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Miss Bala, an English-language big-studio remake of an acclaimed 2011 movie from Mexico, provides the first feasible argument for our southern neighbor to pay for building a wall: to keep Hollywood hacks out of the country. An American director, Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight) and a consortium of producers, including Kevin Misher and, to his discredit, the producer of the original Miss Bala, Pablo Cruz, have manufactured a violent, insipid prototype for turning a harrowing yet sensitive foreign film into a stock melodrama—which these days, of course, means a gunstock melodrama, riddled with shootouts....

Darren Aronofsky’s mother! begins as another irritating psychodrama from the director of Black Swan, this time about a selfish poet (Javier Bardem) who mercilessly exploits his wife and muse (Jennifer Lawrence). It ends as another repulsive parable from the director of Noah about humans ravaging Mother Earth. Determined to be powerful and elemental, this movie doesn’t allow the characters to have names or even personalities. They’re Archetypes with a capital A....

If the hero of this rebooted franchise were a boy, he’d be nicknamed “Chip,” as in “chip off the old block.” Instead, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) affectionately calls his daughter Lara (Alicia Vikander) “Sprout,” as in “a young shoot (as from a seed or root).” Could she have lived up to a more vivacious moniker, like, say, “Sprite?” Maybe not. The filmmakers and Vikander devote themselves to bringing the glitzy “cyberbabe” of the original video games and two Angelina Jolie movies back to earth....

Extremos do prazer (Carlos Reichenbach, 1984) Screening at the Cinemateca Portuguesa (about as dreamy a place to imbibe cinema as one can hope for), Doclisboa’s renowned retrospectives are often dedicated to important auteurs who are little known outside their own countries. Recent editions cast a deserved spotlight on the likes of Colombia’s Luis Ospina and Italy’s Cecilia Mangini, and this year the festival presented the subversive oeuvre of the Brazilian Carlos Reichenbach....

CHRIS CHANG: What was the creative spark that led to two years, six cultural institutions, and one Bruce Posner restoring 11 minutes of film? In 2005, after putting together the Unseen Cinema film and DVD retrospectives, Manhatta was in constant demand. This was most evident with the art museums that wanted to present it alongside paintings and photographs by masters such as O’Keefe, Stieglitz, etc. In 2006, I was invited to a National Gallery of Art “thank you” dinner for people who loaned work to the “Charles Sheeler: Across Media” exhibition....

It was already exciting to learn that Too Much Johnson—the filmed prologues, designed to form part of the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 revival of William Gillette’s antique farce, that supposedly perished in a fire at Orson Welles’s villa in Spain—had been discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone and restored by the George Eastman House. More than that of any other filmmaker, Welles’s oeuvre trails off into films withheld from view, films unfinished, films lost or stolen or destroyed, and films not made at all....

Sweating Blood In 1997, security expert Gavin de Becker wrote The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. Based on years of studying domestic abuse situations and threats to public figures, de Becker’s book advocates for trusting intuition: we have the ability to pick up on certain warning signs better than animals do, for we have the gift of foresight, but all too often they get rationalized away....

Film critics are generally thought of as purists, only interested in established venues: cinemas, television, streaming platforms—places fit for the “high art” that they critique and discuss in considered reviews and tweets. But lately, I find myself (and I know other critics in the same boat) poring over YouTube videos, mostly with the intention of distracting or entertaining myself. Sometimes, though, I find something on these deep dives, something that connects to me more deeply than any film that I’ve seen recently....

9 Fingers With little hierarchy as to age, style, subject, or prestige, the selection of new and old films at the 70th Locarno Festival was one of its most pleasingly eclectic yet. In fact, the two retrospective programs—a complete survey of Hollywood genre journeyman Jacques Tourneur and a generous sampling of the defiantly difficult works of Jean-Marie Straub (on hand to receive the Pardo d’onore Manor for lifetime achievement)—work as convenient signposts to the festival’s curatorial philosophy and open-minded conception of cinema in all its forms, past and present....

Pilgrim Hill Galway’s new programmer, Gar O’Brien, gave voice to a new generation of Irish filmmakers who have produced a body of work that’s rougher, more authentic, and more distinctly Irish than in previous years. One of the most talked-about films was Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations. The husband-and-wife team dramatized the true story of Terri Hooley, the creator of Belfast’s Good Vibrations music store and record label that helped propel punk bands such as the Undertones onto the international stage in the Seventies....

After watching Pablo Larraín’s Neruda, I’m not sure that I know much more about the film’s subject than I did before—and I knew next to nothing. I was aware that Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet, a Nobel laureate, and an icon of the left. I now know that he was a Communist senator who was driven into hiding when his party was outlawed; that he had to flee Chile by crossing the Andes; that he was famous, and much adored, for the exaggeratedly romantic manner in which he recited his poems in public; and that he had a penchant for fancy dress parties and cavorting naked with female admirers....

As it celebrates its tenth anniversary with its fifth series entry, Universal’s Fast and the Furious franchise should rightly be regarded as one of the more reliable popcorn pleasures of recent years—and also, like the Harry Potter films, that rare long-legged franchise that has actually gotten better with age. A revved-up, nitrous-boosted makeover of the hot-rod movies of the Fifties and Sixties, the first Fast and the Furious (borrowing the title, though not the plot, from a 1955 Roger Corman quickie) followed undercover Los Angeles cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) as he infiltrated an elite underworld of high-octane street racers, only to end up befriending one of his suspects—the blue-collar tough Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel)—and falling for Toretto’s comely sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster)....

The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021) My first unresolved question about The Souvenir, that I hoped might be answered in its sequel, concerned a far-leftist terrorist plot: was the mysterious Anthony (Tom Burke) involved in anti-Thatcher political activities resembling tactics of the Provisional IRA, which bombed a Harrods department store in 1983? Hadn’t 25-year-old Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) glanced out the window of her apartment at one point, holding the curtain open, to see a building in flames?...

The Wizard Of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) The following abridged excerpt comes from the book Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe (published by Columbia University Press). In the book, Street and Yumibe show how color sensibilities and industries developed in relation to cinema’s rise at a key moment in history, digging into the meaning and making of color as we know it, from a deeply grounded perspective....

Boris Barnet’s magical 1936 By the Bluest of Seas is one of the glories of Soviet cinema and, despite the director’s slowly growing reputation, unfortunately still too little known. The simple story concerns two friends, a mechanic and a sailor, shipwrecked and washed up at a collective farm/fishing community on the coast of Azerbaijan, who vie for the attentions of a young woman. The film has an out-of-time fable-like quality and shifts tone in a carefree, almost reckless, way....

A highway can be a dead-end street. Witness Zehra (Neslihan Atagül), a Turkish teenager who works double shifts at a truck stop and comes home to a fiercely protective mom who tries to keep her on a tight leash. Adolescent co-worker Olgun (Baris Hacihan) makes clumsy romantic overtures, but his greatest ambition, to be selected to appear on a TV game show, makes him a less-than-impressive suitor. Zehra’s eye falls on a rugged long-hauler twice her age—and through a lovely match cut from her rubbing her sore neck in the kitchen to him doing the same on the road, director Yesim Ustaoglu suggests that their union is almost fated....

When belligerent loan-shark Sang-Hoon (Yang Ik-joon) first encounters Yeon-Hue (Kim Kot-bi)—a high-school senior who looks young enough to be his daughter—it isn’t exactly a textbook example of “meet cute.” He spits on her—and then knocks her lights out. This happens shortly after the film’s opening sequence, in which he establishes himself as a reprehensible, equal-opportunity sadist with an exemplary flair for gratuitous misogyny. And while Yeon-Hue looks the part of a well-behaved Korean schoolgirl, she turns out to be no shrinking violet either....

A world premiere at the True/False Film Fest, The Hottest August holds up New York circa August 2017 for a kaleidoscopic look by the light of a burning world. Director Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) beads together conversations and curiosities across the five boroughs, people and places shadowed by economic anxieties and buoyed by coping methods. A poised voiceover, à la Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai, introduces the endeavor with a clinical air—and then two union guys say hi and answer questions from the second-story window of a house....

Nearing the third decade of their collaboration that began with 1990’s Life Is Sweet, Mike Leigh and Dick Pope continue to be one of modern cinema’s most ingenious and multifaceted director-cinematographer pairs. In Peterloo, their follow-up to the lavishly realized Mr. Turner (2014)—a portrait of the idiosyncratic 19th-century painter—they rise to the challenge of reconstructing a neglected event that has left its scar on the British collective consciousness. The most costly undertaking of Leigh’s career, the three-hour historical movie was commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, the government crackdown of a democracy rally in Manchester’s St....