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Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022) Earlier this year, the clever lads at Chapo Trap House offered up a modest proposal for James Cameron: notwithstanding his having been born in Canada (a country whose rugged natural splendor and community-minded healthcare policies rival, to my mind, those of Pandora itself), the director should consider running for President of the United States. “I would trust him with the absolute power of a temporary, Cincinnatus-style dictatorship,” co-host Matt Christman declared....

The reference is to a 1998 film, the first and to date only feature directed by music video visionary Hype Williams, which begins with a blacklight-lit, slo-mo heist. It needs be said that the borrowing goes two ways here: early in Belly, stick-up men Tommy Bunds (DMX), Sincere (Nas), and their partners in crime cool down after a job in Tommy’s immaculate house in posh Jamaica Estates. For a little late-night entertainment, Tommy throws on Korine’s 1997 directorial debut Gummo, which plays for the boys on his big-screen projector....

A man wearing a richly brocaded smoking jacket lowers his magnifying glass, and closes the vellum volume he was inspecting. The sound of Schubert’s Winterreise, playing on a hand-cranked phonograph, softly suffuses the room. Can I get you a Port? A Calvados? He pours himself a brandy, and settles into high-backed chair by the fireplace with a gouty heave. His trembling, spotty hand gestures towards a seat opposite. So glad you could make it....

This paraphrase of a line from Menahem Golan’s 1980 The Apple, which I am indebted to a Twitter acquaintance for, was proven in spades last week after a spate of prominent celebrity passings, of which the first and by far the least widely mourned was that of Golan himself. It can’t be said that the news came as a surprise. A friend who saw him and cousin/partner Yoram Globus at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, which I attended in early July, reported that Golan was looking a bit worse for the wear, while the most vivid memory that I have of a 2010 phone interview that I conducted with him is a three-minute uninterrupted coughing fit that occurred in the middle of the chat....

Dogville Todd McCarthy boldly defended Our Way of Life in his pan of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. His reminder of our beneficent past, at the very moment that we’ve decided to throw out the rule book and plunder the world (not to mention our own economy), is matched generality for generality and cliché for cliché by Trier’s clever, shallow, unedifying movie. Stridency and tone deafness can be found on all sides of the American Question, which provided the 2003 Cannes Film Festival with a depressing coherence....

Gavin Smith: We’re coming up to the halfway mark of the festival, so the point of this discussion is to give our first impressions so far, either overall or focusing on specific films. It seems like today was the day that there was finally a film in the Competition that seemed to please everybody. Amour seemed to be unanimously acclaimed. I wasn’t in the Lumière, but was there an ovation at the end of the Michael Haneke press screening?...

Quintessential fairbanks swashbuckling abounds in this Raoul Walsh–directed adaptation of the Arabian Nights stories, in which Fairbanks’s crafty but charismatic (and remarkably agile) thief impersonates a prince to win the heart of princess fair Julanne Johnston. At the height of his reign as “the King of Hollywood” with wife/Queen Mary Pickford, Fairbanks is a magnetic screen presence, combining Chaplin-like physical comedy skills with (possibly the original) Hollywood good looks. But it is often Anna May Wong who steals the film as the duplicitous Mongol Slave—Wong would go on to become one of the most visible Asian-American film stars, though critics often lament her relegation to stereotypical “dragon lady” or “lotus blossom” roles....

But Grover had completed the introduction to the piece, and the Q & A has been shaped and ordered according to his notes. I drove with him to El Monte for his third encounter with Carey, when the actor locked us up in his TV room and forced us to watch his pilot for Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena in its excruciatingly full-length splendor. Once released, Grover just mumbled to Carey, “Not your strongest suit....

About two weeks ago, there appeared in all the newspapers of America a report prepared by the Surgeon General that clearly and bluntly told the American people that whoever smokes cigarettes is taking a grave risk of contracting lung cancer. I don’t think this report should stop people from smoking cigarettes, but perhaps it will bring about research into the invention of a type of cigarette that does not cause cancer....

Andrew Stanton’s follow-up to Finding Nemo (03) dares to be good—and that’s what makes it such great fun. Finding Dory doesn’t replay the same notes as the first film, and it doesn’t push for homey wisdom. By developing the logic behind the character of his beloved heroine, Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a blue tang fish with short-term memory loss, Stanton arrives at a concoction that’s equally warm and witty. Watching it is the aesthetic equivalent of swimming in a heated pool set at just the right temperature....

David Lowery has the creative alchemy to transform time and place into poetry. He proved it in his debut feature, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (13), which unfolded in a gritty yet mythic 1970s Southwest. In that stunningly lyrical movie, outlaws and lawmen drive big old American cars, and they stride through Texas scrubland in muddy boots and weathered clothing. They cast giant shadows as they trigger traditional cowboy movie clashes between freedom and responsibility, loyalty and ethics....

“Rebellions are built on hope,” says Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. So are movie franchises. The team behind the re-launch of the Star Wars saga has made it their main goal to keep hope alive among their multitudinous viewership. Last year their gift to fans was to craft a mashup of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This year their early Christmas present is the first “stand-alone” Star Wars movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story....

Spider-Man: Far from Home (Jon Watts, 2019) The last terrific live-action web-slinger extravaganza, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004), was a majestic comic-book grand opera. Jon Watts’s Spider-Man: Far from Home is an effervescent comic-book light opera—complete with disguises and illusions, shifting allegiances, real wisdom from fake or disreputable characters, rib-tickling contrasts between romantic couples, and swift epic reversals that put the universe in and out of balance. At one point, we enter a Prague opera house for a performance of Smetana’s The Devil’s Wall....

The producers of Alan Taylor’s ambitious, interminable Terminator Genisys have circulated James Cameron’s praise for the movie as an official seal of approval. In a promotional featurette, Cameron says that this dogged entry—the fifth in a mammoth dystopian series—is the only sequel that measures up to the first two movies in the franchise, the ones he co-wrote and directed. They should be glad Cameron made that statement on camera. Back in 2003, Cameron said he could describe Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, “in one word: great,” but apparently now he considers it … not so great....

Images from Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) The Toy Story movies have always said a lot about what it means to be a boy or girl, and what it means to be a toy. Pixar’s storytellers proved how much they thought about the most peripheral character—the toys’ original owner, Andy (John Morris)—in the improbably moving climax of Toy Story 3, when Andy, on his way to college, bequeathed Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), dinosaur Rex (Wallace Shawn), and all the rest to a shy four-year-old neighbor, Bonnie, whom he was sure would take good care of them....

God Bless America In his heyday as a performer, Bobcat Goldthwait, with that unmistakable screechy voice a few decibels above comfort level, was someone people often wished would shut the hell up. But with the arrival of his latest pitch-black comedy God Bless America, “that annoying guy” from the stand-up stage and silly Eighties comedies, the one who set his Tonight Show chair on fire and was kicked off The Hollywood Squares, has solidified his place as one of the bravest independent filmmakers working today—an unlikely movie actor turned unlikely auteur....

The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1969) The old specter is haunting Europe again. I arrived at Karlovy Vary for its film festival after a short stay in the precincts of Exarcheia, Athens, where the familiar hammer and sickle shares space on walls with the anarchist red-and-black, and dissidents fight it out nightly with a police force who, per some sources, has been infiltrated extensively by the far-right Golden Dawn Party. Political schisms once thought left in the prior century are alive and well in Europe as at home, and while not caught up in the same outright turmoil the city of Karlovy Vary itself still bears the physical traces of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic regime....

FC readers definitely know (and generally love) Wong Kar Wai’s 1991 film Days of Being Wild and Johnnie To’s 2005 Election. But chances are they’re unfamiliar with Patrick Tam’s Final Victory (87). Tam, who edited both the Wong and the To films, hasn’t directed in 17 years but is one of the original members of HK’s Seventies new wave, i.e., the first generation of filmmakers to think of the islands, rather than the mainland, as home....

Stranger by the Lake The most acclaimed of Guiraudie’s films to date, and the one that most directly concerns gay sexuality, Stranger by the Lake is set over 10 days at a secluded nature spot where men sunbathe, swim, and enjoy somewhat explicitly depicted sex. The film’s protagonist, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), falls head over heels for the athletic, mustachioed Mark Spitz look-alike Michel (Christophe Paou), only to witness him in the act of drowning a lover....