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Plus the omnipresent hype, not for the films themselves, but rather for that ineffable, high-altitude Sundance experience and for you, you, and you, oh my God, actually present at the most happening American film event, where, as one blogger gushed, the thrill was not in seeing the merchandise but in watching Harvey Weinstein make a deal. (Has that blogger taken a good hard look at the garbage The Weinstein Company has acquired of late?...

© 2021 Rectangle Productions, Wild Bunch International, Les Cinemas De La Zone, KNM, Artemis Productions, Srab Films, Les Films Velvet, Kallouche Cinema The grim reaper is at his grimmest when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, at least for onlookers who must watch a loved one disappear mentally before the body finally gives out. Finally because it can take days, months, years—dementia’s refusal to consume the body distinguishes it in cruelty from other diseases....

Silver Linings Playbook The first unalloyed pleasure of my festival viewing—your mileage may have varied—has been Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell’s manic-romantic-comic adaptation of Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel. The homecoming story of fresh-from-hospital bipolar Pat Solitano (note-perfect Brad Cooper) begins by hurtling forth powered by Russell’s neo-screwball dialogue, character collisions, and agile point-of-view tag-alongs, with Robert De Niro unexpectedly effective as Pat’s anxious tree-not-far-from-the-apple Dad, and Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) resourceful in the Mom role of timely intervention....

To the Wonder If you want to know the true-true—to borrow the FutureJive spoken by Tom Hanks in one of his 20-odd hammy roles in Cloud Atlas, also viewed at Toronto—Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder exhibits certain limitations. One such is that actors, when directed to romp and twirl in the manner of lovers animated by eternal love, eventually run out of ways of making this romping and twirling expressive and meaningful, much less a sufficient replacement for more traditional interpretations of amour....

El gran movimiento (Kiro Russo, 2021) “I am a formalist,” Kiro Russo unapologetically declares in the press kit for El gran movimiento, his second feature and the middle of a proposed trilogy generated from his work in the Bolivian mining town of Huanuni. When he first arrived there in 2009, as he told an uncredited IFFR interviewer, Russo was drawn to the location less as a socially motivated chronicler and more from an interest in the aesthetic challenges of shooting underground: a mine, he noted, is “the darkest place in the world!...

20,000 Days on Earth These rules apply in varying degrees to two new music documentaries. I almost said “music documentaries with a difference,” but then they all aspire to be “with a difference,” more or less. These two really are somewhat singular, though—one because it doesn’t quite resemble anything else in the genre, the other because it purports not to be a film about a band so much as a recreational project by a person who happens to be related to someone in a band....

Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020) At the heart of Berlin stands the Humboldt Forum, a ghostly hybrid of the city’s past and present. On the inside is a museum, opened virtually to the public just last year, that houses collections of non-European art; on the outside, a partial reconstruction of the façade of the Baroque palace that occupied the site from the early 18th century to 1950. A series of destructions and reconstructions trails the structure’s modern iteration....

A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery I wouldn’t say the Berlin competition was outstanding this year, but at least it was healthy. There was little cause to shake your head and tut-tut over the mystery of the Berlin malaise, as we’ve often found ourselves doing in recent years. Perhaps the inclusion of an eight-hour film by Lav Diaz was meant to signal to the world that Berlin meant business, or maybe it was just intended to offset the hyper-traditional stodginess of the earnest “quality titles” contained in this year’s list—Michael Grandage’s dour literary anecdote Genius and Vincent Perez’s wartime saga Alone in Berlin, a film that probably wouldn’t have been that much better even if it hadn’t been made with the actors speaking English in heavy German accents....

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker Hopes were high for Wednesday’s Competition premiere of An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker by Danis Tanovic, the Bosnian director whose No Man’s Land won a slew of awards in 2001, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. While an admirable project featuring a Roma family reenacting actual events from their recent past, the film’s deliberate restraint is miscalculated, engendering a bland and at times overly conventional portrait that fails to successfully convey the absolute wretchedness of the Roma situation....

BEST FILMS OF 2008 Wendy and Lucy Kelly Reichardt, U.S. Flight of the Red Balloon Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France A Christmas Tale Arnaud Desplechin, France Happy-Go-Lucky Mike Leigh, U.K. WALL·E Andrew Stanton, U.S. Still Life Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Kong/China Paranoid Park Gus Van Sant, France/U.S. Waltz with Bashir Ari Folman, Israel/France/Germany My Winnipeg Guy Maddin, Canada Milk Gus Van Sant, U.S. BEST UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2008 The Headless Woman* Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Spain/France/Italy 2....

Homecoming (Catherine Corsini, 2023) The only truly quotable dialogue in this year’s Cannes opening film, the French costume drama Jeanne du Barry, is this exchange: “This is grotesque!”—“This is Versailles.” Cannes, as regulars know only too well, can be grotesque. And it can feel a lot like Versailles, with the stars on the red carpet as the ducs et marquises de nos jours, and the watching crowds, the delegates, the staff, and the press in their seemingly endless queues, as today’s restless sans-culottes....

Amy Taubin: There have been a couple of splendid films, three or four really good films, and a lot of awful films. And the weather has been terrible. Marco Grosoli: The first part of the festival is often weaker. There have been quite a few good films so far. GS: What do you think the highlights have been? AT: Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin, Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P., Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, and, today, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar—and Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust....

Max (Monika Treut, 1992) Summer 2023 has seen masc visibility enter the mainstream via Elliot Page’s memoir Page Boy and Christine and the Queens’s album Paranoia, Angels, True Love. Yet an urgency, both political and aesthetic, only grows: the need to know our history, and to come together against renewed forces of repression and erasure. Masc, a 19-film Pride-themed program for the Criterion Channel curated by Jenni Olson and Caden Mark Gardner, is both a vision of community-making and the fruit of an intergenerational, international community in itself—one that speaks to Olson’s decades of work with festivals such as Frameline, the funders of a number of shorts in the program....

“United We Stand. Divided We Fall,” reads the poster art for Captain America: Civil War. I think the movie conveys a more pertinent and veracious feeling: “Even divided, we endure.” That’s downright Faulknerian for a comic-book movie, and not surprising for a Marvel production by the Russo Brothers, whose Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the film equivalent of a graphic-novel masterpiece. Civil War doesn’t reach that level, but it is solid, engrossing, and, in places, inspired....

Thoroughly assimilated and confident Chinese-American woman Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) has fallen in love with supremely suave but slightly enigmatic Singaporean man Nick Young (Henry Golding). Nick’s big secret: his family back home belongs to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The broad joke behind the setup: their healthy Greenwich Village romance scandalizes his hoity-toity kith and kin. On her first trip to Singapore (and Asia, for that matter), Rachel, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, gets treated worse than Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman....

You can go home again—just for a visit. For me, that’s the most potent takeaway from writer-director Sebastian Lelio’s loose adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, Disobedience. Rachel Weisz stars as a New York–based photographer named Ronit Krushka, who returns, after her Orthodox rabbi father’s death, to the Jewish London neighborhood where she grew up. She learns that her rabbi cousin Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), the Rav’s designated successor, and her adolescent lover, Esti (Rachel McAdams), a schoolteacher, have become man and wife....