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As the follow-up to his debut feature, the unexpectedly enduring teen-movie/sci-fi hybrid Donnie Darko, writer-director Richard Kelly has crafted an even more ambitious and far-reaching story. Southland Tales, set in the near future, somehow brings together an energy crisis, a withering look at both sides of the U.S. political divide, contemporary surveillance culture, and celebrity as both lifestyle brand and pornography substitute. It’s out there, as they say. Fittingly, Kelly has assembled a discombobulated cast including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jon Lovitz, Amy Poehler, Lou Taylor Pucci, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, and a slew of cameos....

Beasts of the Southern Wild Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild joins a very short list of American fiction movies—Donnie Darko, Safe, Kids, Primer, Ballast—that knocked my icy-cold socks off when I first saw them at the Sundance Film Festival. I’ve seen many other very good movies in the more than two decades that I’ve made the trip up the mountain to Park City, but these were special in that they each created, with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, a world I had never seen on screen before....

Tales of the Purple House (Abbas Fahdel, 2022) For two decades, the work of Iraqi-French director Abbas Fahdel has moved deftly between fiction and nonfiction, often within the same film. His latest feature, Tales of the Purple House, is his most comprehensive integration of these two modes to date. At once intimate and epic, the film is a dual portrait of Fahdel’s wife, the painter Nour Ballouk, and the political turmoil in Lebanon....

Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen, 1984) On the opening-credit roll to Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose (1984), the first card you see after the producers, title, and lead actors, is Casting Juliet Taylor Taylor introduced the film at the 2019 TCM Classic Movie Festival, where she also presented Mike Nichols’s 1988 comedy Working Girl and was interviewed by TCM host Alicia Malone. Taylor holds a special love for Broadway Danny Rose even among the 40 movies she cast for Allen since Love and Death in 1975....

Bloody Beans (Narimane Mari, 2013) Winner of the award for best film at Denmark’s prestigious CPH:DOX festival for documentary, Narimane Mari’s Bloody Beans (Loubia Hamra) invariably drew a roar of laughter among audiences there at the moment referencing the film’s title. Poor Algerian kids are comparing which beans—their dietary staple—are the worst, the most indigestible. “You fart like a Frenchman,” one accuses the other. An expressionistic hybrid featuring kids in Algiers, Bloody Beans has its action sequences, but the style is poetic, seems Vigo-influenced, and freely uses symbols in its narration....

Earth Mama (Savanah Leaf, 2023) Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama begins with a woman facing the camera, defiantly saying: “I don’t care if y’all don’t care if I do make it. It’s my journey; it’s nobody else’s journey. Nobody is going to walk with these shoes I got on my feet.” With this opening flourish, Leaf’s debut feature—about a young Black mother who struggles to reclaim custody of her kids from the foster-care system in Oakland—announces with bracing frankness that it intends to pander to neither our sympathy nor some generic idea of empathy....

Tip Top opens Friday for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. During Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in the spring, Bozon, an occasional actor, critic, and leading tastemaker among the young set of hardcore Parisian cinephiles, told FILM COMMENT about the basic principles behind his complex film. If your previous feature hadn’t been called La France, you probably could have used that title for Tip Top, which paints a portrait of France today....

Like many of the best Los Angelinos, Andersen was born a Midwesterner—in Chicago, to be specific—but relocated to southern California at age 3. He attended the USC film school in the Sixties, where his student films—since little-seen—included Melting (65), a portrait of a decomposing ice cream sundae shot with a 16mm Mitchell camera. He later attended grad school at UCLA, producing a thesis film that would be somewhat more in keeping with his later work: Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (75), a biography of the Anglo-American moving images pioneer in pictures....

Life is a Dream Over the course of his prolific career, Chilean writer-director Raúl Ruiz made more than 100 films. Conceived as a pair and shot in consecutive years, Life Is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences, 86) and The Blind Owl (La Chouette aveugle, 87) showcase Ruiz’s signature sense of humor and predilection for putting the sacred, the profane, and the absurd in delicious proximity. Perhaps more than any of Ruiz’s other films, Life Is a Dream and The Blind Owl manifest an appealing admixture of self-reflexivity and self-indulgence in pursuit of the idea that cinema is a game whose rules are meant to be broken… and then gleefully trampled upon....

The Day of the Dolphin A head appears in close-up, looking directly into camera, and lays out a theme, a landscape, a journey—or, to use the term that crops up often in Mike Nichols’s interviews, a “process”—for the film to follow. In The Day of the Dolphin (73), it’s marine biologist and dolphin specialist Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott), who invites us to “Imagine. Imagine that your life is spent in an environment of total physical sensation....

Where does your sense of what to film come from? What drew your eye at the commune, for instance? Ben Russell: We have different ways of shooting. I always think about what the image is before I shoot it, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to shoot with Ben, because I think he has a more intuitive relationship to recording the world and producing an image of the world....

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977) Chantal Akerman’s memoir, My Mother Laughs, is now available in English thanks to a translation by Corina Copp. (A second translation by Another Gaze editor Daniella Shreir will be available in September.) According to publisher The Song Cave, the book questions “what it means to love and care for oneself and for another, and in the end, what the personal cost of those decisions can be....

It will help if we radically reformulate the terms of our bemusement. The problem is not that the President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World, the Occupant of the World’s Loneliest Office, etc., used to be a movie actor, a creator of make-believe. The problem is that he used to be—probably still is—a movie fan, a consumer of make-believe, even an addict of it. This is a disturbing conclusion....