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A brief hiccup early in Palo Alto resonates throughout Gia Coppola’s debut film, at least for habitués of American teen-angst classics. High-school virgin April (a luminous Emma Roberts, daughter of Eric, niece of Julia) is babysitting for her ominously hunky soccer coach Mr. B (James Franco), watching TV with his young son. The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” emanates from the speakers, heralding that primal scene of late-century premium cable: Phoebe Cates’s slo-mo breast-baring in Fast Times at Ridgemont High....

With the exception of Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect, male-centered comedies have continued to hold sway at the studios. The Heat, Paul Feig’s follow-up to Bridesmaids, achieves a feat not attempted until now: an all-female buddy cop movie that, for all its flaws, amounts to one of the ballsier attempts at the genre. Women have always had a place in the buddy-cop genre, but not an admirable one; usually they’re half-naked femmes fatales or damsels in distress....

The paradox of Jules Dassin’s career is as painful as it is familiar. As a wage slave for the Hollywood studios, he turned out an unbroken series of sharp, vivid, profoundly pessimistic films rooted in the rediscovered realism of the postwar years (e.g., Brute Force, 47, Thieves’ Highway, 49). As a free agent in Europe, driven abroad by the blacklist, he seemed at first to be picking up where he left off (Rififi, 55) but soon lost his way with glum, self-serious literary adaptations (He Who Must Die, 57; Phaedra, 62; 10:30 P....

It seems that the fundamental flaw of music documentaries made up of more talking heads than live performance is that they put life and legend before music. Taking their cues from Pare Lorentz and Ken Burns, these types of docs employ an unapologetically didactic approach to their audiences: “This band was the first to…,” “This band changed history,” “You’re now part of the club that understands their importance.” (In the worst cases, you’ll get a Behind the Music–style bloodletting and recitations of the mantra, “Life is really, really, really hard....

That one of the most consistently amusing and enlivening movies to emerge from 2011’s crop of festival films should have been made by a filmmaker under house arrest, his hands pretty much tied, his budget nil and equipment minimal, just goes to prove that you can’t keep a good man down. I stress the playful charm of This Is Not a Film by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb because the circumstances surrounding this singular work (and most attempts to describe it) inevitably portend something grimmer....

Denis has been weaving more or less explicit self-critiques into her films since at least 2001’s polarizing Trouble Every Day. The difference is that where Bastards finds her impressionistic, hyper-tactile aesthetic willfully hemmed in, Trouble Every Day suggests what happens when it’s allowed to run amok. Denis’s films have always been shot through with a current of menace just waiting to be made explicit: it’s present in their off-balance close-ups, faintly unstable camera moves, obsessive attention to the texture of hair, clothes, and skin, and habit of letting the camera slide caressingly around actors’ bodies when they’re at their least self-conscious and most exposed....

No film captures the glittering, zombified world of yé-yé pop royalty with as much style as Marc’O’s 1968 musical Les Idoles. Seen today, this flamboyant tale of complicity and revolt yields multifaceted readings—as backstage drama, as denunciation of consumer capitalism, and as the historical record of a crucial meeting between commercial auteurism and the avant-garde. Think of it as an all-singing, all-dancing missing link between the melancholy pop fantasy of Godard’s Masculin-Féminin and the aerial views and blank screens of Guy Debord’s Critique de la separation....

One of the more concrete things in Jennifer Baichwal’s often mystifying new doc is the title: Act of God. It sounds concrete—sort of for sure—but it’s also misleading. The film’s ostensible subject is people who’ve been struck by lightning. The topic automatically prompts associations with a supreme being, particularly among the film’s interviewees who’ve had the good fortune to survive the experience. (As the old saw goes, it’s much easier to believe in Hell once you’ve been there....

The fall of the Soviet Union remains relatively underrepresented in theatrically released documentary, considering the importance of the event, the wealth of material, and the range of possible angles. In her feature-length contribution to the topic, Robin Hessman assembles five Muscovites and lets them reflect on their lives, past and present, as witnesses to massive political, cultural, and societal change. Buoyed by Communist kitsch and the engaging personalities of its subjects, it’s an appealingly personal look at what from a distance seemed like monolithic changes....

In the absurd opener to Damián Szifrón’s six-episode collection of scabrous stories, the passengers and crew of an airplane coincidentally discover that they share a connection with and dislike of the same individual—who happens to be the pilot. It’s a hilarious worst-case-scenario of comeuppance—what could happen if you were left entirely at the mercy of a person you’d wronged—but it’s only the first in a series of tales that’s about more than just throwing up in your hands in despair at a collapsing nation....

Current online editor David Velasco tells FC that “the magazine’s and the website’s film coverage are relatively independent beasts.” The site gives space to a wider range of subjects and more reflections from a welcome roster of critical voices including James Quandt, Amy Taubin, Malcolm Turvey, Arthur Danto, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ed Halter, Andrew Hultkrans, and Brian Sholis. In its effort to build a more robust Web presence, Artforum’s pristinely designed outpost places the cinema beat alongside a news digest, an ample collection of video and film works gathered from other online venues, and the Scene & Herd diary, which catches the eye with photos from a plethora of exhibition openings and parties....

The lowest level is a true wonder, recalling a 2-D version of Marker’s installation Zapping Zone. Haphazardly piled on the floor, monolithic screens stream belts of images—surreal collages of iconic paintings infiltrated by technological absurdity. The attendees of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe idly channel surf, while Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is intruded upon by a surface-to-air missile. Marker’s career has long anticipated the age of new media, the fraying infinities of images composing and confounding the visible world and our status within it....

It was a pleasure to experience on the big screen the newly minted version of this proto-minimalist masterpiece, in which people eat, drink, play music and reminisce. Its gently mocking humor and keen eye for the minutiae of human behavior got me wondering if Jim Jarmusch, whose latest film Paterson I had watched the day before, had been directly or indirectly influenced by it. Ivan Passer was one of the Czech New Wave directors who emerged in the mid-60s during the short-lived social and cultural democratization in Czechoslovakia that afforded filmmakers unprecedented artistic freedom....

Certain Women Twenty-seven years of “Sundancing”—did I really write that?—has taught me to prepare. Check the 10-day weather forecast: more clouds than sun, light snow most days, two nights of 10-degree chill, but otherwise fairly comfortable days in the mid-30s and nights in the low-20s. Download the program; make a schedule even if you know you’ll remake it every day; RSVP for conferences, panels, and parties (Women’s Brunch already wait-list only); and, if you live in New York or L....

I arrive in Park City, Utah. This will be the 12th Sundance I’ve been to since 1999. As I check into the shuttle service to take me to where I’m staying, they cheerfully hand me a cute hand sanitizer gift, because this year is FluDance apparently. I’m just as paranoid as everyone I know about coming here sick or getting sick while I’m here, hitting the Airborne like fizzy-in-your-drink crack for the past five days before departing and using hand sanitizer like the lady from those old Palmolive commercials: “You’re soaking in it....

When a pop culture luminary dies, the media tends to “print the legend”—to quote the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—but in only an abstract form. Too many facts might cloud our vision of our white knights. But what happens when the great man was a heel? In The Great Man, that’s the conundrum facing Joe Harris (Jose Ferrer), a reporter tasked with assembling a crowd-pleasing tribute to renowned broadcaster Herb Fuller after his sudden death....

Unfolding like a spiraling, intoxicated dream, Spring Breakers is a vision of American pop culture’s progeny running amok. It’s a surreal fantasy that ranks among recent cinema’s most memorable visions of Hell. Drawing inspiration from several ongoing narratives in contemporary American life, Harmony Korine’s fifth feature mines what Norman Mailer once characterized as “the subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, the concentration of ecstasy and violence that is the dream life of the nation....

We caught up with Joanna while she was in New York for the festival, while Honor joined the conversation from Edinburgh via Zoom. Our lively chat touched upon the film’s layered approach to autobiography, its precisely contrived naturalism, and how the film’s soundtrack draws from Hogg’s memories of youth. Stay tuned for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast and in the Film Comment Letter....

Over the past few years, Film Comment has established our own annual tradition of previewing the best movies in the New Directors/New Films lineup with local critics. This time around, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by Vadim Rizov and Beatrice Loayza for a rundown of some of the gems in the 2023 edition, including Earth Mama, Arnold Is a Model Student, Safe Place, The Face of the Jellyfish, and more....

A special thanks to HBO, the presenting partner of all NYFF Talks.