ONE OF THE PRESENTING symptoms of my Shelley Duvall fandom is amateur numerology. The actress, among the most totemic and inimitable performers of the New American Cinema, was born on the seventh day of the seventh month of 1949. She made seven films with Robert Altman, the director with whom she remains the most closely affiliated. The greatest of their collaborations, 3 Women, was released in 1977.

I focus on the dominance of seven in Duvall’s life and profession only to confirm what I already believe about occult signifiers: They mean nothing. Despite the lucky number, a hazy sense of

ONE DOESN’T NEED to go far to find a meaningful connection between art and serious farming, especially when the art in question is driven by political urgency. The example of John Berger, the poet, critic, and painter who lived half his life on a remote working farm in rural France, is close enough. For the past ten years, the Palestinian artist Jumana Manna has been making dazzling films and quizzical objects about the historical strata and lived experience of cities, namely Jerusalem. Her works draw upon many sources and experiment with many genres, but virtually all of them are urban—with

ALAN RUDOLPH IS AN URBAN FILMMAKER, particularly if not exclusively so. It is telling that the title of his first major movie, Welcome to LA (1976), reads like a sign you encountered on the way into town. His camera moves like a flaneur’s readily distracted eye, and Rudolph loves the opportunities that a city affords for lives to intersect, cross, and recross while heading along their individual orbits.

As any cityscape is the sum total of the layers of years past, so too are Rudolph’s films, the better part of which can be seen in a twenty-one-film retrospective at the Quad. Rudolph began his

IF YOU’VE HEARD ANYTHING about Let the Sunshine In (2017), it is probably that Claire Denis’s new film is a romantic comedy, and that it is inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a hyper-referential 1977 book that theorizes the language of love. So why reiterate this? Out of protest. Neither statement provides any real insight into this seductive and subtle film, but both figure as symptoms of the problem that a movie like this—which is to say, one about a mature woman’s sexuality, desire, and happiness—poses for a critical establishment that continues to have firm if

LAUNCHED BY THE FRENCH FILMMAKER AND ANTHROPOLOGIST JEAN ROUCH with Jean-Michel Arnold in 1978, and hosted by the Centre Pompidou for the past four decades, “Cinéma du Réel” is an ideal vantage point from which to survey the landscape of contemporary documentary. Even amid the intensified skepticism about audiovisual media’s relationship to the real, and the proliferation of what is defined as “documentary,” this showcase for nonfiction film—broadly conceived—sustains the form’s disciplinary roots in ethnography and sociology even as it explores its outer limits in experimental film

“THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE,” says Ursula Reuter Christiansen in a new interview that’s included in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark, in Copenhagen. The show revolves around her cult classic short film Skarpretteren (The Executioner), 1971, and features related artworks, along with production and archival material. Reuter Christiansen began studying under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1965, and then left her native Germany in 1970 for a farmhouse on a small Danish island with her husband, the composer Henning Christiansen. “It

TIME IS A METRIC for B-listers, the epigones, the basic. It is not for Grace Beverly Jones. “I’m often asked how old I am—the world likes to know a person’s age for some reason, as if that number explains everything. I don’t care at all. I like to keep the mystery,” the singer-actress-model-supernova declares in her 2015 auto-biography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. (The title repurposes the first line of “Art Groupie,” a track on her 1981 album, Nightclubbing.) For GBJ, age is nothing but a number—as in a numeral and an anesthetizing bit of irrelevant data. And time is but a hollow,

THE FIRST BUT PERHAPS NOT THE LAST Steven Soderbergh movie to get a theatrical release in 2018 is Unsane, which was shot on the iPhone 7 Plus with 4K capture and, of course, a kit of add-on lenses and stabilizers, with probably half the $1.2 million budget going to image-enhancing postproduction. As a result, the movie’s initial twenty minutes look exciting—like nothing you’ve quite seen before, certainly not like Sean Baker’s jittery, neon-hued, made-with-love-and-very-few-dollars iPhone 5s Tangerine (2015). By comparison, the nearly subliminal instability, slightly heightened color, and

A WOMAN LISTENS TO A PLAINTIVE, MEANDERING KEYBOARD BALLAD performed by a musician, with whom she’s having an affair, for an audience of her alone. Tears run freely down her cheeks as the camera almost seems to move to caress her face and comfort her, the scene running the full four minutes of the song. An amped-up white longhair buttonholes an incredulous black restaurant manager and self-professed Reagan voter at a party and proceeds to harangue him for trying to join the oppressing class. At a civil and quiet memorial gathering, the angry and unreconciled daughter of the deceased lashes out

A BLONDE IN HOT PINK and a wrap as white as a wrap of pure cocaine steps out into a good-time party on what looks to be a balmy summer night, and sizzles. What she’s looking for is not sex, but a song.

It’s fair, and obvious, to say she looks like sex; she also looks like Marilyn Monroe, this being Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953). Her character, Rose Loomis, is marked from the start as liberated, sexually adventurous, and thus imperiled. Rose is living in a cabin at Niagara Falls with George (Joseph Cotten), her husband, and is sleeping with a man named Patrick (Richard Allan). She and Patrick

LOYALTY IS A PARTICULARLY PRIZED QUALITY throughout Wes Anderson’s filmography—a man’s puppyish longing for his half-sister, who he has loved since she was a girl, in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), or the bonds of fealty that tie together boys’ adventure clubs such as the Khaki Scouts of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) or Steve Zissou’s Belafonte crew in The Life Aquatic (2004). Looking over the nine features that the director has made since 1996’s Bottle Rocket, a movie anchored by one man’s indefatigable devotion to a slightly cracked friend, it is difficult to recall a single instance of a contented

OSTENSIBLY A WILD-EYED, CORROSIVE, CONVULSIVE SATIRE, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017) comes off like George Orwell’s Animal Farm staged as a Comedy Central roast. Trading scabrous put-downs and obsequious equivocations about Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) and one another are a Who’s Who of grimly cackling reapers: Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), and Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs). This crew of vile ideologues and heartless Communist party hacks jostles for position and power