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Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) 1962…1963…1964, Film Forum’s exhilarating, unconventional slice of mid-century cinema, is fresher than any retrospective of the American Movie Renaissance (roughly ’67 to ’75). In 1962, four years before Stanley Kauffmann dubbed the movie-weaned audience “The Film Generation” and a decade before America’s film-schooled “Movie Brats” (Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese) grabbed the world’s attention, moviemaking talent began popping up all over and moviegoing became a D....

Avatar Digital projection came as a blitzkrieg, and carried the day before most of us knew what was happening. “Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly?” Roger Ebert wrote in November, 2011, asking the question that much of film culture was two years anno Avatar. But the element of surprise is gone now, the trenches have been dug, and the surviving 35mm partisans, having lasted two long winters, are finally mounting an offense....

This shot stuck out to me while recently watching a badly aged, tomato soup–palette print of Sharky’s Machine, in part because of its unusual duration—it lasts around a minute, all said, lounge jazz tinkling all the way through—in part because of the extraordinary lengths that it goes to convey very little narrative information, other than emphasizing the physical fact of the Peachtree Plaza, its singular, imposing presence over the low-slung Atlanta skyline....

Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022) In James Gray’s films, autobiographical memory is frequently refracted, transfigured, and mined for its subterranean currents of desire and moral conflict. The resultant material is then, through the magic of real-deal, big-screen, old-school American moviemaking, alchemized into a latter-day form of tragedy structured around the impossibility of ever truly being able to go home again. But if the tragic internal logic of the family unit precludes the return to an idealized image of home, the hope of eventually making contact with a redemptive “outside” (as with the rumored golden city in Gray’s The Lost City of Z) lingers tantalizingly on the horizon in these movies....

Walter Pater’s famous claim that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” still reverberates within certain fusty circles, like some lost entry out of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas. Middlebrow absurdity for sure, but nonetheless a useful argument-starter for visitors to New York’s Park Avenue Armory this spring, where electronic composer and multimedia wizard Ryoji Ikeda commandeered the darkened, cavernous Drill Hall’s 55,000-square-foot space with the transfinite, his most accomplished work to date....

Familiarity breeds affection between an out-of-control 13-year-old Maori boy and a crusty old white bush hand—and between the movie and the audience—in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a rambunctious, beguiling comedy adventure about fugitives on the run in the New Zealand wilderness. Julian Dennison as Ricky Baker, the roly-poly problem child from foster care, and Sam Neill as Hec Faulkner, the illiterate loner with tip-top survival skills, generate a rare prickly warmth....

Let’s fantasize that in 1968, after the startling success of his televised comeback concert, Elvis Presley continued to recharge his music, stay trim and focused, and put on powerhouse performances. Let’s picture that, in addition to “adult rock” like his final #1 hit, “Suspicious Minds,” he recorded more songs that, while not exactly political, either spoke more directly to the times, like “In the Ghetto” (also released in 1969), or recognized his central position in U....

Flight “God help me,” mutters airline pilot “Whip” Whitaker at the climactic moment of truth in Robert Zemeckis’s Flight. Whip has been hailed as a hero for saving 96 “souls” by crash-landing his crippled plane, having pulled off a daring, decidedly nontextbook aerial maneuver while maintaining the calm professionalism of a heart surgeon. Whip also happens to be an alcoholic and drug user with a messiah complex who’s almost continuously under the influence from the first moment we see him until the film’s final minutes....

First & foremost: Stranded in Canton If you’re able, I’d recommend getting your hands on the DVD & watching it somewhere besides your laptop monitor, but go ahead & get yourself a taste of it here on YouTube first, I won’t tell. I first encountered clips of this footage in Michael Almereyda’s documentary William Eggleston in the Real World, and I was immediately transfixed. I’m sure I’d glancingly encountered Portapak footage before but something about this stuff gave me a powerful fantasy of trying to apply these aesthetics to narrative, which led eventually to Computer Chess....

Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020) Three years ago, 79 German filmmakers signed an open letter to the Berlin International Film Festival and its then-director Dieter Kosslick calling for a drastic reevaluation of its artistic vision and programming priorities. With signatories to the letter including Christian Petzold, Maren Ade, and Fatih Akin, it was only the latest in a series of broadsides against Kosslick and his team’s creative and administrative decisions, which contributed in no small part to the Berlinale’s diminished artistic reputation among the international film community over the course of Kosslick’s 19 years as festival head....

Moses and Aaron QUITE A LOT OF PENT-UP ANGER… January 3, 1994 Returning from a rather long journey, we found the first issue of Nuances, for which we thank you. Nowadays it is rare to read concrete, precise, documented—and impassioned—things. Thank you. But how depressing at the same time! In 1975 we did a tour of the USA, where we were invited because our film Moses and Aaron was playing at the New York Film Festival and some universities asked us to come with some films....

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer assesses the performances, self-presentations, and unconscious affects of Nixon, McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and Reagan as if he were auditing at the Actors’ Studio. Andrei Ujica’s mammoth documentary The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is grounded in exactly this kind of scrutiny, albeit from a bittersweet historical remove. Ujica plunges us straight into the public life of Ceausescu, without narration, lower thirds, or contextualization of any kind....

This speaks to the adventurousness of RIDM, a still very Quebecois showcase that has nevertheless widened and faceted since Executive Director Roxanne Sayegh’s arrival in 2010. But it also speaks to the current moment in documentary filmmaking, to days of shifting definitions, hybrid forms, and diversified financing, to a liberating split between the Sundance/HBO/Oscar-ready docs and everything/everyone/whatever else. Familiar forms were in effect at RIDM this year—via both stateside imports like Charles Bradley: Soul of America and Canadian films like Wavemakers—but unpredictable and organic shapes were more the rule, thanks to a strong slate of shorts, medium-length films, and features....

In the Romanian film Aferim!, an elderly traveling lawman, given to philosophizing, asks his son what he thinks people will say about them hundreds of years in the future, then provides his own answer: “Nothing.” It’s hard to argue with him, because the date is 1835, and these characters live in Wallachia—a historical region south of the Carpathians, which eventually became part of Romania. In other words, it’s a time and place that most of us know nothing about....

A publisher’s wronged wife suspiciously picks up a pair of discarded black lace panties from her husband’s office floor. We know they’re his secretary’s, but the publisher, without breaking stride, says with absolute sangfroid: “That cleaning woman always leaves her things around.” In fact Mathieu Amalric delivers these words with barely inflected impassivity, and the first thing that struck me on hearing them was how differently they would be delivered in any other film....