The media generously, if inexplicably, dubbed Britney the next Madonna, but her interpretations of classics like “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” from 2001’s Britney, lacked the irony and grit of a more seasoned and self-aware artist. The titles below (all presently streaming on Netflix) have shown us utopias, dystopias, distant planets, and our own Earth destroyed.

This narrative arc plays out as a vicious critique of colonialism, but the film takes a dramatic turn when an unconscious Agnes is found by a group of chicleros. Tragic Jungle never becomes a full-on horror film, but Olaizola engages with indigenous legends and colonial history across a story where misogyny is turned against the patriarchy in ways that recall recent genre offerings like The Witch. Fernando F. Croce, A disquieting expression of pragmatism as proof of godlessness. The film’s singular ambition is to immerse the viewer in the thick of a frenzied drive toward the promise of a lover’s touch and a few more minutes of life. The song might skew capital-R romantic (“A red rose grew up out of ice-frozen ground/With no one around to tweet it”), but it’s an affectionately detailed testament to the fact that readers can become writers, and writers can become icons. In the film, a 2019 literary festival in Jia’s home province of Shanxi is the springboard for three writers’ takes on how China has been transformed since the 1940s. Pollard handles this explosive issue with restraint and intelligence. So it’s no surprise that some of the album’s most enduring tracks pivot back toward Britney’s earlier hits, including the bubbly “How I Roll” and “Trip to Your Heart,” which finds frequent collaborators Bloodshy & Avant seamlessly applying their glitchy, pitch-incorrected synth-pop to the fad of the era.

Despite the signs—the difficult-to-start vehicle, the fallen bridge—no one else believes the woods are alive. There’s something instructive about the way Gaga rejects any and all intimacy with others throughout.

I'd never seen a real film shoot in my life. The best parts of the film slyly set up those tools and other objects, including a swing set and a rat trap, only to bring them back at some later, climactic moment. Songs like “Private Show” and “Do You Wanna Come Over?” yearn for a specific intimacy, a moving expression from an artist whose public relationship with sexuality once seemed disturbingly out of her control. It stands up on its own as a well-oiled, brilliantly edited example of new-school, Spielberg-cultivated thrill-craft, one that endures even now that its visual effects and haw-haw references to Pepsi Free and reruns seem as dated as full-service gas stations apparently did in 1985. Cinema as practiced in the traditional model of a narrative feature like Kajillionaire is very much a one-way conversation between you and the audience. It’s a single-minded focus that is, in large part, passed down from his own gurus, though when he berates one of his students for wanting to sing raag in a fusion band, it reveals not a love for the artform to which he’s devoted his life, but a domineering spirit that arises from his musical monomania. I work on that with a friend who's a coach.
Maybe it’s in the overtly fable-like structure that reduces the characters to not just archetypes, but cutouts. You’re used to watching someone who’s such a star like that without them being able to see you. Interview: Christian Petzold on Transit, the Refugee Crisis, and More. All rights reserved.

And then, once you’re on the other side of it, it’s like, “Well, hold on this thing that’s your whole childhood, this was just like a series of decisions I made because I was in a weird place in my life—some of them conscious, some of them accidental.” The whole thing doesn’t hold water so tightly as it does when you’re on the other side of it. Were you consciously trying to approach these themes in a more oblique way? But each of those disciplines is really important to me. The filmmaker suggests that casual hostility within the family unit is the real normal, buried underneath an ornate series of social pretenses. Often lost among such face-offs are considerations of the lives that are destroyed and ruined over the course of the narratives, as these thrillers exist to evoke and satisfy our own fears and resentments.

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning centers around a Jehovah’s Witness missionary, Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), who lives with her husband, David (Rati Oneli), and young son in a remote village in the mountains outside of Tbilisi. When you’re only a daughter, if you’re not yet—or are never going to be—a mother, then you just have this sense of parenting as almost like God or something. It’s a dozen-plus songs of blithe denial—one of which, “Radar,” is curiously recycled from the earlier album—that seems to be saying, “Hey, I’m still young enough to eat hard candy without it being a sad anachronism. Bowen.


He can’t afford to waver, but it’s our privilege to do so. While the film doesn’t entirely stick its murderous finale, no one who hears those scarifying final lines of dialogue will soon forget them. Even the format’s deficiencies, from the rickety hum of sprockets to the instability of the frame, are savored by what seems like a nostalgic impulse—a fondness for the old-fashioned that even transforms the rough, granular quality of the haunted films themselves into something like pointillist paintings of the macabre.

Like “Mad Woman,” “My Tears Ricochet” tells one of Folklore’s most straightforwardly resentful stories, this time grounded narratively in the idea of a toxic lover showing up at their ex’s funeral. Throughout, the film it remains firmly focused on its thesis of Frankenstein as a lens for examining modern society. Luke Goss’s Nomak asks in one scene: “Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?” What first seems like a cut-and-dry moral dilemma becomes an awesome, cautionary tale against cultural homogenization. Silly, seemingly nonsensical lyrics like “Aphrodite lady seashell bikini garden panty” recall Gaga’s early hits, but “Uranus!/Don’t you know my ass is famous?” is no “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin.” Artpop’s best song, “Do What You Want”—a duet with R. Kelly that has since been scrubbed from the album’s digital editions—is a measured electro banger that smartly doubles as a love song and finds Gaga lashing out at critics while doing her best impression of Christina Aguilera.

That always stuck with me. Despite its bleak context, the film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives. Starship Troopers then has to be a bad movie, insofar as that means that the acting is not dramatically convincing, the story is hopelessly contrived, the special effects are distractingly garish in their limb-ripping and bone-crunching, because the point isn’t to do better than Hollywood (that would run counter to Verhoeven’s obvious love of these cheap popular forms), but to do more of Hollywood, to push every element to its breaking point without caving to the lazy lure of ridicule. Given the philosophical nature of the guru Maai’s interview snippets and the remarkably beautiful musical performances of Sharad and his guru, Sindhubai (Dr. Arun Dravid), writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane appears, for much of The Disciple, to be fully celebrating the asceticism and endless struggle that Sharad has committed himself to. Rohrwacher sees Lazzaro as an alternative male hero, of a kind she felt Italy needed. I think that every stage is important. The path from “Jesus Walks” to Jesus Is King has been a willfully discursive one, a journey from hip-hop’s hard beats to gliding electro-rap, from 808s & Heartbreak’s Auto-Tune croon to the industrial rave soundtrack of Yeezus to, ugh, the #MAGA hat. First revealed in 2011 with the delicate Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body), her first film, the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher then made her mark with Le meraviglie (The Wonders) (Grand Prix in 2014) and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzarro) (Best Screenplay in 2018), as one of the filmmakers to watch in the new generation. If the anime series’s finale was a psychological breakthrough, End of Evangelion is the relapse, an implosion of self-annihilating revulsion and anger rendered in cosmic terms. Because I’ve already acted out all these parts, and I think they know it and can feel it on some level. Throughout, you may recall that audacious sequence in Grass in which a woman repeatedly went up and down a flight of stairs, as Hong fashions a similar yet subtler portrait of stasis with his latest. The Hellraiser films certainly never stint on graphic displays of the former, even if the latter receives increasingly short shrift after the kinky family dysfunction that undergirds the first installment. So, I’m just kind of a mercenary or something. Paralleling an earlier scene in which Krissi (Erin Richards) calls out Oxford professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) for his misogyny, as if speaking for every woman in the Hammer Films canon, the film torches the sexist notion that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, correlating self-acceptance with the severity of Evey’s hauntings and propping up its horrors as a selfless expression of a once-invisible girl’s sense of agency. For every eviscerated remake or toothless throwback, there’s a startlingly fresh take on the genre’s most time-honored tropes; for every milquetoast PG-13 compromise, there’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners attempt to push the envelope on what we can honestly say about ourselves. For me, it was very important to talk about things that, in the past, have remained in the past but aren’t solved. My way of looking at the past is by no means nostalgic, but not at all a rhetorical kind of looking at the past. Some of these depictions are humorous, others haunting.

Eden slashes her wrists in the kitchen sink, the sounds of children playing emanate from the empty yard, inane talk of the Internet’s funny cats and penguins becomes white noise against Will’s screaming: The question of whether or not to trust his sense of foreboding is perhaps not so open as director Karyn Kusama and company might wish, but against the terrors of continuing on after losing a child, the issue of narrative suspense is almost immaterial. With its relentlessly throbbing beats (“Americano”) and plethora of fierce breakdowns (“Scheibe,” “Heavy Metal Lover”), this resuscitated vintage would be perfectly content as the soundtrack to fashion weeks and underground sex dungeons the world over, though really it’s intended as a sincere ode to the bedazzled hearts of outsiders past and present, real and imagined. Bicycle-powered blimps, suspended railroads (where trains hang down from the tracks instead of running on them), and rodent surveillance cyborgs (serving the same purpose as our modern closed-circuit security cameras) transform this unique, smog-drenched vision of turn-of-the-century France, despite the gray and brown palette, into a visual wonderland. Folklore’s tender, self-referential bonus track reveals an important element of the album’s ethos, namely that Swift aims to be remembered as a poet. Based on a real case that happened in the 90s, it is about a rural community tricked by an aristocrat into working on her land in quasi-feudal conditions. That concept is stiob, which I’ll crudely define as a form of parody requiring such a degree of over-identification with the subject being parodied that it becomes impossible to tell where the love for that subject ends and the parody begins. This mix of socio-politically engaged documentaries and auteurist cinema also marks the festival’s Spotlight section. Does she consider herself a political film-maker?

And that ego, like the singing rapper’s heart, isn’t so much broken as it is deflated like the balloon on the album’s cover, making for purposeful (mis)use of the pitch-correction software as a symptom of said heart defect. Early on, the camera often lingers on the deceptive stillness of the rising water for maximum suspense. There are still so many things I'd like to learn!