A mad criminal genius continues to wage his campaign of terror on Berlin from beyond the grave. Declared a menace to public safety by the Nazi’s Ministry of Propaganda, Lang’s film shows that once men create a culture of fear and lies, they can then weaponize it to keep an entire people in their thrall.
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Thank you to everyone who insisted I see Miranda July’s story of a bunch of lonely people cheerfully–and frantically–trying to reach across enormous voids to make contact with another human. I was most moved by their relationship to time. They go through life trying to speed it up or slow it down, lying about their ages or lamenting wasted years, but sometimes when everything aligns, they can create a little pocket of time to fill with feeling.
Miloš is excited to carry on the family tradition of doing as little work as possible in his first job as a train dispatcher in his little German-occupied Czech town. But unpredictable hormones and partisan brigades threaten his leisurely routine. The movie also features a scene which deploys rubber stamps to memorably nefarious use.
I’ll smash through this hell or there’s no future for me. A mob boss and his prized lieutenant “Tetsu the Phoenix” try to give up their life of crime, but their comrades and competitors conspire to drag them back in. A vibrantly surreal gangster movie bursting with color, song, brawls, and humor.
When the newest teacher at the schoolhouse falls for his pupil’s older sister, and the neighborhood’s bullying butcher tries to win her for himself, she proves more independent than either of them bargained for. Through peering eyes and whispers, Beyzaie draws a withering critique of a community where neighbors lie in wait, looking for a reason to pounce when anyone steps out of line. But his touch is also playful, romantic, and utterly unique, and I’m really grateful that one print made it through the Revolution so we can enjoy this beautiful restoration.
Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know. Show them stuff they haven’t seen. It’s a wonderful, rare feeling to watch a movie for the first time and realize that you’re going to return to it again and again over the years. I don’t really know how to talk about it except that it’s about life in the way that Chekhov is, with storytelling as incremental and as epic. Edward Yang shows such compassion for the discontented, young and old, who wonder what might have been as they look for meaning in their day-to-day lives. Two friends consumed by jealousy each take up a monastic life to atone for one terrible night. Bustillo Oro keeps us off-balance with two contradictory narrators, and lets gothic horror elements bubble to the surface, culminating in a fevered vision of a horde of masked monstrosities that are still haunting nearly a century later
A feud within a clan of the Camorra erupts into outright war, making a Neopolitan suburb the front lines. Garrone covers the clan’s vast criminal reach, from running guns and drugs, to counterfeiting haute couture, even to dumping toxic waste for corporations. But he avoids the glamor or romance found in so many American mob movies, focusing instead on the poison that indiscriminately seeps into the lives of everyone in this town, young or old, gangster or bystander.
When a strident but distracted political newspaper editor leaves his wife to her own devices, she finds in his younger cousin a companion and kindred spirit who shares her love of poetry. I was blown away by Madhabi Mukherjee’s vibrancy in Satyajit Ray’s previous film THE BIG CITY, and here she communicates a crushing longing, sometimes without any words at all. And the ending–with a tentative hope for new beginnings just as life’s course seems most intractable–gave me chills.
We have so many documents of artists at their polished best, but no one ever lets us in to see someone face the terrible feeling that they’re letting the room down. Watching Elaine Stritch record “The Ladies Who Lunch” is a raw, harrowing journey to hell and back, but there’s nothing like watching a genius hit a wall, then come back triumphant, to give you hope. As we’re looking ahead to reopenings, a reminder to be patient.
When Estrella’s father starts disappearing shortly after her First Communion, she tries to get to the bottom of his mysterious behavior. The producers pulled the funding before the second half of the film could be shot, but that feels formally fitting for this story about the questions we can’t answer, the questions we wish we couldn’t, and the insurmountable distance between us and the people we want to understand the most.
Tatiana Samoilova is riveting as a young woman whose fiancé rushes to enlist after the German invasion. He goes missing behind enemy lines, leaving her to navigate the treacherous, unfamiliar wartime landscape without even knowing if he is alive or dead. The death of Stalin created an opening for Kalatozov to acknowledge in starkly human terms what many Soviets had repressed: the casualties and trauma that ripped through a generation.
A time-traveling Elizabeth I and Ariel from “The Tempest” explore a punk dystopia full of anarchy and state-sponsored brutality. This movie is psychedelic and psychotic and a gleeful repudiation of respectable good British taste. It demands to be seen in a midnight movie theater, but for the time being, this will have to do.
I do not recommend watching this movie without a full stomach of ramen (we ordered ours from Colala.) A devastatingly cool cowboy/trucker rolls into a struggling noodle shop just looking for a bite, but sticks around to help the owner up her game from middling to transcendent. With fourth-wall breaking digressions into gangster parodies and wild sexual food antics, Itami pokes fun at how our appetites can make us seriously deranged. But by thoroughly detailing the craft of a well-made dish, he reveals the value of this obsession.
I’d never seen one of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s sound films, and I think his transition was remarkable. Working in Nazi-occupied Denmark, Dreyer chose to return to themes of institutional persecution similar to those in his “Passion of Joan of Arc.” But in this more ambiguous story, witchcraft feels possible, and perhaps even justified.
A romantic comedy of sorts–but only as Claire Denis would tell it. Juliette Binoche’s character goes looking for a life-defining love, and falls for a series of men who each let her down with their own singular flair. Binoche's carries nearly every frame of this movie, and each flicker of desire, or disappointment, or joy floods the screen.
A Senegalese man wanders Dakar trying to cash the money order his nephew sent him from Paris, but red tape, bad luck, and cynical opportunists thwart him at every turn. Instead of writing to accommodate former colonial powers, Ousmane Sembène made the first African-language feature, focusing on the franc’s poisonous influence still reverberating in a newly independent country.
This “film without actors” cast five Berliners who’d never been in front of a camera to play versions of themselves on an ordinary lazy weekend, in the lull between wars. The laidback style feels decades ahead of its time, and it’s especially fascinating to see writer Billy Wilder and cinematographer Fred Zinnemann experimenting with structure and form before coming to the States and becoming legendary directors in their own right.
After leaving his ailing mother and beloved dog for a summer to stay with his uncle, a boy has to navigate his developing awareness of sexuality and loss when this town of oddballs insists on bringing them both to the surface. A uniquely honest tearjerker, where people sometimes manage to help each other, and sometimes devastatingly fail each other, but everyone is fundamentally doing their best.
To balance out the ratio of men to women, a bunch of leering middle-aged soldiers get shipped into a little Czech town, where a factory girl dodges their fumbling advances in favor of a scrawny young jazz pianist who tells her she looks like a guitar drawn by Picasso. Smitten, she shows up at his parents’ house in Prague, but doesn’t get the welcome she imagined. When the couple try to salvage their reputation by cramming their adult son into their bed, leaving his spurned lover alone and humiliated on the couch, the painful, awkward turmoil that sexual repression sets off is as funny and heartbreaking as it is in life.
Pepper LaBeija. Octavia St. Laurent. Willi Ninja. Dorian Corey. Freddie Pendavis. And Venus Xtravaganza. I can’t believe it took me this long to see Jennie Livingston’s essential documentary on New York’s late-eighties ball circuit. But through their vitality, wit, and passion, each of these unforgettable icons demonstrate how just finding each other was a defiant and resilient act.
When a poor film buff gets caught impersonating a famous director in order to defraud a family, Abbas Kiarostami gets permission to film the trial, giving the defendant an outlet to plead his case. To accompany this documentary footage, both sides agree to play themselves in re-enactments of the scam and the sting, and the sly pleasure they take in recreating these moments of “real-life” performance is infectious. By choosing to point a camera at this odd story, Kiarostami shows moving compassion for an outsider who just wants people to see him like the artists he idolizes.
One week before the Nazis will ultimately surrender, a small town unit drafts a group of eager German schoolboys into service. When their superiors abandon them with nothing to follow but slogans and propaganda, the boys make a last stand at a bridge that–unbeknownst to them–is strategically useless and set to be demolished. Their childish games and bravado are suddenly met with horrific and senseless violence that reveals the empty lie of nationalism that treats human life as disposable.
A young woman leaves her small village for a job in Manila and vanishes without a trace, prompting her boyfriend to follow after her. He takes whatever work he can get–starting at a perilous building site, then falling in with a crew of hustlers–just trying to sustain himself as he searches for his love. Lino Brocka is a master at combining pathos with a clear-eyed outrage on behalf of a population forced to live right on the edge.
Returning from the Indonesian War of Independence, a freedom fighter finds himself alienated from a society that only pays lip service to his sacrifice. While deeply patriotic, Ismail’s film also shows how corruption can seep into a revolution, manipulating then abandoning the people on the front lines.
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The Bri-terion CollectionI’m loving the Criterion Channel streaming service, so every week I’m going to share my favorite new find. 
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