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Carole Lombard To Be or Not to Be, 1942 Victor Sjöström Wild Strawberries, 1957 Barbara Loden Wanda, 1970 Randolph Scott Ride the High Country, 1962 Peter Finch Network, 1976 Clark Gable The Misfits, 1961 James Dean Giant, 1956 John Wayne The Shootist, 1976 Ingrid Bergman Autumn Sonata, 1978 Edward G. Robinson Soylent Green, 1973 Richard Farnsworth The Straight Story, 1999 Marilyn Monroe The Misfits, 1961 Robert Ryan The Iceman Cometh, 1973...

Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 Ordet Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955 Pickpocket Robert Bresson, 1959 M Fritz Lang, 1931 Vampyr Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932 Notorious Alfred Hitchcock, 1946 Paisan Roberto Rossellini, 1946 Greed Erich von Stroheim, 1924 Ikiru Akira Kurosawa, 1952 Scarface Howard Hawks, 1932 Shadows John Cassavetes, 1959 Earth Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930 Freaks Tod Browning, 1932 Stagecoach John Ford, 1939 Fury Fritz Lang, 1936 Nosferatu F. W. Murnau, 1922 Underworld Josef von Sternberg, 1927...

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The Girl (Márta Mészáros, 1968) Around the late 1980s, the Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros was contemplating making a movie about Marilyn Monroe. It would have been new territory. Her best-known movies had until then centered not on the lives of the famous but on women caught up in private, churning dramas: factory workers negotiating friendships and love affairs, orphans in search of family, women trapped or poisoned by their proximity to power....

A Long and Happy Life Sasha is the owner of a potato farm, which at the film’s outset he is ready to sell off in exchange for a healthy sum and a blank credit slate so that he may leave farming behind and relocate to the city with his girlfriend. His workers are dismayed, and, invoking the collective ideals that went into founding the farm, declare themselves ready to use violence to fight off the money-hungry invaders....

The Decline of Western Civilization Most of the subjects of The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 boots-and-braces-on-the-ground documentary on Southern California hardcore, can’t have had much reason to think that posterity would care a tittle about what they had to say—though this probably didn’t prevent some of them from hoping it would anyway. The exception, in terms of reaping positive feedback from establishment sources, are the group X, who were already on their way to becoming critical darlings when they sat down with Spheeris....

Force Majeure Before shooting the emotionally gory climax of his fourth feature, Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund turned to a consistent source of inspiration: YouTube. The scene in question depicts Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), a privileged and reasonably handsome man, on vacation at a French ski resort with his attractive wife and their two porcelain children, slumped on the floor in his underpants outside the family’s room and flooding the halls, as his wife glowers overhead, with what Östlund has called the “worst man cry ever....

Since Alain Guiraudie’s astonishing 2001 mid-length feature debut, That Old Dream That Moves, the French writer-director has represented something special in the always troubled universe of independent European filmmaking. Consistently running against trends, and one of the most distinctive auteurs below age 50 (though he just passed the half-century mark), Guiraudie has been an oddly well-kept secret, except for a passionate cadre of supporters, mostly in France and among influential cinephiles like Viennale director Hans Hurch....

Redoubtable One of the most anticipated titles going into Cannes this year was Ruben Östlund’s The Square, which (no pressure) press-screened in the same slot as 2016’s Toni Erdmann. Östlund’s surgically precise prior feature Force Majeure dissected masculine weakness and the ready cycle of recrimination in a picture-perfect Swedish family on a ski trip. Speculation was rife on what The Square might contain. The two-hour-and-20-minute film turned out to be a shaggy satirical comedy about Christian (Claes Bang), the chic curator of an art museum, toggling among mortifying story lines: a one-night stand with lingering consequences, a nastily conceived ad campaign for a hot new exhibit (the titular “square,” an artwork creating a kind of ethical safe space), and a positively unbelievable outreach effort to retrieve a stolen wallet and other items....

Post Tenebras Lux But the most disconcerting experience at Cannes came with Post Tenebras Lux, which won Carlos Reygadas the award for best director. Reygadas’s film opens with an absolutely indelible sequence: a gorgeous 3- or 4-year old blonde girl runs through muddy grassland, ringed by mountains, and plays among frantic dogs and cattle. She keeps calling out to Mommy and Daddy; then landscape takes over, with scarily beautiful thunder and lightning....

In the mid-1960s, horror on American screens mostly meant one of two things: Vincent Price in a Roger Corman movie or Grand Guignol starring one of the many middle-aged actresses seeking employment and being offered little more than increasingly degraded rip-offs of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. It was a genre most studios and directors preferred to avoid—something that would change precipitously in 1968 with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. But in 1967, Warner Bros....

Forget, if you can, the post-Cannes hullaballoo surrounding the film’s hotly debated gender politics. Forget the stories of Abdellatif Kechiche’s grueling working methods, the highly public feud that’s developed between the director and his two gifted young stars, the objections of Julie Maroh—who wrote the graphic novel on which the movie is based—and the MPAA’s predictable choice to assign the film an NC-17 rating. Forget, in short, all the baggage Blue Is the Warmest Color accumulated as it rolled down the festival circuit and slowly evolved from a movie into a cultural event....

Watching Robert Redford and Nick Nolte play off each other—sometimes poignantly, sometimes lightheartedly—is the major lure of A Walk in the Woods, a hit-or-miss adaptation of Bill Bryson’s rollicking travel book about hiking bits and pieces of the Appalachian Trail with a ne’er-do-well companion. Redford, now 79, is the movie’s fictionalized Bryson, who was actually 44 when he started the trek. Nolte, now 74, is the rascally, out-of-shape, recovering alcoholic “Stephen Katz,” a pseudonym for an on-and-off Bryson pal who dates back to their school days in Des Moines....