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Looking for Richard In Looking for Richard, his 1996 documentary about Shakespeare, Al Pacino’s been out and about, buttonholing scholars, colleagues, regular people on the streets of New York, interrogating everyone and his brother regarding the significance of the Bard and Richard III. Now the director/actor is in costume—all black with slashes of silver—set to accost poor grief-stricken Anne (Winona Ryder) as she attends the corpse of her husband, murdered in accordance with Richard’s machinations....

Coming fresh to the beloved tween/Young Adult science-fiction odyssey A Wrinkle in Time, I kept thinking of its author Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) as an outsider artist. In mysterious and unconscious ways, her gimcrack construction expresses home truths about children’s need to see themselves and their families intelligently and honestly but still lovingly, while figuring out their place in the universe. As a craftsperson, she’s like an educated, literary version of those self-taught sketchers, tinkers, and sculptors who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with drawings, gewgaws, and wire-hanger contraptions....

The anti-heroine of Antonio Campos’s Christine, Christine Chubbuck, is a driven, idealistic reporter at a tiny Sarasota, Florida UHF station in the mid-1970s, who’s striving to perfect her craft and advance her career while serving her adopted community for her signature public-affairs show, Suncoast Digest. Christine (Rebecca Hall) lives with her divorced mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), volunteers as a puppeteer to entertain and educate disabled children, and hopes that a handsome coworker, George Peter Ryan (Michael C....

As the desert scavenger Rey, British actress Daisy Ridley unleashes a talent that flashes like a beacon amid the enjoyable clatter of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. She supplies the heady new wine for a bottled-up, 38-year-old franchise. Her fresh, go-get-’em character gives audiences an emotional focus while the movie’s director, J.J. Abrams, puts a vast, diverse ensemble through Tilt-A-Whirl combinations of centrifugal and gravitational force. It’s no spoiler to say that the Force is strong within her, and it’s no disrespect to her cast-mates to say that her presence elevates the movie....

Writer-director Michael Winterbottom’s confident technique holds us for only half the running time of The Wedding Guest, a flimsy thriller about a tight-lipped lone wolf possibly named Jay (Dev Patel). He flies from London to Pakistan to execute a risky criminal job. He must then improvise a getaway through India with Samira (Radikha Apte), an equally enigmatic young woman. For me, the wittiest aspect of the movie was the romcom-like title....

In may 2018, a short video claiming to be the newest work by Jean-Luc Godard began making the rounds. Entitled Vent d’ouest (“Wind from the West”), it was notable for two things. First, it looked like a Godard film; that is, it had the kinds of things—images, clips, texts, references to his own career, his own voiceover—that his works since Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) tend to be comprised of. Second, Vent d’ouest was about something happening at that particular moment in time, namely the dismantling of the ZAD: the community set up in 2008 to protest an airport in the west of France....

Kinatay Weeks before I got on the plane to Nice, I was sure that Cannes ’09 would not be a vintage year. On the festival website, a valedictory essay by festival president Gilles Jacob honored Cannes’ commitment to the director as auteur. Well and good, and a bit inspiring, but even the most dedicated auteurist has his/her A, B, and C lists, and for me, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Ang Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Ken Loach, and Gaspar Noé, to name the directors of some of the most highly anticipated movies, are far from top tier even when they’re on their game, which, as it turned out, none of them were....

Dancing Arabs “Jerusalem is one of the strongest brands in the world!” Thus was contemporary marketing jargon applied to a 5,000-year-old city by Nir Barkat, the city’s mayor, speaking at the opening night reception for the 31st Jerusalem International Film Festival, on the lawn of the Jerusalem Cinematheque. This was shortly after we, the assembled, had been given instructions as to what to do in case of air-raid sirens. As hostilities between Israel and Hamas ramped up in the days before the festival began, the world-premiere screening of Eran Riklis’s Dancing Arabs and the subsequent gala which had been arranged to occur at the Sultan’s Pool outdoor auditorium were canceled, and this less conspicuous event, which had quick egress to safe cover, had been slotted in its place....

Insect The 47th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam marked the third year under the stewardship of director Bero Beyer following a contentious nine-year reign by Ruger Wolfson during which the festival’s increasingly confused programming came under fire by critics. While my sampling of this year’s program—about 35 features and a handful of short and medium-length films in seven days—was pleasing and occasionally even invigorating, the artistic identity of the festival still clearly remains in transition....

The Unknown Known What do we want from Donald Rumsfeld? Or Robert McNamara, or the rank-and-file soldiers of Abu Ghraib in Standard Operating Procedure? (Or, for that matter, Fred “Mr. Death” Leuchter?) Errol Morris’s portraits of perpetrators tend to be determined by his taste for weird personal systems of logic—Morris’s interest lies in faithfully teasing out a tunnel-vision worldview, not in eliciting repentance or accountability. In Tabloid, it’s funny to see through the eyes of a loon, but in Morris’s new chronicle of Rumsfeld’s career according to Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, the humor can wear thin, because this particular worldview affected millions....

Harry Belafonte, who died last month at 96, devoted so much time and energy to activism—from helping fund the 1961 Freedom Rides to serving as UNICEF goodwill ambassador—that he suspected his peers considered him self-righteous. “In California, I walked into a place and somebody said, ‘Here comes Mr. Conscience,’ and all the cocaine left the room,” he once explained. Thus, his turn as the elegant but ruthless, coke-snorting 1930s racketeer Seldom Seen in Robert Altman’s jazz riff Kansas City (1996) stands among the most bracing image inversions in screen history....

Spring Forward (Tom Gilroy, 2021) Much of the coverage of Ned Beatty’s death in June demonstrated, distressingly, that typecasting reaches beyond the grave. Judging by lede paragraphs, Beatty’s career consisted of 1) Deliverance and 2) Superman—with few noting that those two performances, while hardly delimiting the range of his talents, offer indelible takes on emasculation in wildly different tonal registers. Across 165 credits spanning everything from Southern Gothic to Pixar—and a single scene as a boardroom evangelist in Network that bagged him an Oscar nod—Beatty personified the hardworking, perennially undervalued character actor....

Actor, director, screenwriter, memoirist, artist, TV host… Takeshi Kitano has so far outdone even the most versatile of multi-hyphenates that you can well understand him experiencing a sort of identity meltdown. Kitano spent several years as a writer-director pondering the question of what it all meant, this business of Being Takeshi Kitano—and dismantling the hardboiled screen persona attached to his actor name “Beat” Takeshi. The perplexing, intermittently fascinating, entirely self-reflexive Takeshis’ (05) confronted Beat Takeshi with his doppelgänger in the form of an everyman loser, with Kitano pinning his sympathies to the latter figure....

Still, I can take a guess and suggest that Child of God probably brings Franco closer to the primate realm than he has been since The Ape. And I can say for sure that the film stays quite close to the mode and to the thematic territory of his adaptation last year of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Child of God is an adaptation of the 1973 novel by Cormac McCarthy—the most Faulknerian of latter-day American novelists, as much in his subjects and settings as in his use of language....

When Sievey died of cancer in 2010, some admirers hailed him as a genius, but it’s probably fairer to say that he was a sometimes inspired English eccentric and humorist who managed to make one cheap and cheerful gag work reasonably well for a surprisingly long time. But Sidebottom as an undiscovered god of alternative rock? That’s the unlikely conceit imagined in Frank, a new film opening next week, directed by Lenny Abrahamson (What Richard Did, 12; Garage, 07) and co-written by Ronson and Peter Straughan....

Werner Herzog’s latest feature, Into the Inferno, is about volcanoes, and if you’ve seen any of his recent documentaries, you’ll know that hearing the director utter the word “volcano” in that sepulchral Bavarian accent is itself one of the film’s selling points. Ever since Herzog achieved a new popularity as an accessible and highly idiosyncratic documentarist—the breakthrough being 2005’s Grizzly Man—his austere voiceover prognostications on the piddling wretchedness of the human condition have been one of his cinema’s prime appeals....

A favorite critical term of mine—one I know I use far too much, but it’s just so damn useful—is OVNI, as used by French reviewers. It means “UFO,” and absolutely fits the bill for those films that seem to come out of nowhere, that bespeak a wildly nonconformist sensibility, and that you can’t believe ever got made. But what about those films that, “ovnicity” apart, seem perfectly open to classification and description—and yet that you don’t really know quite what to do with?...

Talk about making a spectacular entrance. Not only do the heroine of Montparnasse Bienvenüe, and Laetitia Dosch who plays her, come on like a storm in the opening sequences of this new French film, so does writer-director Léonor Serraille. Her Parisian comedy means business with a furious intensity like few debut features we’ve recently seen, and it couldn’t be a better time, either. Premiered in Cannes last May, months before the Weinstein revelations broke, it’s as if Serraille’s vigorously feminist feature was ready poised to make its wider public appearance once #MeToo and Time’s Up had changed the tenor of gender discussion in movies and in the world....

Images from Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat, 2018) Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo is a mystery thriller of sorts. That is, it comes across like a thriller, but remains fundamentally mysterious throughout, weaving a texture of loose ends and tantalizing enigmas. One thing that seems to set us on a clear footing at the start is the introductory caption, “In an Argentinian province—1975”—in other words, a year before the coup that established Argentina’s seven-year military dictatorship, in which some 30,000 were “disappeared,” to use the familiar euphemistic term, by government forces....

What a blast Bayard could have with John McNaughton’s Wild Things, a film that flaunts its narrative obstructions, is defined by withholding. These are the spaces in which McNaughton conceals his crime. As the movie parcels out fragmentary and downright deceitful information to the audience, its true narrative—that is, the information that would allow us to understand what exactly is going on and who is behind it—remains safely hidden in its ellipses....