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Long the elusive Holy Grail for Fuller fanatics, China Gate—the two-fisted filmmaker’s magnificently CinemaScopic pre–Vietnam War mini-epic, “dedicated to France”—throws the director’s career-long concerns (racism, war, the simple valor and ugly stupidity of folks everywhere) into extraordinary relief. A concussion grenade of “oriental” eye makeup and endless gams, Angie Dickinson incinerates the screen as the Eurasian bargirl/smuggler extraordinaire “Lucky Legs,” determined to send her illegitimate son to America, and unwilling to let either the boy’s racist father Sgt....

Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994) If we’re lucky, we will encounter a handful of artworks in our lives that hit us like thunderbolts, which communicate something true about the world we live in but which also instantly open up new avenues of awareness and understanding about the medium in which they function. Such eureka moments for me include the first time I saw Matisse’s The Piano Lesson, heard Debussy’s “Arabesque,” or the second time I read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse....

The Round-Up First manifest in The Round-Up (65), Jancsó’s boldly stylized film language appeared to be a synthesis of Antonioni (elegant widescreen compositions, austere allegorical landscapes), Bresson (impassive performers, exaggerated sound design), and Welles (convoluted tracking shots, intricately choreographed ensembles), even as his free-floating existential attitudes and “empty world” iconography evoked the theater of the absurd, albeit without the laughs. Jancsó’s subject or, rather, his prison, was history. His narratives recalled the literature of extreme situations-pivoting on cryptic betrayals, mapping the seizure of power, dramatizing the exercise of terror- and his politics were ambiguously left, perhaps crypto-Trotskyist....

More often than not, the actual experience of growing older is not accruing more responsibilities, respect, or knowledge, but being let down by the things that you love the most. And, for those adults whose tastes skew towards the far too silly, such disappointments are especially bitter when dealing with the lackluster partial reunion of a certain legendary British sketch-comedy troupe. Directors Bill Jones (son of Terry Jones), Jeff Simpson, and Ben Timlett have paired recordings of long-deceased Monty Python member Graham Chapman reading his wry, pseudo-memoir A Liar’s Autobiography with the work of 14 different animation studios....

First let’s consider the poster. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, in walk-and-talk formation, superimposed onto the soft poetics of a colored pencil illustration. Krasinski looks easygoing and affable, wearing a green army jacket and sporting a beard and glasses. Maya Rudolph is pregnant and glancing lovingly at her “good guy.” There’s an element of wonder and fantasy. A car winding down a road. Rain falling from a pastel cloud. An orange tree....

This good-natured yet foul-mouthed comedy of freaks, geeks, and the women who love them will inevitably draw comparisons to The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. The faces are familiar, the thematic material isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and the writer-director, John Hamburg, is an Apatow alum having directed episodes of TV’s Undeclared. But this unpretentious crowd-pleaser is still punchy enough to send packed theaters reeling in riotous laughter—and hey, isn’t that what studio comedies are supposed to do?...

Oskar is a melancholic 12-year-old so drawn to violence that he keeps a scrapbook of newspaper crime-reports and, with knife in hand, privately acts out imaginary revenge scenarios on the boys who bully him at school. The ethereally pale blond, perfectly embodied by newcomer Kåre Hedebrant, may well be a serial killer in the making but he also longs for the sympathy his estranged parents fail to give him. He meets his emotional counterpart (and physical opposite—her dark features a striking contrast to his light) with new next-door neighbor Eli—that’s Ell-ie—played by Lina Leandersson, in an equally dazzling debut....

For years now writer-director Neil LaBute has taken body shots from critics who find his work misogynistic, chauvinistic, and downright cynical. But whether you believe LaBute to be slyly affirming that “boys will be boys,” or exposing modern male narcissism, Some Girl(s), directed by Daisy von Scherler, will leave you opinionated. And if noise (critics, blogs, enraged viewers) can be a kind of currency, LaBute continues here to cash in....

What ensues is more unnerving than the antics of your average Coen Brothers buffoon and yet reminiscent of how Burn After Reading’s proceedings were shadowed by burned-out desperation. Prone to Nicholson Baker–caliber internal monologues about polar bear noses and imaginary TV shows, Whitacre could simply be peculiar, mentally off, or, in his blinkered, self-interested, and nutty way, only human. But just possibly, he’s crazy like a fox. Well-compensated by his employers for his expertise, he lives comfortably with his devoted straight-shooter wife in bucolic Illinois, not far from work, and takes business trips to places like Paris and Zurich....

A fictionalized tribute to Jiro Horikoshi, the brilliant engineer responsible for many of Japan’s World War II fighter planes (including the Zero, which was used in the attack on Pearl Harbor), The Wind Rises paints a portrait of a man preternaturally attuned to the principles of beautiful design as they manifest in the world around him. Fascinated with flight since childhood, but prevented from becoming an aviator by his poor eyesight, Jiro decides to focus his talents on aeronautics....

A Dadaist delight, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers is a direct descendant of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, perhaps the first and only. Times have changed, and the spectacle of an orgy of the impotent, enacted by performers behaving like three-year-olds who’ve just discovered their penises and are excited to a frenzy by mindless acts of destruction repeated ad infinitum, may not pack the transgressive punch it once did, but the near-perfect balance of boredom and exhilaration can’t be denied....

From the foreboding title, on through the funereal pallor of DP Bradford Young’s visuals, the mournfulness of Alex Ebert’s score, and the look of dread or resignation on the face of every character, A Most Violent Year is nothing if not tonally consistent. Oscar Isaac makes good on his career-igniting turn in Inside Llewyn Davis by channeling primo Pacino in the vulnerably cocky comportment of Abel Morales, an immigrant entrepreneur whose ambitions are beginning to conflict with his scruples in 1981 New York....