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He scurries through the rubble, a furtive man in shabby clothes. Afraid of being seen, he hides from the camera following him, pushing aside aghast pedestrians and stumbling over construction detritus in his hurry. In a way he resembles Estragon in Waiting for Godot, fleeing an attack from assailants. Or the vagrant in Molloy, retreating to his mother’s room so he can “finish dying.” His name is “O,” and he is the chief figure in Film, the only screenplay written by Samuel Beckett, and he is played by Buster Keaton....

The gift which Obama brings home represents a major restoration effort undertaken by the Library of Congress, in consultation with Edgardo C. Krebs, using a 16mm print discovered by Argentine film historian Fernando Martin Peña and a 35mm print from the National Archives in Puerto Rico. The restoration was screened in the Masterworks section of the 50th New York Film Festival in 2012. Wright, who spent 10 years and his own money bringing Native Son to the screen, despised the bowdlerization of his work, which understandably failed to connect with North American audiences....

A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1970) Though Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life only recently made its debut at Cannes (hotly debated on this episode of the Film Comment podcast), various Italian publications are reporting that the director has already begun shooting his next film, The Last Planet, in Rome. Following the life of Christ through various evangelical parables, the film will see Malick explicitly dramatizing Christian subject matter for the first time—unless you believe David Roark, who argues that all Malick’s films are “distinctly and explicitly Christian....

Chantal Akerman is one of those filmmakers cursed with having legions of imitators and very few peers. I say “cursed” because the aesthetic tools she developed—extreme long takes, a particular style of frontal or “planimetric” compositions (which she argued obeyed the Second Commandment’s prohibition of idolatry)—can seem dulled by overuse in less skilled hands. (I recall my college film production TA warning me about associating a female subject with her home in a short documentary I was making because it was so “overdone”—and she was right to say so....

Scissere Mettler has forged an unlikely path, even by Canadian standards. Scissere (82), his first major work, is a narrative film that feels like an experimental piece, a collage of micro-tales of schizophrenia, addiction, study, and solitude—states of mind. It became the first student film ever to be accepted into Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (now TIFF). Mettler had yet to turn 25, but he’d made enough of an impression to earn the confidence of Canada’s chronically conservative producers and national funders and was given the go-ahead on a pair of wildly uncommercial projects....

Repetition has always been a key structural device in the work of the young, prodigiously gifted Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, and The Princess of France, the third of the director’s beguiling, waltz-like romances to take its inspiration from a Shakespeare play, is no exception. Piñeiro has a habit of staging certain moments, scenes, and snatches of dialogue in multiple variations, but the duplicate passages that result from this practice are never exact copies....

July 2015. We are lazing around in our summer house in Assos. It’s Bairam and the beaches are extremely crowded. A few hours away, there is a small town amid pinewoods where I spent some of my childhood’s best years. Even though its old charm and beauty are gone, the air is still clean. We figured we would go visit the place. We hit the road with the children and abundant company....

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) Agnès Varda (the subject of a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center) devoted much of her best work to looking at women: at their bodies and inner lives, their friendships and loves, how they move through the world and see themselves being seen, at her own career and her fertile, restless imagination. Women looking at women remain rare behind or in front of the camera, but two new movies written and directed by female filmmakers dwell on the emotional bonds between women, and on the choice—or lack thereof—between the paths of marriage and of artistic and professional independence....

The Hurt Locker (#1) This Iraqi war drama about a company of bomb disposal technicians recalls the best of classical Hollywood action cinema (i.e., Ford and Hawks), in spite of the near-constant use of handheld cameras, and offers an intriguing critique of masculinity besides. Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant William James is like an Ethan Edwards for the YouTube age.—Michael Smith, Chicago, IL Kathryn Bigelow is Queen of the World!—Alice Whitmore, New York, NY I’m not understanding the love for The Hurt Locker....

Among the great acting moments in recent memory, I would place near the top of the list the following sequence in Jacques Audiard’s immersing organized-crime thriller, A Prophet: newcomer Tahar Rahim, playing the young, resourceful antihero, Malik El Djebena, stands on an airport escalator unable to totally suppress the waves of excitement, confusion, and childlike surprise flooding his face and body as he realizes that he is about to take his first plane ride—as if he were a free man like any other....

Adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name (blurbed by Edmund White as “one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement”), A Single Man describes a day—November 30, 1962—in the life of George Falconer, an English professor at a small Los Angeles college who, eight months after the accidental death of Jim, his lover of 16 years, is still deep in mourning. It is the day on which George’s carefully planned suicide collides with the first stirrings of desire he’s felt since Jim’s death....

As the film continues, little details, shreds of context, facts, clues, and connections start to accumulate at painfully spaced-out intervals. The story, when it eventually emerges, concerns ship’s captain Marco (Vincent Lindon), who goes AWOL and rushes home following his brother-in-law’s suicide and the hospitalization of his young niece Justine (Lola Créton, she of the high heels), only to get caught up in the machinations of a depraved, sunken-eyed financier (Michel Subor)....

There is a vivid party scene at the middle of Abdellatif Kechiche’s sprawling Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka, in France, La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2) that encapsulates some of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a young schoolteacher who is feeling her way through early adulthood and her first serious love affair, has earnestly prepared a meal in honor of her artist girlfriend, Emma (Léa Seydoux)....

Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platts-Mills, 1969) The opening titles of Bronco Bullfrog—newly restored and now screening at Film Forum—proudly declare that the film, directed by the late British independent filmmaker Barney Platts-Mills, was “made on location in East End, London.” Rightly so, because the film’s inner-city setting—mainly Stratford, a town in East London—is its greatest asset, lending it a documentary authenticity that makes it feel like a time capsule. The impoverished postindustrial wasteland of Bronco Bullfrog—featuring desolate streets, bomb sites, and brutalist high-rises populated by teens in late-1960s “suedehead” fashions—bears little similarity to today’s Stratford....

Valérie Donzelli’s Cannes hit Declaration of War is a brave, deeply personal, but artistically uneven chronicle of a young couple’s battle to save their son from a malignant brain tumor. A melodrama trying to reconcile romantic idealism with a sobering illness, Declaration is also a flawed dose of neo–new wave pop. That is, until you read that Jérémie Elkaïm and Donzelli, who play the on-screen named Romeo and Juliet, were also a real-life couple with a son who endured a life-threatening illness....

Vigilant soldiers trudge through the forest en route to the enemy base. This war has been brewing for months, and tensions are running high. Loyalties are tested and coups staged as helicopters whiz overhead. A skirmish erupts between rival forces, each side armed with state-of-the-art military technology. A soldier lurches forward and collapses. He begins counting out loud: one steamboat, two steamboat, three steamboat. At ten steamboat, he’s back on his feet, staring down his would-be assassin....

—“About History” by Tomas Tranströmer (from Bells and Tracks) Ilya Kabakov has spent his life as a painter and conceptual artist reconfiguring his experiences as a citizen of the Soviet Union into installations (and paintings) where the everyday banal tears at his country’s utopian aspirations and the disastrous social climate they created. In 2008 Ilya and his wife and co-conspirator Emilia traveled from their home on Long Island back to Moscow for an ambitious showcase of their work, and Amei Wallach’s documentary uses this trip as a loose structuring device....