Features

Tangled web: with The Girl and the Spider, the Zürcher brothers craft a formalist fable of Surrealist uncanny and combustible yearning

Taken for a ride: Jenkins’ moving image work artist incisively analyzes how images—in film, TV, advertising, and the media landscape—set limits on the possible.

Run it back: a renewed interest in reenactment in documentary foregrounds two historically sidelined aspects of nonfiction cinema: performance and authorship

Woman’s work: the remarkable work of the Japanese actress-turned-auteur gets its due with a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center

Sustain an edge: filmmaker Courtney Stephens reflects on the inspiration, both personal and artistic, she has drawn from Joan Didion’s foundational writing

In my room: while the big-name titles were relatively modest, there was nothing small about more formally expansive films like Dry Ground Burning and Jet Lag

Light touches: this year’s slate was dotted with life-affirming standouts like Claire Denis’s Fire, Mikhaël Hers’s The Passengers of the Night, and more

Dangerous minds: in the new Jackass Forever, persistence in the face of aging is a stunt in its own right

Fresh perspective: the nonfiction lineup ran the gamut from the exploitative provocation of Jihad Rehab to the genuinely moving uplift of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy

A closer look: Scathing but myopic in its critique of the sexist cinema of Hollywood, Nina Menkes’s Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power regurgitates the blind spots of male-gaze theory.