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63 Up is the latest episode of the most extraordinary sustained experiment in documentary history. In 1964, director Paul Almond profiled a group of fourteen 7-year-old British children from diverse backgrounds in a program for U.K.’s Granada Television called 7 Up. Since then, 7 Up’s researcher, Michael Apted—who also went on to carve out an eminent career as a transatlantic feature director—has continued to film the subjects every seven years, in a series of avidly followed programs that have allowed British society to watch itself change over decades....

Poetic justice notwithstanding, this might seem a rather reckless secret weapon to unleash—just imagine the damage its huge elongated snout could do—but the logic of the premise is essentially sentimental. An anteater, however gargantuan, is something that we humans can relate to. It’s cute, and—as a mammal—it’s one of us, sort of. The same logic governs the new attempt by Legendary Pictures/Warner Brothers to relaunch a Western version of Toho’s Godzilla franchise, after the damp squib of the 1998 Roland Emmerich version....

Alan Clarke’s 1979 drama Scum, probably the best-known British film about life behind bars, features a scene in which Ray Winstone’s young offender thrashes the opposition among his fellow inmates, famously concluding with the words, “I’m the daddy now.” David Mackenzie’s Starred Up similarly charts the jail progress of a young man who’s clearly, precociously destined to be the “daddy,” the alpha male, on his wing. But there’s an obstacle, or possibly an advantage, waiting for him in the prison where he’s just arrived: there’s already a daddy there waiting for him....

It isn’t till the very final moments that we discover the literal meaning of the title Stay Vertical, the new film by French director Alain Guiraudie. But other meanings are apparent before then. It’s partly a question of simply staying alive, and as usual in Guiraudie’s films, men’s ability to keep erect is also a key question, although it never appears to be a problem: there’s one hard-on glimpsed through a character’s pants in close-up, while lead actor Damien Bonnard appears visibly erect in the film’s most startling shot....

The late Tony Conrad was one of those people that British writer Iain Sinclair sometimes refers to as the “reforgotten”—those cultural figures who slide in and out of some dim limelight, usually staying in the margins, sometimes revered by a small but impassioned coterie, but often destined ultimately to be neglected or forgotten again, their perpetual obscurity or semi-obscurity a mark of their authenticity and enduring energy. Conrad would be rediscovered from time to time, even getting some mainstream press attention before his death last April aged 76....

What Will People Say, the second feature by Iram Haq (I Am Yours), is based on the Norwegian director’s own experience: at the age of 14, she was kidnapped by her own parents and forced to live for a year and a half in Pakistan. Given her film’s traumatic inspiration, it might seem surprising that the result comes across on-screen as a little impersonal—yet, that makes a kind of sense....

Big Hero 6Don Hall & Chris Williams Perhaps no studio-produced animated feature felt so of its time as Disney’s Big Hero 6. Loosely adapted from a Marvel comic, it’s set in “San Fransokyo,” and features a teen tech whiz named Hiro, his robot sidekick Baymax, and a diverse “hero” group that works to stop a rogue scientist from using one of Hiro’s inventions for criminal purposes. Stunning animation, and an encouraging hint of things to come from the Disney-Marvel merger....

Feted as an indie phenomenon in France—un film-guérrilla de Djinn Carrénard, per the poster—this serial gabfest rarely takes a breath in beading together the romantic travails of its Paris-banlieue characters. The Haitian-born director’s microbudget debut feature sets the stakes high from the get-go: Spanish teacher Analia (Emilia Dérou-Bernal) puts insolent student Nacio (Vincente Perez) in his place after class with a shocking sexual power play—which she recounts to her incredulous friends....

Aspects of Huston’s own life uncannily parallel those of Maerose, a woman doubly cloistered by her Italian Catholic heritage and her family’s illicit business. On her father’s side were the renowned Hustons, père et fils, and on her (Italian) mother’s there was success, talent, and tragedy. Reared on a remote estate in Ireland’s wild and mystical Galway, she attended convent school until the age of eleven, when her parents separated and she went with her mother to London....

FILM COMMENT spoke with Anderson’s frequent director of photography, Glen MacPherson, who has shot all three of Anderson’s 3D features: Resident Evil: Afterlife (10), The Three Musketeers (11), and Resident Evil: Retribution. We discussed the technology’s constant evolution, the challenges that places on the production team, and why you can’t easily fake a punch in 3D. Final Destination How did you start working with Paul W.S. Anderson? Did he see your 3D work on The Final Destination (09)?...

The lamest possible criticism of the film is to decry its false notes. David Holzman’s Diary shows its hand often, but that’s only part of the point and the gag. David’s friend Pepe (Lorenzo Mans) echoes one possible reaction when he says the diary is “not believable… It looks like a horrible movie… Don’t make me look at it on the screen,” and it’s as funny as anything in Albert Brooks’s like-minded proto-reality-TV spoof Real Life, which came a decade later....

You had been working on an Internet-related drama called Flashmob. What happened? The problem was financial. It would have been either an American co-production or at least 50 percent of the film would have been shot in the United States, and the European producers were afraid that we’d lose money and they wouldn’t be able to obtain financing for it. But the real problem was that my female protagonist was a woman in her late twenties and early thirties, who weighed 350 pounds, and I couldn’t find that actress....

How would you classify your film in terms of genre? The term “eco-thriller” comes to mind. What do you think? Yes, I think I rather like that appellation. It’s a difficult film to classify. For me, it’s a hybrid film, because it has elements of romance just as much as those of the thriller, as you say. And also documentary elements. And it even, I would say, lays claim to the genre of experimental film....

sex, lies, and videotape “I always think that everyone else is having a really good time, and I’m not having anywhere near as good a time as they are.” —Steven Soderbergh, in Cannes, before winning the Palme d’Or “Now I think that everyone else thinks I’m the one having this really great time and resent me for it.” —after winning the Palme d’Or Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, 1960; Luis Buñuel, Viridiana, 1961; Luchino Visconti, The Leopard, 1963, and Death in Venice, 1971; Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up, 1967; Robert Altman, MAS*H, 1970....

If they held a pageant for most dyspeptic film of the 1940s, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest (49) would have been a shoo-in finalist, and Bette Davis easily would have walked away with the prize for Miss Monstrosity. Morbid, strident, bitterly divided against itself, Vidor’s seething ruin of a melodrama is festooned with enough borderline- personality traits to merit its own subcategory in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders....

Echoes of the Rainbow After actors, the next person on the attention-grabbing totem pole is the director, and that’s where Hong Kong women are doing even worse. Ann Hui is the only major female director in the industry. Sylvia Chang is a big deal, but since 1997 she’s only made five films to Hui’s 11. Clara Law was a major arthouse force in Hong Kong film, but her career has slowed down since her heyday in the late Eighties and early Nineties....

The One-Armed Swordsman But after Hong Kong was swamped by protests, riots, strikes, and a wave of terrorist bombings that lasted from 1966 through the end of 1967, Chang Cheh channeled the counterculture outrage of the times to create The One-Armed Swordsman, starring Jimmy Wang Yu, Chinese cinema’s original cocky, charismatic badass. Previously, wuxia were about sophisticated swordsmen and women, dressed in silk, wielding mystical weapons but One-Armed Swordsman changed the genre forever, giving audiences young, male, working-class heroes, stripped to the waist and smeared with gore, chopping out their futures with their swords and dying with an axe in their guts....

Appearing in either 268, or 301, or 350 movies, depending on who you ask, Tamba was born rich, descended from Japanese aristocracy, and he lived his life according to the rule he laid out for Sean Connery when he appeared opposite him as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice (67), “Rule number one—never do anything for yourself when someone else can do it for you.” The Five Man Army For Tamba, that meant: never watch your own movies, never turn down a role, and never memorize a line....