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The opening image of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method is of a woman screaming her head off, her face pressed against the window of a careening horse-drawn carriage. She is 17-year-old Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whose amazing real-life story is the focus of this poignant, witty, intellectual adventure movie, an inquiry into the early years of psychoanalysis and the fraught father-son relationship between its all-too-human pioneers, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender)....

It is sometimes said that work makes man noble. Yet after immersing himself into present-day China’s coal mines and steel mills, Zhao came to the same conclusion as philosopher Simone Weil and bourgeois saint Irene Girard from Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51: workers are little more than doomed convicts on the assembly line. Zhao means this quite literally, as Behemoth allegorizes the condition of workers under Chinese socialism by adapting Dante’s vision of a journey across Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven....

Anna May Wong (Photo by Ray Jones/Kobal/Shutterstock) “I really thought that I was finished with filmmaking. I was getting bored with it. I thought that I would end up writing another novel, and then I got interested in the whole Netflix thing and the idea of a streaming series . . . I generally don’t watch movies in a cinema at all. Netflix is the future. It’s the present.” For The Globe and Mail, maybe-ex-filmmaker David Cronenberg sat down to talk about cinema’s past and future, his own influence on the medium, and the end of the “so-called Cronenberg canon....

Though some predicted that The Image Book may be Jean-Luc Godard’s final film, at age 88 the French-Swiss pioneer is already planning his next project: a story centered on the Yellow Vest protests and inspired by Jean Racine’s play Bérénice. “It won’t be made just of what you call archival images. There will also be a shoot,” Godard said in an interview with Les Inrockuptibles. “I don’t know whether I’ll find what one calls actors....

Rip Torn in A Stranger is Watching (Sean S. Cunningham, 1982) David Fincher is set to direct a biopic depicting the life of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. The film, currently titled Mank, will star Gary Oldman in the leading role, with Netflix taking production reigns. Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher, wrote the script. (Recent FC archives offer three great Fincher-related reads: two interviews by Amy Taubin, one from 2009 and another from 2014, as well as this 1999 piece by Gavin Smith on Fight Club....

With Zama’s distinctive adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s novel about a Spanish conquistador in 18th-century South America, Lucrecia Martel confronts what has always been a spectral presence in her work: the colonial history of Argentina. For her next project, Martel will explore the present-day manifestations of this history through a documentary about Javier Chocobar, an indigenous Argentinian activist murdered in 2009 over a land dispute. María Alché, who played the lead role in Martel’s sophomore film The Holy Girl (2003), is co-writing the project....

Beau Travail In the films of Claire Denis, intimacy between people is a constant, insoluble problem. Her characters have to either structure their lives around avoiding the company of others (The Intruder), concentrate all their pent-up sexual energies into bursts of ritualized behavior (Beau Travail), devote themselves so fully to another person that they don’t know how to share their beloved’s attention (35 Shots of Rum), or, perhaps most dramatically, sublimate the urge to eat the one they love at the cost of showing any affection (Trouble Every Day)....

Princess Mononoke The Japanese eco-fantasist Hayao Miyazaki is an animation magician, a crowd-pleasing storyteller who is also a builder of worlds. He designs meticulously engineered imaginary aircraft, sets their perfect gears spinning, and propels them over moss-green rolling landscapes, zipping between the sprung columns of ruined castles. He uses animation in a refreshingly direct and intuitive way, reveling in its capacity to lift things off the ground. Miyazaki rarely resorts to computer graphic imagery....

This is a man—6’2/1 and a couple hundred pounds—who wants to be liked but sits anywhere he wants to. And before you ask what’s that got to do with his filmmaking, stop to consider his brief directing career, as it arrives at The Princess Bride. Spinal Tap First comes Spinal Tap in 1984. It is, as he calls it, a “close to the bone” cut that satirizes more than rock-‘n-roll culture....

The Tree of Life made the top of Film Comment and Sight & Sound’s list, and was the most mentioned film by reviewers around the country. (Three of the top four films on the Film Comment and Sight & Sound lists are the same.) I am left, to the amazement of my friends, unmoved. I have never seen a Terrence Malick film that was not beautiful, and I have never seen a Terrence Malick film that was wholly satisfying....

Courtesy of The Visible Press The Afterimage Reader Edited by Mark Webber, The Visible Press, 2022 If the 1960s ushered in new approaches to cinema, the decade was no less impactful for film criticism. Yet here in the United States, audiences are more likely to know the films of Kijû Yoshida, Glauber Rocha, and Harun Farocki than the names of the magazines they wrote for. In light of this, the appearance of The Afterimage Reader, published last May, is very welcome....

As many critics have noted, Claire Denis’s work has been drifting toward a “musical” abstraction for some time now. Kent Jones has compared her to Ornette Coleman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum to Charlie Parker, though I don’t find much in her films as deliberately disruptive and dissonant as the work of those two great jazz innovators. Her films seem more in tune (literally) with the smooth, seductive pop jazz sensibilities of the group Tindersticks, which has scored her Nénette and Boni (96), Trouble Every Day (01), and now 35 Shots of Rum....

When John Eleuthère du Pont was arrested for murder in the mid-Nineties, the press described him as off his rocker. The multimillionaire heir to part of the vast chemical empire had styled himself “the Dalai Lama of America” and once showed up at a neighboring family’s house in an Army-issue tank to ask if the husband “could come out and play.” But, as du Pont in Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s filming of this grim tale, Steve Carell isn’t nearly so flashy....

Desire—especially in the 19th-century novel—is never simple. Complicated by rigid social mores, relationships are rarely bilateral, and passion is frequently paired with deceit. Emile Zola’s scandal-rich 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is no exception. Adapted for the theater by Zola himself in 1873, the story has seen many reincarnations on both stage and screen, the latest of which is Charlie Stratton’s debut feature, In Secret. In spite of the rather trite title and a hazy poster image that resembles a harlequin romance cover, In Secret imbues Zola’s dark tale of love, lust, and murder in the lower echelons of Paris with modern-day appeal in large part thanks to its stellar principal cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, and Oscar Isaac....

A big-screen treatment of Broadway deity Stephen Sondheim’s fractured 1987 fairy tale Into the Woods would seem a no-brainer, even in our notably anti-musical era. Mainstream cinema is now sufficiently postmodern (and post-Shrek) to make Sondheim’s once radical conceit—the intermingling of a handful of iconic Grimm stories, driven by characters wise enough to control their own fates and thus subvert the narrative contraptions in which they find themselves—seem like just another self-reflexive night at the movies....

As the bits of bone and flesh continue to rain down on Los Angeles in Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths—by the pool, in the cancer ward, under the Hollywood sign—a strange calm creeps into the story despite the ratcheting chaos. As bushy-browed and alcoholic screenwriter Marty (Colin Farrell) is drawn deeper into the unexpected consequences of a dognapping perpetrated by buddies Billy (Sam Rockwell) and Hans (Christopher Walken), the story zigs and zags in dubious patterns that should leave moviegoers confused, albeit visually satiated....

Alert the genre police: Leviathan is the best horror film of the year. In public remarks, co-directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have admitted, like proud Frankenstein parents, the difficulties they’ve had with classifying their creation. In an interview in The New York Times, Castaing-Taylor proclaimed: “It is utterly a documentary . . . But it also doesn’t feel like a documentary to me. It feels more like a horror film or science fiction....