie.com. Organized into categories of harm inflicted on animals in films—dead, hurt but alive, just fine—the site provides short synopses indicating both faked and actual deaths....

There are even suitably Rivettian intimations of behind-the-scenes co-conspiracy—though certainly not, in this case, maleficent. The site has brought its founders into contact with other ardent devotees, many of whom know Rivette’s work only through video. Readers have become contributors, happily driven to transcribe, compile, or translate material, thereby adding to the site’s stripped-down yet well-organized database. “But we’re not archivists collecting everything. Selection is key to what we do,” emphasizes Stuyck, currently attending the graduate film-production program at the University of Texas, Austin....

Danny Says “If I went to see an artist now, I would say, ‘Well, I really like you and I’ll work with you, but you’ll only be rich and famous in 40 years,” Danny Fields, the subject of Brendan Toller’s cheeky documentary portrait, told FILM COMMENT in an interview. If you didn’t know Fields from Adam, after watching Danny Says you might notice him eerily materializing in pictures you have seen a hundred times before, right next to Andy Warhol and Lou Reed or Iggy Pop and Joey Ramone....

The Barefoot Contessa The tagline for the 1954 drama The Barefoot Contessa, starring Ava Gardner in the title role, was “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal!” Beauty is as beauty does—it did quite a lot for Gardner, and quite a lot to her—but there’s something curiously deliberate in the choice of “animal,” beyond the ordinary press kit purple prose. It gestures at her feral nature, her untamable spirit. Gardner was arguably the earthiest of all the golden age stars, and her duality of coarseness and glamour made her one of the most compelling....

Blues in the Night was released in a sweet spot just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor (22 days prior, to be precise), when studio/government saber-rattling was ramped up but before American war entry, when rah-rah propaganda to support the effort became nearly obligatory. The timing might help explain the film’s loose-leash oddness—the unique mashing of genres (noir, musical, melodrama) that makes it close to sui generis. There are later films that amalgamated musical and noir elements, including The Hard Way (also featuring Jack Carson), To Have and Have Not, with its swell Hoagy Carmichael tunes, Gilda, Glory Alley, et al....

“There are many reasons for accepting a movie,” Sidney Lumet wrote in his indispensable guidebook-cum-memoir Making Movies. “What’s important is that the material involve me personally on some level. And the levels will vary.” But he hastens to add: “Long Day’s Journey Into Night is everything one can hope for. Four characters come together and leave no area of life unexplored.” It’s a tribute to Lumet’s drive and stamina—and, frankly, to his courage—that five years into his big-screen career, the most exhaustively confessional work by America’s poet laureate of the shattered soul was everything he could have hoped for....

The Magnificent Ambersons The night of August 9 in this year’s “Summer of the Stars” at TCM boasts a mighty one-two punch at the top of the bill: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, followed by The Magnificent Ambersons. Then comes Gregory La Cava’s breezy Fifth Avenue Girl, and finally, Edward Dmytryk’s delirious Hitler’s Children. Who ties these wildly disparate films together? Tim Holt, the soft-faced, soft-spoken actor whose career was made up of B Westerns on the one hand, and on the other, a handful of starring and supporting roles in some of the greatest American films ever made....

The following list (with Flaubert’s Dictionnaire as its model) is intended only as a frivolous skirmish well in the margin of that civil war of critical methodologies currently being waged between auteurist Cavaliers and structuralist Roundheads, dedicated respectively to upholding and dethroning the King, or Author. Possessing neither the former’s tastes nor the latter’s discipline, I offer here a selection of idées reçues which continue to plague serious film journals, of whatever persuasion or pretention; others to be found in fan magazines, newspaper review sections and “informed” conversation; and all of which I, personally, am sick to death of....

On our latest episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, critics Guy Lodge and Adam Piron join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to share their reactions to two of the most buzzy recent premieres—Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Sean Baker’s Anora—before offering some personal recommendations for deserving films that aren’t getting the same hype treatment, including Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, Carson Lund’s Eephus, and Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In....

Tune in for more Film Comment fun at the New York Film Festival with our Filmmakers Chat director showcase on Saturday, October 5th, and our critics wrap-up on Wednesday, October 9, both free events at Film at Lincoln Center.