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—Jean Baudrillard, “Ecstasy and inertia,” Fatal Strategies Ice In Robert Kramer’s Ice, a revolutionary outfit battling the powers-that-be on the streets of Manhattan hide their weapons in clay and in the giant heads of papier-mâché puppets. From artistic commitment to political galvanization to violent uprising: it is this path, perhaps, that most distinguishes the era of Kramer’s film from today. Yet the social turmoil that might trigger such a transformation in an artist is ever with us, and the “Cinema of Resistance” series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center gathers this work and other radical responses on film....

In its opening passages, Julia Murat’s Found Memories offers a beguiling blend of anthropological observation and formal control. Murat takes us through the daily rituals of Madalena (Sônia Guedes), an elderly woman residing in Jotuombo, a (fictitious) rural village in Brazil. Madalena prepares small loaves of bread in her kitchen by lamplight. She walks along the railroad tracks to the local market, chats with shop owner Antônio (Luiz Serra) about how to arrange the loaves, goes to church, and dines with Jotuombo’s fellow aging inhabitants....

It’s not always easy to be a Mila Kunis fan. Certainly, there’s a lot to draw you in—keen comic timing, a voice that routinely shows more range in a single scene than some actresses manage over their entire careers, and alluring, distinctive features. Yet these very apparent strengths are all too often drowned out in Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis’ latest maximalist CGI onslaught which wobbles between borderline-incomprehensible spectacle and failed operatic drama....

It’s hard to imagine a more magical wedding than the one that opens Mother of George. Seductively filmed and crowded with richly dressed family and friends, it’s sensual, spiritual, dreamlike. Nigerian immigrants living in Brooklyn, the bridal couple are handsome middle-aged Ayodele (Isaach De Bankolé) and beautiful younger Adenike (Danai Gurira), whom he has brought over from Africa and with whom he is deeply in love. To the accompaniment of ethereal music, blessings flow—promises of health, longevity, and fertility....

Adapted by Dee Rees from her award-winning 2007 short, Pariah is one of a handful of contemporary coming-of-age features that depict the transformative experiences of adolescent African-American women. It may be the only recent film that also portrays the coming-out process of a young person of color. As the title suggests, Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old lesbian, could be perceived as the ultimate racial and sexual Other. She is introduced in the dynamic first scenes of the film hanging out with her friend Laura (Pernell Walker), a flashy and charming playa, trying to navigate the scene in a local women’s nightclub....

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022) When Matt Reeves decided to make an epic paean to Batman as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” he ignored an inconvenient truth: no great American detective film has clocked in at three hours. The Maltese Falcon? One hour 41 minutes. Chinatown? Two and 10. The Batman takes 176 minutes to wrap the rebooting of the franchise around the search for a serial killer who aims to expose something rotten in Gotham City....

Like a redneck puppy with an automatic weapon, Barry Battles’s The Baytown Outlaws just wants to be loved—and shoot up a bunch of stuff at the same time. You could say that the film demands that you leave your critical eye at the door, but it’s closer to the truth to say that it’s just going to do what it wants, and you can either enjoy yourself or just leave the theater....

With the resounding iconography of its opening credits, The Last Circus boldly announces itself as a “parade of monsters” of 20th-century Spain. Set to a military march adorned with flamenco flourishes, the title sequence unfurls a collage of snapshots in which dictators like Franco, Hitler, Basque terrorists, and priests, coexist with figures from horror movies (Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff) and Spanish popular culture, particularly comedy stars. It’s an audiovisual bombardment in which director Álex de la Iglesia plants the seeds for a very special exorcism of History, recalling the wounds of a nation that spent nearly half a century under a tragic cloak of repression, a bold and visceral exercise in memory that employs the distorted filter—baroque and oneiric—of the horror genre....

After a hiatus from action movies—during which he deftly portrayed a two-term California governor who, married to President John F. Kennedy’s niece, finds that the secret love child he’d fathered with their longtime housekeeper is no longer such a secret (or did that actually happen?)—Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to the genre that made him famous with The Last Stand. An American production directed by the talented Jee-woon Kim, The Last Stand tells the story of Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a past-his-prime sheriff in a sleepy Arizona town that sits on the Mexican border....

Sometime in the early Nineties our curators of cool inducted Johnny Cash into the proto-gangsta pantheon of Great American Badasses. A ferocious 1970 photo of him flipping a cameraman the bird started appearing everywhere (I had one in my cubicle next to an Ice Cube malt-liquor ad), and rap impresario Rick Rubin began his decade-plus recasting of Cash as the eternal mystic outlaw—releasing four spare treatments of that timeless baritone doing songs both old and postmodern, all skewing to themes of, as one album title put it, “Love, God, and Murder....

In the studio era, when he would have flourished, Viggo Mortensen’s shorthand description might have been “dashing but dangerous; cultivated veneer hides mysterious, checkered past.” Ergo screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut finds Mortensen perfectly cast in the Joseph Cotten–ish role of Chester MacFarland, an urbane American touring Greece with his glamorous wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst), perhaps less to see the ruins than to avoid joining their ranks. Fellow expat Rydal (clean-shaven Oscar Isaac) helps Chester out of a bind and offers to expedite the couple’s escape....

Ototo (Kon Ichikawa, 1960) Kon Ichikawa’s 1960 film Ototo cools the typically overheated juvenile delinquent drama into surely the most genteel example of that genre ever made. Unlike the angst-ridden cry for tenderness of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause or Ichikawa’s own paradigmatic and nihilistic entry in Japan’s troubled youth cycle, The Punishment Room (1956), Ototo is a careful, meticulous spelunking into the hidden character depths within a self-destructive family....

One of the benefits of the streaming-industrial complex and its rapacious and insatiable lust for content is that short films suddenly have a noticeably more robust presence in the landscape of global cinema. Shorts often have been regarded as serving one of two functions: vehicles for the modernist obsession with newness and innovation (as if experimental filmmakers were really just frustrated tech bros); or little proof-of-concept seedlings, fundraising warm-ups that show that their makers can one day direct a “real movie....

Three on a Match “Corrupt and phosphorescent prettiness” is my favorite phrase ever written about Bette Davis. Graham Greene, who could snark with the best of them when he disliked an actress, captured her unique beauty as no one else ever did. If a face can be said to be controversial, it’s more true of Bette than any other actress, save possibly Barbra Streisand. One of the most unattractive actresses in Hollywood, once sniped some guy on Twitter, whose name I cannot recall since he is now blocked....