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Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.It will come as...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

It’s a French New Wave take on America’s worst era — what else could you want? The great Far from Vietnam plays as part of “Welcome to Metrograph: A-z” on Saturday, along with Varda‘s Lion’s Love and Tsai‘s The Hole.

“Summer In the City” brings Dog Day Afternoon and Spike Lee...

Complex and avant-garde French film director best known for Night and Fog and Last Year in Marienbad

Alain Resnais, who has died aged 91, was a director of elegance and distinction who, despite generally working from the screenplays of other writers, established an auteurist reputation. His films were singular, instantly recognisable by their style as well as through recurring themes and preoccupations. Primary concerns were war, sexual relationships and the more abstract notions of memory and time. His characters were invariably adult (children were excluded as having no detailed past) middle-class professionals. His style was complex, notably in the editing and often – though not always – dominated by tracking shots and multilayered sound.

He surrounded himself with actors, musicians and writers of enormous talent and the result was a somewhat elitist body of work with little concern for realism or the socially or intellectually deprived. Even overtly political works, Night and Fog,...

'I make films—that's what I can do for Vietnam," says Jean-Luc Godard in the omnibus anti-war project Far From Vietnam (1967). If you replace "Vietnam" in that statement with, for starters, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Northern Ireland, the French West Indies, various factions of the New Left, and the Occupy movement, you'll have a sense of the bracing scope of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's weeklong "Cinema of Resistance" series. The 15 feature-length works and various shorts programs here—whether fact, fiction, or, more often, an explosive hybrid of the two—are all acts of bearing witness, made to provoke outrage over abuses, conflicts, and wars.

Made a decade after Algeria won its independence from France, René Vautier's To Be T...

 Paolo here. We should probably give in and see what this year's Toronto International Film Festival has to offer! Toronto marks the unofficial start of awards season, inflating or deflating much hyped movies and performances. Speaking of which, the locals can experience the star power of actual would be contenders.  Within the space of ten days, Tiff gives its paying audience access to a year's worth of art house cinema - these movies will be trickling out in limited release for at least a year to come.

Fine reasons to be excited but I have more personal reasons, too. 

Reason no. 1 They're bringing back some classics.

They're under the Cinematheque programme, spotlightling restorations like Dial M for Murder in 3D, Loin du Vietnam - a collaborative anti-war project involving a handful on 1960's auteurs like Godard, Agnes Varda, William Klein Alain Resnais and (Rip) Chris Marker. There's also Roberto Rosselini's...

The 2012 Toronto International Film Festival line-up got another boost with today's announcement of the Midnight Madness, Vanguard and Documentary selections which include films from the likes of Barry Levinson, Don Coscarelli, Rob Zombie, Martin McDonagh, Ben Wheatley, Michel Gondry and Alex Gibney and include titles such as Aftershock, Dredd, Seven Psychopaths, Pusher, Sightseers, The We and the I, The Gatekeepers, Finding Nemo 3D, Hotel Transylvania and a Cinemateque selection that includes Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, Roman Polanski's Tess and Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli. Considering Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master was recently added to the official selection as a Special Presentation I am going to have my hands full when it comes to screenings, but I will definitely make sure to catch McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths, which is one of my most anticipated films of the year. Otherwise, the schedule will determine which ones I check out. The...

Experimental French director acclaimed for his post-apocalyptic film La Jetée

The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent exponents, but Chris Marker, who has died aged 91, was credited with inventing the form.

Marker's creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called "the new documentary", but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne. Marker's interests lay in transitional societies – "life in the process of becoming history," as he put it. How do various cultures perceive and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly intermingled modern world?

He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve,...

“Though I don’t have any children,” says John Gianvito, “I imagined a child someday saying to me, ‘You regard yourself as a political filmmaker, did you do anything during the longest war in U.S. history?’”

Gianvito, the Boston-based director of the acclaimed feature The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, recalls this thought coming to him earlier this year as the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan approached. On Thursday, October 6, in honor of that day of infamy, Gianvito and a team of filmmakers will unveil an ambitious omnibus project to raise awareness about the enduring conflict.

Still a work in progress, Far From Afghanistan: The October Edition (pictured) will premiere on-line for one-week only to coincide with the anniversary, both to help accelerate political resistance to the war as well as help boost funds for the project’s Kickstarter campaign. As of September 26, the project...

"What makes Johann run — and rob?" asks Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "Benjamin Heisenberg's second feature is as taut, lean, and fleet as its title character, played by Andreas Lust and based on the real-life Johann Kastenberger, who was both Austria's most-wanted bank robber of the 1980s and a champion marathoner. Writing the script with Martin Prinz, who adapted his own 2005 novel about the notorious criminal, Heisenberg forgoes backstory and psychological explanation, structuring his film as a series of adrenaline spikes."

"Lust's character in The Robber is familiar from European crime movies," suggests Noel Murray at the Av Club. "He's the stoic loner who doesn't say much, lest he inadvertently reveal some kind of motivation. When he robs banks, he wears a thin mask that doesn't look all that different from his face, and when he goes on a date with his caseworker, Franziska Weisz, he's more amused by...

The London Palestine film festival has simple but radical aims: to constantly push boundaries, disrupt our conventional understandings and make us see it all anew

The perilous art of choosing a film on Palestine for an international audience may appear fraught with elephant traps. Weighted down by more than 40 years of military occupation and 60 years of dispossession, and comprising the largest refugee population in the world, Palestine is a touchstone for passion and political engagement across the world. Is a film about it inherently too political, too ideologically rigid to enlighten, or indeed entertain? Do the unhappy politics of the place trump any chance of critical engagement on a film's artistic merit, or allow room for happy accident and serendipity in choosing a film?

The long-running London Palestine film festival, established at London University more than 20 years ago and held annually at the Barbican since 2005, arrived at a highly unexpected...

III.

“And this is the liberating discovery… the man-made alone can be made, whereas whatever else the environment has to show is only imitable by make-believe… A crucial problem of twentieth-century art—how to make the painting a firsthand reality—resolves itself when the subject matter shifts from nature to culture.” —Leo Steinberg

Recap: Man and machine, life and art, documentary/fiction, idealism and reality collapsed. Yet Vertov shows things as things, images as images, equal and radiant in their thingness. No longer is the soccer ball the service of stories and the tool of man: now we see how it directs men's gestures. But to see the thing, it must be seen in relativities of movement, reoriented and re-placed. Abstract the principles and forms by seeing its relations: it takes two bricks to see the form of one. Life's design is the film's design, an electrified Arcadia the camera...