In Olivier Assayas' speedy, slightly wan dispatch from salon society, Non-Fiction (Doubles vie), Parisians have badly concealed affairs and argue loudly but inconclusively about books and society.
The dynamic in Andrew Kightlinger's Tater Tot & Patton, wherein it falls on a troubled middle-aged man to teach a young woman how he thinks she ought to behave, is concerning.
Dismissed as "trash" in their day, Charles Bronson films Rider on the Rain and Cold Sweat belong to a Golden Age of internationally co-produced Euro-thrillers that combine pulp storytelling with stylistic elegance and intense emotion.
While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.
João Moreira Salles's melancholic documentary, In the Intense Now (No Intenso Agora) stitches together amateur footage of the riots of 1968 to create a riveting rumination on the glee and disillusionment of idealism.
Documentarian Penny Lane challenges you to leave behind your preconceptions and give the Devil his due in this irreverent, entertaining look at the Satanic Temple, Hail Satan?
High Life is more a series of tensions and breaking points than it is a traditionally satisfying space narrative, but Denis's allegiance to directors like Tarkovsky and Kubrick offers an intriguing view of humanity at the gates of the final frontier.
Over 90 years later, silent film The Kid Brother works well as entertainment for modern audiences, for whom its calculated old-fashioned corn and apparent simplicity aren't a problem but par for the course.
In Combat Obscura, a jangled, jarring Afghan War documentary, a Marine Corps cameraman shows the flippant cynicism of combat in ways the military would rather we not think about.
Franco Rosso's stark, rough-edged, and music-soaked 1980 drama, Babylon, about West Indian Londoners scrapping for survival, was never released due to worries about inciting violence. Until now.
By satirizing the French literary intelligentsia, Assayas' Non-Fiction (Doubles vie)chronicles the hypocrisies of the modern psyche without attaching itself to any particular worldview.
