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Images from Libterté (Albert Serra, 2019) To others the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general people savor the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid. —Georges Bataille In Catalonian director Albert Serra’s Liberté, the spectacle of sexual transgression dressed in powdered wigs, petticoats, and corsets brings to mind the Marquis de Sade and his The 120 Days of Sodom....

At the start of Timur Bekmambetov’s grueling, chaotic Ben-Hur, Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) is a complacent Hebrew one-per-center in ancient Jerusalem, Messala Severus (Toby Kebell) is a red-blooded goy who joins the Roman army to see the world, and Ben-Hur’s beloved Esther (Nazanin Boniadi) is an early adopter of Christianity. By the time we get to the unlikely Kumbaya climax, we expect them to declare that they’re “stronger together.” Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, has already served as the source for one great action epic (directed by Fred Niblo in 1925) and a deluxe spectacle with a superb chariot race (directed by William Wyler in 1959, with the race by Andrew Marton)....

Coming at the tail end of the Young Adult dystopia craze, the movie franchise based on James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy is like the runt of the litter that grows into a sinewy hound. From the first film in 2014 to the current finale, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the director, Wes Ball, has stripped Dashner’s pop myth down to its satisfying teen-rebel essence. Its young heroes never stop asking, “What exactly are we doing here?...

This clear-eyed, kick-ass action movie traces the thin red line between sicario and soldado when a U.S. black-ops unit battles Mexican drug cartels that have made illegal immigration their top moneymaking racket. Sicario means hit man and soldado soldier. The first Sicario’s opening crawl linked sicario to the sicarii of ancient Judea, who slew occupying Romans with daggers hidden under cloaks. In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the sicarios are mostly the cartels’ hired guns and the soldados are American agents executing a stealth operation....

The Mark Twain quote that kicks off The Big Short, a bold and upsetting tragicomedy about the American economy, could serve as the epigraph to The Collected Works of Adam McKay: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” As the director and co-writer of brash, hilarious Will Ferrell epics like Talladega Nights and Anchorman, Adam McKay has functioned like a cross between a village idiot and a town crier, lampooning all-American masculine aggression by drilling down into the belly of the beast....

Two of Us (Filippo Meneghetti, 2019) Love’s in need of love today, and many titles at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed determined to safeguard it against all comers. Prime among these, and a tearjerker par excellence, Filippo Meneghetti’s debut feature Two of Us positions the long-term lesbian love between two aging apartment building neighbors as the last stronghold of true romance. The keepers of the flame are Nina and Madeleine—affectionately, “Mado”—played with committed passion by Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier....

Apples While they undoubtedly conjure associations with Eden and forbidden knowledge, apples in Czech culture are associated with good luck, and frequently appear in kraj, Easter egg, and needlepoint designs. (A Czech Christmas dinner tradition involves everyone slicing an apple down the middle. If the core is shaped like a star, it’s good luck; if it has four points, it means someone at the table will die within the next year....

Germany in Autumn I was a sophomore in college when I saw In a Year of 13 Moons for the first time, and it was my introduction to Fassbinder. The year prior I had excitedly highlighted David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s half-exalting, half-exasperated descriptions of his work in Film History: An Introduction; out of anything in its “Young German Film” section, the still from Germany in Autumn in which Armin Meier leans against Fassbinder, eyes turned towards him cherub-like, as the director makes a phone call, remained burned in my mind for a long time afterward....

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) A small moment in Apocalypse Now Redux captures the film’s ethos even better than any gruesome battle scene. During the French plantation sequence, Hubert, the owner’s son, upon hearing his family discussing their plan to remain in Vietnam, angrily stands up and… cracks an egg. Here lies the truth of all the conflicts between the West and Vietnam, he claims. “The white left, the yellow stay,” he shouts and leaves the table....

As Festival Director Dimitri Eipides notes in the program guide: “At the core of all the films, the glue that holds them together is always humanity.” And indeed, in addition to its usual impressive selection of retrospective tributes—Aki Kaurismäki, Cristian Mungiu, and the late Theo Angelopoulos among them—Thessaloniki, which ran from November 2 to 11, demonstrated an even deeper focus on personal, socially conscious independent film than in past editions....

The response was unprecedented, a testament to the breadth of film knowledge and tastes of our readership. Even the smart-asses were pretty creative: Of course, some people took the challenge seriously, as evidenced by their willingness to subject their prospective dates to some nontraditional romantic fare: — Nick Pinkerton (@NickPinkerton) February 14, 2014 — Jorge I. Castillo (@jicastillo) February 14, 2014 — Nick Pinkerton (@NickPinkerton) February 14, 2014 — The Doug (@douglenox) February 14, 2014 — Kate Hagen (@thathagengrrl) February 14, 2014 — Mark Garrett (@MarkRGarrett) February 14, 2014 — wolfbats (@wolfbats) February 14, 2014 — James McLallen (@ThyJamesMachine) February 14, 2014 — Will Sloan (@WillSloanEsq) February 14, 2014 — Ross Miller (@rosstmiller) February 14, 2014 — A1 Filmmaking Advice (@A1FilmAdvice) February 14, 2014 — lyndsey (@vvangoghs) February 14, 2014 — citizenrobot (@citizenrobot) February 14, 2014 — Jake Pitre (@jake_pitre) February 14, 2014 — Scott Beggs (@scottmbeggs) February 14, 2014 — brycerichardson (@brycerichardson) February 14, 2014 But what’s more serious than not sharing a sense of humor?...

Among highly regarded auteurs, France’s Bruno Dumont may command the least affection. It’s not because his films are severe; there are other filmmakers who cultivate extreme austerity yet invite viewers to partake of the bleakness in a way that’s somehow inclusive. That’s why it’s possible to emerge oddly elated from, say, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse—you feel pleasure at having shared a vision, however pessimistic. With Dumont, you suspect that he doesn’t give a damn whether you share his vision or not; there’s an often icy self-containment about his films, which in any case elude being pinned to any clear meaning....

The Israeli drama Incitement has all the makings of a tough, unnerving political thriller. It follows the events leading to the 1995 assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a young law student, Yigal Amir. An Orthodox Jew of extreme right-wing views, Amir—played in Yaron Zilberman’s film by Yehuda Nahari Halevi—objected to Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords, intended to bring peace to the Middle East. For the religious hard right to which Amir belonged, there could be no compromise with the Palestinians, no mitigation of what the ultra-Orthodox saw as a divinely accorded right to land, laid down in ancient scripture; for them, Rabin was pretty much the devil incarnate, and depicted as such in placards seen brandished in archive footage of anti-Rabin demos....

Images from Late Night (Nisha Ganatra, 2019) Late Night is a comedy about how things could and should be different, but it sometimes comes across more like a dramatized set of consultation proposals for implementing measures for difference. As a film about the business of comedy, it’s not that funny—which is a problem in a story about the challenge of being funny and staying funny in a changing world where humor, its targets, and its methods constantly have to change too....

Strange, isn’t it, how in films about haunted houses, the TV always seems at some point to be tuned to a station that’s showing old black-and-white cartoons about the Big Bad Wolf; I guess the Primal Fear Channel never stops broadcasting. This cliché can be forgiven in Australian chiller The Babadook, not least because writer-director Jennifer Kent is nodding so wryly at the convention and, through it, at another film that made its own pointed use of the wolf trope, The Shining....

Adebar A cold sort of ecstasy—that’s what he says his films are supposed to trigger. And they do. Anyone who’s ever seen the disturbingly immaculate works of Peter Kubelka in a theatrical setting will agree. In fact, that’s the only way you can see his films since there are no digital copies available, apart from those pirated YouTube clips, which don’t give you the faintest idea what Kubelka’s art is really about....