Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been a prominent creator of radical cinema for four decades. Most probably know him best as the director of I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documentary using the words of James Baldwin to describe structural racism in the U.S., which got an Oscar nomination. His latest is called Orwell: 2+2=5. It’s about the work of the English novelist, journalist, and social commentator George Orwell, particularly his writings about politics and the threat of totalitarianism expressed in his final book, “1984.” The technique is somewhat similar to that of the Baldwin film. We hear excerpts…

The English filmmaker Terence Davies died two years ago at the age of 78. He’s a director I always admired, and an artist that I think has gone underappreciated by general audiences. One of the films I wish more people knew about is his adaptation, from 2000, of Edith Wharton’s great novel The House of Mirth. Rather than using the material as a vehicle for his own concerns, or creating “entertainment” through the distancing effect of dramatic spectacle, Davies directed all of his energy toward faithfully translating the sensibility of the book itself. That The House of Mirth succeeds as…

We’re living in a time when the news is stranger than fiction. What should filmmakers do in such times? Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our best film directors, has chosen to face this moment by combining the action film with satire. The result is his latest movie, One Battle After Another. In a sort of alternate version of recent history, a revolutionary group called “The French 75” breaks into an immigrant detention camp, freeing all the prisoners. One of the revolutionaries, a black woman calling herself Perfidia Beverly Hills, and played by Teyana Taylor, enlists a comrade named Ghetto Pat,…

Stephen King, America’s most popular fiction writer, is an expert at writing books and stories that get adapted into films, the majority of which are horror. King’s excellence at horror I attribute, at least in part, to his frank recognition of evil as a powerful force in society. Evil in his books is something we participate in, whether we want to or not. The latest King adaptation is called The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence and adapted by JT Mollner from a 1979 book that King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. In the future, a terrible civil war…

Taiwanese director Edward Yang showed a willingness to take risks in his short films, and in his first feature, That Day on the Beach, from 1983. Two years later, in 1985, he released Taipei Story, putting all his money into the project. It failed at the box office, while getting some recognition at international film festivals. Despite its less than spectacular showing, it marked the beginning of a new era in Taiwanese film. Up until then, movies in Taiwan were derivative of Hollywood commercial formulas. Yang fashioned a unique style of his own that created the conditions for a “new…

Over the past thirty years, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been gaining stature as one of the world’s best living directors. His style features long takes, wide shots, and minimal camera movement. Lately, though, he’s been making what I would simply call “philosophical” films that examine human nature and culture, moral responsibility, the individual versus the mass, and the doubts and inner struggles that human beings always go through. Ceylan is at that stage in the life of some artists when they seek to understand everything. His latest film is called About Dry Grasses. The title is from a…

Earth Mama, from first-time filmmaker Savanah Leaf, tells the story of a young Black pregnant single mother in Oakland named Gia, and played by Tia Nomore. Successfully avoiding tiresome exposition, Leaf introduces us immediately into Gia’s world. First we witness her answering questions at an office in Child Protective Services. Her two children, a boy and a girl, were taken into foster care when the office was alerted to Gia’s drug use. She’s been mandated to take classes in self- and child care, and the time that takes, she complains, makes it impossible to earn enough money working. She works…

Sing Sing, a film from director Greg Kwedar, is set, as you might expect, in the famous almost 200-year-old New York State prison thirty miles north of the city called Sing Sing, the name being a distorted version of a Native American name for that area. I’ve only been aware of it through old Hollywood prison movies up until now. But this film takes place in the real Sing Sing of today. In a large auditorium in the penitentiary, a small group of inmates on folding chairs are talking about what play they want to perform this year. They did…

Anatole Litvak was a Russian Jewish writer in the avant-garde theater of the early revolutionary period in the Soviet Union, eventually getting involved in the film industry there. He slipped out of the country in 1925, it’s not clear exactly how, and ended up directing films at UFA, the big German studio that was the home of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and many others. He made a few films that were hits there, but when Hitler came to power in 1933, Litvak fled to Paris, where he enjoyed a moderate success for awhile. Then in 1936 he directed the film…

I think it’s significant that in our current historical moment the most prevalent film genre is horror. It might have something to do with the scariest stuff these days not being in movies, but in the news. Well, there are plenty of routine formulaic horror films, but horror is also attracting new artists that have more on their minds than just saying “Boo!” Many horror films employ supernatural elements, like black magic or demonology. Weapons, written and directed by Zach Cregger, is one of those, but never attempts to make the story seem real or credible, which sounds like it’s…

Gleaning—gathering food left on the fields after harvest—is an ancient tradition in Europe. In France, as we learn in the great Agnès Varda’s endearingly personal film from 2000, The Gleaners and I, gleaning is protected by law, although the laws vary in different provinces, and with different crops. Varda was intrigued not only with this practice, but with all its echoes and implications—our attitudes and policies towards waste; our ideas about property, labor and sustenance; the dumpster-diving of the homeless in the cities; artwork based on “found” objects; our relationship to objects and their utility (or lack of); and even…

Sorry, Baby is the debut feature from 31-year-old Eva Victor, who is the writer, director, and star of this drama about persevering through traumatic events with honesty and humor. Victor plays Agnes, a newly promoted professor at a New England school who is visited by her best friend and former college roommate Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie. Their affectionate ways with each other, their conversations and jokes, convey a genuine rapport. Then Lydie springs a surprise: she’s going to have a baby. The film is divided into sections, or chapters, each with a title designating “the year of” something, like…

The Room Next Door, the latest film from the grand artist of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez that I have not read, but the story couldn’t be more well-suited to his style. Ingrid, a successful novelist, played by Julianne Moore, discovers that Martha, an old friend with whom she’s been out of touch for years, a former war correspondent played by Tilda Swinton, has cancer. When she visits her in the hospital, it turns out that the cancer is clearly terminal. In a gap between rounds of chemo, they reestablish their friendship, Ingrid…

Charles Laughton was a renowned British actor who made it big in Hollywood, but someday wanted to direct a movie. In 1953, Paul Gregory, a producer and long-time friend, sent him a book by a new writer, Davis Grubb, called “The Night of the Hunter.” Laughton was captivated, and decided he wanted to direct the film. Gregory would produce it. James Agee would write the screenplay. In 1955, United Artists released the finished film, The Night of the Hunter. Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, an itinerant preacher, dressed in black, in early 1930s West Virginia, whom we first hear in…

Try to imagine your country being attacked, conquered, and then occupied by a hostile foreign power. It’s difficult unless you’ve been through it. The most prominent examples occurred during the Second World War, when Nazi Germany conquered most of the European countries, instituting its murderous practices into the fabric of these countries. We have countless testimonies and books. And motion pictures have told the stories, both in dramatic and non-fiction films. Can anything fresh and new be made of this old subject? A recent documentary from British director Steve McQueen goes further than I thought possible in making us understand…

A black girl is being taught how to fish by her father. We see a close up of her hands turning the reel. “Not so fast,” he tells her. “Easy.” When she catches a fish she touches its scales with her fingers, feeling its curious texture. We see her face, with intense eyes, serious and still. A younger girl, her sister, is looking on. Eventually the father says “let’s go home,” but the girl pauses to touch the shallow water and hold some mud in her hand. This film is founded on the sense of touch more than sight or…

British director Ken Loach announced his retirement a couple years ago, at the age of 86. Like everything else in his remarkable career, this was a modest and well considered decision. With 26 feature films, plus numerous shorts and TV programs, he’s been an important presence in cinema for 60 years—one of only ten directors to win the Golden Palm at Cannes twice. But because he never stopped making movies about the lives of working class people, their problems and underlying issues; and didn’t make genre films, such as action, suspense, or horror; his work didn’t get as much attention…

I’ve talked a lot about Wes Anderson over the years. In fact I’ve reviewed seven of his films on this show. I’m at the point where I want to just assume you know something about his work by now, and that I don’t have to keep describing his style and methods, such as sets that look like marvelous intricate toys, everything in bold colors, block-like patterns, with the camera either facing the actors head on or from the side, precise geometrical movements, the love of miniatures and marginal details; but this is unfair to you. You may be a new…

Food films: movies that tell stories about cooking and eating, are a popular genre. When I think of the best ones, Babette’s Feast and Tampopo immediately come to mind. There are others. Now we can add The Taste of Things, from Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng, to that list. The Taste of Things begins at a French country estate in the late 19th century. Eugénie, an older woman played by Juliette Binoche, is smiling while she prepares a meal. First she makes an omelet that she shares with her two young assistants, Violette and Pauline, and the imposing middle-aged man…

Marketa Lazarová, the 1967 film by Czech writer-director František Vláčil, opens on a vast winter scene, wild horses running in the distance. A deep-voiced narrator says we are being told a series of stories that were assembled “almost at random.” We are plunged into a world of ragtag medieval warriors: stealing, fighting, and killing as they roam through a snow-covered landscape. It turns out that when the film says the stories are random and unworthy, it is seeking to convey the actual experience of being someone in those stories. If you by some magic spell were dropped suddenly into (in…