Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel has long been exploring her country’s social tensions and contradictions in her dramatic films. Now in her latest film, she’s turned to documentary, in a project it’s taken her almost a decade to complete: Nuestra Tierra, Our Land. Just as in her fictional works, Our Land plunges us into its subject without explanation, and with no narrative voice, letting us figure out what’s going on by ourselves. A courtroom trial is beginning, and we see and hear from the three accused, a landowner and mining entrepreneur named Darío Luis Amín and two of his associates, former police…

Two young fishermen take a job on a boat that has returned after disappearing for thirty years, in a film about the tragic paradoxes of time and mortality. In a mosaic of very brief shots—fragments really—we are shown an old stone and concrete quay above the seaside on a rainy day. A stout middle aged man sees a small boat in the dock below. There is no one on it. As he climbs in, there are close-ups of his face, his feet, the mottled surface of the stones, and a curious old name plate that says “Rose of Nevada.” Rose of…

Depicts one night in the life of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, when his partner Richard Rodgers premiers a new hit musical “Oklahoma!” done with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. The Austin, Texas based director Richard Linklater is always trying new things. His latest movie is about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who paired with composer Richard Rodgers to make 26 Broadway musicals in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, featuring many songs that became classics, including “My Funny Valentine;” “The Lady is a Tramp; “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the one he’s made the title of the film: Blue Moon. Blue Moon’s smart,…

A Cold War thriller tells of an assassin hypnotized by the Chinese to kill a presidential candidate. A special brand of American movie emerged during the Cold War that I call the “paranoid thriller.” It started in the ‘50s as Hollywood’s way of exploiting the “Red Scare,” the fear and hatred of communism at home and abroad. As political events became more chaotic and disturbing in the ‘60s and ‘70s, these films began to reflect popular suspicion of U.S. government covert actions and conspiracies. Produced right on the cusp of these two phases was an amazing suspense film, from 1962: The…

A gritty crime film dramatizes a 2008 heist in Copenhagen, the biggest robbery in Danish history. The heist film is now a well-established genre. From the beginning, the stories have involved losers striving to become winners, underworld types who ultimately get tripped up by mistakes and by their own greed. Later, things became more light-hearted, even comic, as more or less glamorous crooks find ways to get around the system to make a big score. In either case, we usually find ourselves rooting for them to succeed, even against our better judgment. A recent film from Denmark called The Quiet Ones…

Two films employing the horror genre to explore darker truths about relationships between men and women. A recent sort of “new wave” movement in horror films is discarding old ideas that were based only on scaring you. I offer two examples. My first example is called Sleep. It’s the debut feature of Korean writer and director Jason Yu, telling of a young wife, played by Jung Yu-mi, who notices that her husband, played by Lee Sun-kyun, is having increasingly alarming sleepwalking episodes, at one point eating raw meat from the fridge and then trying to crawl out of an upstairs window.…

Wim Wenders’ 1976 movie about two guys traveling around West Germany is a portrait of a time still haunted by the dark legacy of the recent Nazi past. Kings of the Road, a film by Wim Wenders from 1976, opens with a startling event. Bruno, a traveling movie projector repairman played by Rüdiger Vogler, is shaving next to his parked van when he sees a Volkswagen zoom off the road and into the Elbe River at top speed. If this is a suicide attempt, it’s a failure, because the car floats, and its driver, Robert (Hanns Zischler) sheepishly wades to shore.…

Sepideh Farsi’s intimate documentary shows the friendship she developed with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza during Israel’s invasion. Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in our minds, despite the degree of accuracy in reporting. We are individuals, and all human experience is such. Therefore we must see events on that level, and imagine being a person in the midst of all this, to genuinely understand. Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi gives us access to that experience, in a documentary about her friendship with a young…

A rec league baseball game conveys a gently humorous truth about American men trying to hold on to the rituals of their younger days. On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way for a new school. They are what you call “rec” teams, short for recreational, that play for fun and allow any local adult male to join who wants to be a part. The two teams in this game are Atlas Paint, in red, and The…

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and surrealist ride through the horror genre. But he’s directed over seventy films that are largely considered eccentric and avant-garde. I started watching his final film, from 2019, Labyrinth of Cinema without realizing any of this, purely on word of mouth. Labyrinth of Cinema begins with a mysterious old hipster in…