Noah Baumbach, Greenberg, 2010, color film in 35 mm, 107 minutes. Production still. Photo: Wilson Webb. Roger Greenberg and Florence Marr (Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig).

ROGER GREENBERG (Ben Stiller), like the hyperarticulate, acid-tongued narcissists who precede him in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s oeuvre—Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot in Margot at the Wedding (2007)—repels and attracts. Recovering from a crackup, the forty-one-year-old sometime carpenter, vowing to “do nothing” for a while, arrives in Los Angeles from New York to house-sit for his wealthy brother, Phillip, on vacation with his family in Vietnam. Frequently bedecked in a Steve Winwood T-shirt, the resolutely Gen-X Greenberg reminisces with his pal Ivan (Rhys Ifans), a former bandmate now struggling to keep his family together; writes angry letters to Starbucks, Hollywood Pet Taxi, and Mayor Bloomberg; and commences a dizzyingly passive-aggressive courtship with Florence (Greta Gerwig), Phillip’s twentysomething personal assistant.

“Hurt people hurt people,” according to one of the pop-psych bromides uttered more than once in Greenberg—its banality later revealed to have resonance even for Stiller’s bilious, cranky know-it-all. Baumbach’s fifth feature, unlike Margot at the Wedding, does more than just marvel at the noxious cruelty of its protagonist; Greenberg, though self-absorbed and self-pitying, shows the faintest signs of kindness and compassion when he’s with Florence. Her task isn’t to redeem him but to make him realize when he’s behaving outrageously.

Stiller may have the title role—and gives one of the best performances of his career—but Gerwig, awkwardly radiant, serves as the movie’s emotional ballast. Best known for her roles in mumblecore films like Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008), Gerwig opens Greenberg driving down Sunset Boulevard as the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” plays on the sound track—a moment of casual ebullience similar to the scene of Gary Lockwood tooling around LA in his MG in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), which, like Greenberg, is its director’s first film set in Los Angeles. While Greenberg offers the satisfaction of seeing Stiller’s stardom being tweaked, it provides the greater pleasure of witnessing Gerwig’s stardom on the rise.

— Melissa Anderson

Greenberg opens March 19 in New York and Los Angeles.

Left: Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972, still from a color film in 35 mm, 167 minutes. Right: Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev, 1966, still from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 205 minutes.

WHEN INGMAR BERGMAN said of Andrei Tarkovsky that he had invented a cinematic idiom “true to the nature of film,” what did he mean? Of course, the “true” nature of cinematic language itself remains—quite rightly—the subject of sharp, perennial debate in film theory. At the very least, Tarkovsky’s body of work can be said—in just seven examples—to have informed those polemics with compelling purpose. The Anthology Film Archives’s “Tarkovsky X3” program presents three films at the core of the director’s (already compact) oeuvre—a primer of sorts to his best-known feature-length films.

In both its religious subject matter and thinly veiled paean to artistic freedom, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Andrei Rublev, tested the boundaries of Brezhnev-era aesthetic imperatives. Notorious problems plagued the film’s production; it went through several edits and various iterations before finally being screened in the Soviet Union in 1971 (a different version won a prize at Cannes two years earlier, as, in turn, would Solaris [1972]). Yet despite Tarkovsky’s embattled dodging of Soviet censors, he is perhaps not the consummate countercultural dissident that Western critics or historians might make of him (especially given the increasing shortage of “subversive” Soviet cinema since the fall of the Iron Curtain). As the art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson recently noted in his volume on Moscow Conceptualism, Tarkovsky enjoyed decided approval among the Soviet intelligentsia. Imbued with a mystical and somewhat wistful melancholy, Tarkovsky’s immersive long takes often match in style his films’ absorptive thematics. That absorption is not, to be sure, solely the domain of medieval archaisms, as in Andrei Rublev; one of the most notable scenes in Solaris—the more cerebral Soviet answer to American science fiction—is a highway drive, by turns hypnotic and anxious (with a nervous sound track to boot). The Mirror (1975) renounces a strict narrative for more paratactic, personal evocations, loosely stitched in a kind of cinematic stream of consciousness.

Tarkovsky’s subsequent collaboration with Tonino Guerra, as well as his marked influence on directors such as Sergei Paradjanov, naturally remain outside the parameters of this tight program. But the range of his subjects and narrative approach in even these three works betray the unflinching cinematographic sensibility—with equal attention to the autonomy of images and the rhythmic momentum of narrative—for which Tarkovsky remains a legend.

— Ara H. Merjian

“Tarkovsky X3” runs March 19–21 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. For more details, click here.

Gianni Di Gregorio, Mid-August Lunch, 2008, stills from a color film, 75 minutes. Left: Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio). Right: Aunt Maria and Gianni's mother (Maria Calì and Valeria De Franciscis).

MID-AUGUST LUNCH (2008) is an easy film to underrate. Its considerable charm lies on its surface; less immediately apparent, but underpinning the whole of the film, is the terror of grappling with the loneliness of aging. Italian actor/writer/director Gianni Di Gregorio demonstrates his multivalent talent, but not in a way that calls attention to itself. The actors, mostly nonprofessionals, are remarkably natural. At times, one can imagine Mid-August Lunch as a documentary.

A fifty-something bachelor, Gianni (Di Gregorio) lives with his ninety-three-year-old mother. The manager of Gianni’s condo solicits him to let his aunt and mother stay with Gianni and his mother; subsequently, Gianni’s doctor requests the same favor for his mother. Gianni winds up cooking and looking after four elderly women for several days. On paper, this sounds like sitcom material, but as filmed by Di Gregorio it flows like a well-crafted ’60s pop song. Mid-August Lunch treads a fine line between naturalism and cloying cuteness, thankfully keeping largely to the former. It’s hard to picture a contemporary American movie being so unselfconscious about its protagonist’s smoking and heavy drinking. Gian Enrico Bianchi’s cinematography has a golden glow, and indeed the film captures the look and mood of summer in the south of Europe.

Di Gregorio has worked with the filmmaker Matteo Garrone as both a screenwriter (Gomorrah) and assistant director (First Love; The Embalmer). Garrone, who produced the film, has been one of the few recent signs of life in Italian cinema, but after Mid-August Lunch, one can add Di Gregorio to the brief list of promising Italian directors.

— Steven Erickson

Mid-August Lunch plays March 17–30 at Film Forum in New York. For more details, click here.

Axelle Ropert, The Wolberg Family, 2009, color film in 35 mm, 80 minutes. Production stills. Photos: Carole Bethuel.

“LET ME DOWN EASY,” Bettye LaVette begs, in the searing 1965 soul nugget that opens The Wolberg Family, Axelle Ropert’s trenchant, aurally dazzling debut feature. The plea, sung to a lover right before a breakup, could just as easily be the appeal overbearing Jewish paterfamilias Simon Wolberg (François Damiens), a proud small-town mayor, makes to his wife and two children, who, fed up with his grandstanding and prying, insist that he change. This small, modest film explores, with persistent acuity, one of life’s thorniest struggles: how to carve out an identity wholly separate from one’s kin.

In her screenplay for La France (2007), directed by frequent collaborator Serge Bozon (he plays Simon’s brother-in-law in Wolberg), Ropert gloriously reimagined both the war movie and the musical. Wolberg, which Ropert also scripted, fulfills an even greater challenge: reinvigorating the nuclear-family drama, one of cinema’s most shopworn genres. “Family isn’t sexy,” Simon’s daughter, Delphine (Léopoldine Serre), a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, announces at the dinner table to her father, a man who insists that what defines a family is its lack of secrets (though he himself is hiding something). Simon’s wife, Marianne (Valérie Benguigui), must also constantly discredit his desperate, suffocating ideas about closeness: “We all have our own private world.” With these pithy pronouncements, Ropert shows that movies about what Susan Sontag once referred to as “that claustrophobic unit” need not constantly erupt into hysteria (cf. Rachel Getting Married) or relentlessly catalogue simmering grievances (cf. Revolutionary Road). What distinguishes Ropert’s celluloid clan is their ability to honestly articulate the complexity—and enormity—of their emotions. Like LaVette, Sam Fletcher (whose “I’d Think It Over Twice” is one of Marianne’s beloved 45s), and Wilson Pickett (whose framed head shot, along with those of other ’60s legends, adorns Simon and Marianne’s bedroom), the Wolbergs stir the soul.

The Wolberg Family screens March 20 and 21 at New York’s Walter Reade Theater as part of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.” Axelle Ropert will be present at both screenings. For more details, click here.

— Melissa Anderson

Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days, 1995, still from a color film in 35 mm, 145 minutes. Lenny Nero and Lornette “Mace” Mason (Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett).

A PAINTER WHO ENROLLED in the Whitney Program before migrating to Columbia Film School, Kathryn Bigelow is something of an anomaly in Planet Hollywood. Combining an affinity for the frenetic rhythms of the thriller with a taste for subversive genre-bending that recalls her “high art” beginnings, Bigelow is a consummate technician whose balletic action sequences remind us how cinematically pure the language of violence can be. Her latest film, Strange Days (1995), is a tech-noir set in a Los Angeles on the brink of the millennium, where conflicting visions of rapture and revolution divide the collective psyche, and the apolitical insulate themselves by getting high on other people’s lives.

With a script by director James Cameron (True Lies, 1994) and writer Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence, 1993; The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988), Strange Days—a cyberpunk extrapolation of the archetypal noir—recasts Chandler’s mean streets as paramilitarized zones where tanks roll by impassively while wasted youth bludgeon Santa Claus on the curb. Scurrying through the back alleys of a decadent underground like an oiled rat, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) peddles other people’s realities preserved on MiniDiscs through the magic of SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), a technology that records and plays back human experience “straight from the cerebral cortex,” allowing the user to be anyone this time around, for a price.

Nero has broken the first commandment of the Dealer’s Credo—“never get high off your own supply”—and has be come a memory addict, hooked on a feedback loop of happier times with a femme fatale who has gutted his life by the time the film begins. When he gets a snuff clip of his friend’s murder, he reluctantly assumes the mantle of Philip Marlowe, and enlisting the aid of Mace (Angela Bassett), an Amazon Warrior moonlighting as a chauffeur, becomes embroiled in a conspiratorial web with enough red herrings to rival The Big Sleep.

Like Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Strange Days is no less noir for being in color. Bigelow’s blacks are black, and her light, what there is of it, is dark cyan, a visual correlative to the creeping rot eating away at her characters. And, as in her last three studio releases (Near Dark, 1987; Blue Steel, 1989; Point Break, 1991), Bigelow is no slave to the fast cut. Strange Days, her best film to date, closes with a sequence that leaves us rattled long after the credits roll. The camera lingers on the bloody face of a racist cop. Gun drawn, he drags his suicided partner along by his own handcuffs, attempting, one last time, to effect his Final Solution as confetti falls from the night sky like acid snow.

ANDREW HULTKRANS: It’s quite a leap from Conceptual art to the culture industry.

KATHRYN BIGELOW: It does seem like a departure. I was studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and one of my teachers put me up for the Whitney Program, so I went. This was ’73 or ’74, when Conceptual art really came to the fore. I did a couple of videos with Lawrence Weiner, and I worked with Art & Language, an artists group who were critiquing the commodification of culture. So I was very influenced by them, and my concerns moved from the plastic arts to Conceptual art and a more politicized framework. And I became dissatisfied with the art world—the fact that it requires a certain amount of knowledge to appreciate abstract material.

Film, of course, does not demand this kind of knowledge. Film was this incredible social tool that required nothing of you besides twenty minutes to two hours of your time. I felt that film was more politically correct, and I challenged myself to try to make something accessible using film, but with a conscience. I still work off that foundation. So I shot this short piece called Set Up [1978].

— Andrew Hultkrans

This interview originally appeared in the November 1995 issue of Artforum.

Niels Arden Oplev, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009, still from a color film in 35 mm, 152 minutes. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist).

AS A PERSON OF SWEDISH DESCENT and somewhat dark sensibilities, I was piqued by the idea of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish adaptation of the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, a posthumous publishing smash that spread the reputation of Nordic noir around the globe. As someone who rarely, if ever, reads contemporary mysteries, I had managed to avoid said publishing smash and hoped to get a taste of the Larsson phenomenon through the film, which has already won a smorgasbord of Swedish awards and was Europe’s top-grossing movie of 2009. I can’t say whether it is particularly faithful to the much-loved source novel, but the film is a serviceable potboiler, though given Sweden’s near-arctic winters, we might call it a potsimmerer—and simmer it does, for a good two and a half hours.

Much like the Scream franchise’s cannibalization of horror-movie history, Larsson laced the novels in the Millennium Trilogy with copious references to classic mystery fiction—Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Sue Grafton, and others—so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by how derivative the film’s plot is. A disgraced investigative journalist is hired by an aging member of the wealthy, secretive Vanger clan—old-money Swedish industrialists who live on a remote island—to look into the decades-old disappearance of his niece, whom he suspects was murdered by one of their relatives. Enlisting the help of a young woman (the titular girl with tattoo), an antisocial cyberpunk hacker who has suffered the abuse of men all her life, the journalist moves into a cottage on the Vangers’ island and begins digging into the long-buried past.

The tableau of a prominent Scandinavian family being rent apart by suppressed secrets seems lifted from Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish Dogme 95 gem The Celebration (1998) (the secrets are the usual suspects—incest, sex murders, Nazism); the multiply pierced, coldly violent hackstress is a dead ringer for Molly Millions from William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (and other Gibson stories); the beleaguered detective in the frozen rural North recalls a better version of Nordic noir, Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia (1997); and there’s even some cryptic biblical hoo-ha that smacks of The Da Vinci Code. Larsson (and the screenwriters) weave these borrowed elements gracefully, but this still doesn’t account for the film’s rapturous reception in Europe.

Besides the stark, magic-hour beauty of the Vanger clan’s island and Michael Nyqvist’s understated, empathetic turn as the investigative journalist, the film is primarily distinguished by the taut, thoroughly credible performance of newcomer Noomi Rapace as the young, sexually abused female hacker. As a motorcycle-riding Valkyrie exacting harsh vengeance for every woman and girl who has been raped, molested, or harassed by men, she is the heart of the film, and Rapace owns the part. The novel and film’s original title was Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), and the story is really more about her than the twisted Faulknerian shame of the Vanger family. Note to Hollywood: If Neuromancer ever gets out of development hell, the producers should give Rapace a call.

— Andrew Hultkrans

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens Friday, March 19.