Portside

Filmed in the 1950s, Vittorio De Seta's luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.

Two recent documentaries, both now streaming, try to unpack the McCarthyite Trump-whisperer—progenitor of the postmodern political world we now inhabit.

Tarantino succeeds in superimposing two meta-narratives: the end of the Western and the self-destruction of the counterculture. Both stories are symptomatic of the war in Vietnam, though here Vietnam is little more than background.

Newly restored, Elaine May’s darkest comedy is one of the great underappreciated American movies of the 1970s.

Carlo Levi’s memoir, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” was a literary sensation in post-Fascist Italy. Three decades later Francesco Rosi's film enshrined the book's neorealist credo--giving voice to the voiceless.

The camera, just by its presence, altered human behavior. The motion picture camera changed the nature of acting. Among other things, it created that apparent oxymoron, the non-actor, the subject of an unusually rich and stimulating series now at the Film Society of Lincoln Center entitled "The Non-Actor".

Get Out opens with a familiar horror-movie trope. Someone walking alone down a dark street stalked by a mysterious force. That the setting is an idyllic suburb, the someone is a young, increasingly panicked black man, and the predator is driving a white car gives the scenario an unmistakable reality. The scene grows disturbing. You may flash on Trayvon Martin. That the black youth is not shot but rather abducted is a dreamlike condensation of the movie to come.

Kaili Blues, an eccentric, remarkably assured first feature by the young Chinese director Bi Gan, is both the most elusive and the most memorable new movie that I’ve seen in quite some time—“elusive” and “memorable” being central to Bi’s ambitions. - J. Hoberman

Brilliant, tedious and irredeemably evil, Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" (1935) is one of the great conundrums of cinema history. Now released on DVD.

Two twenty-first century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie.