All the Light in the Sky The director Joe Swanberg draws magic from a magical location - an oceanfront enclave of homes perched alluringly above the lapping waters of the Pacific and doomed by erosion. There, Marie (Jane Adams), a forty-five-year-old actress, serenely floats on the passing time as she does, in a wetsuit, on the shimmering sea below. Awaiting roles that have more or less stopped coming, dreaming of love that never clicks, she hosts her niece from New York, Faye (Sophia Takal), a young actress. In flowing days and evenings of lunches and parties with friends and neighbors, Marie and Faye talk through and play out shudderingly big questions - the prospect of marriage and children, the artistic calling, the weight of family history. Adams (one of the secret heroines of the recent cinema) and Takal - aided by nimble cohorts, including Larry Fessenden, Kent Osborne, Lindsay Burdge, and Ti West - bring a calm, focussed urgency to every chat and tussle. With his solar measurements and celestial allusions, the real-life environmental entrepreneur David Siskind gives the drama a cosmic context, and Swanberg, who is also the cinematographer, makes luminous images to match. - Richard Brody (In limited release and video on demand.) A series of astonishments, and one of the most pleasurable American movies in years. The director David O. Russell takes off from the Abscam affair - a bizarre investigation in which the F.B.I., beginning in 1978, called on an indicted swindler from the Bronx to help ensnare corrupt congressmen. The elaborate sting involved two "Arab sheikhs" (both F.B.I. employees), allegedly eager to invest money in Atlantic City's nascent casino operations. Russell both simplifies and juices up a tale that is already close to preposterous, and he sets the action in a magical space (ruled by Shakespeare and inhabited by Lubitsch and Sturges) that is faster and more volatile than common realism but not as loosely strung as farce. His people act stupidly because they desperately want things. Russell's extraordinary cast, taking huge risks, is the equal of any group from Hollywood's Golden Age. Christian Bale, bearded, toupéed, and forty pounds heavier, is the swindler Irving Rosenfeld; Amy Adams, in dresses cleaved to her waist, is his accomplice; Bradley Cooper, in his best performance to date, plays a high-strung F.B.I. agent who isn't as bright as he thinks he is; Jennifer Lawrence, moving effortlessly from sensual indolence to strident bitchiness, is Irving's luscious nut-brain wife; and Jeremy Renner, with a serious pompadour, is the New Jersey politician they all corrupt. - David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 12/16/13.) (In wide release. Museum of the Moving Image; Dec. 19.) Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues The comic spontaneity is largely gone from this sequel, set in 1980, which brings Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and his merry band of newshounds (Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, and David Koechner) back from off-the-air exile to New York for a new adventure: the début of the first round-the-clock news channel. There, relegated to the lobster shift, Burgundy challenges the prime-time anchor (James Marsden) to a ratings duel and makes history with an accidental race to the bottom. A dash of outrageous visual humor (notably, in a car-wreck scene) and crazily crude sex talk can't compensate for the formulaic stiffness that dominates - though Carell has some riotous moments of bewildered repression, and Kristen Wiig, as the space-cadet receptionist who plays his love interest, parodies the world of high art to yield loopy wonder. Some intended post-racial humor, meant to knowingly mock stereotypes, perpetuates them with a tin ear. Directed by Adam McKay, who co-wrote the script with Ferrell. - R.B. (In wide release.) Many of Armstrong's former teammates, who covered for him and, in some cases, were punished for the same violations he was committing, speak of him with a mixture of admiration and rue. - D.D. (12/2/13) (In limited release.) Black Narcissus This lush 1947 adaptation of Rumer Godden's 1939 novel, about Anglican nuns wrestling with the sensuality that surrounds their Himalayan mission, keeps the screen aglow and the mind agog. Made by the British producing-directing-writing team the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), it's about faith and temptation; much of the Archers" career is summed up when a British estate manager (David Farrar) tells the Sister Superior (a suggestively tense Deborah Kerr), "There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated." Without leaving England, Powell and Pressburger created a rapturous landscape whose colors seem to spill over onto the nuns" off-white habits. This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l'oeil. With Flora Robson, Kathleen Byron, Sabu, and Jean Simmons (as a native girl). - Michael Sragow (Museum of the Moving Image; Dec. 22.) Unfortunately, this renders the film villain-free; there is nothing here to match the pushy mother from Hell who bestrode "Tangled." Gertrud Moving at the gravely impassioned pace of a symphonic adagio, Carl Theodor Dreyer's last film, from 1964, is a song of love - which it exalts with lyrical rapture and parses with philosophical precision. It opens with the title character (Nina Pens Rode), an opera singer of a certain age, leaving her husband (Bendt Rothe), a renowned lawyer, for a poor young composer. The story is the stuff of melodrama, but the controlled fury of Dreyer's method raises it to grand tragedy - most of all, in the return of Gertrud's first lover (Ebbe Rode), a poet of sexual liberation, now fifty, fastidious, and nostalgic. Filming their reunion in a pair of stupendous long takes (one running nearly ten minutes), Dreyer sublimates their pleasure and pain in the eternal drama of time passing and death approaching. Explicitly set during Freud's heyday and referring to experiments with hypnosis and dreams, Dreyer's film depicts repressed carnal desires that merge with Gertrud's inevitably frustrated spiritual one: the longing for a love so total and consuming that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. In Danish. - R.B. (Museum of Modern Art; Dec. 18-20.) If the antics of the beau monde disgust or exhaust you, stay away from Sorrentino's film; look no further, on the other hand, if you wish to know where, and in what guise, the spirit of Fellini remains at work - and, better still, at play. Hamilton A minor miracle. Matthew Porterfield's first film, barely an hour long, made for a pittance in his native Baltimore with nonprofessional actors on 16-mm. film, is one of the most original, moving, and accomplished American independent films ever. The story alone is touchingly simple - a teen-age mother, about to leave town for a month, wants her baby's young father to pay her a visit - but Porterfield's genius is revealed above all in the way he brings it to life. Exquisitely composed, unfolding gradually, suffused with light and color, his tender yet unsentimental images convey the graceful rhythms and quiet sorrows of young lives on hold. Porterfield is a master of time: here, an eight-minute trip takes eight minutes, but its progress is rich in visual epiphanies. The film builds to an unlikely, wondrous chase, and it leaves the viewer astonished and hungry for more. Porterfield followed up with "Putty Hill" and "I Used to Be Darker," remarkable and worthy successors. Released in 2006. - R.B. (Museum of Modern Art; Dec. 21-22.) The Marrying Kind Despite its buoyant tone and comic energy, George Cukor's drama of scenes from a marriage, as viewed in flashback by a couple in divorce court, is a scathing work of New York neorealism. Judy Holliday - tall, squawky, and full of purpose - and the muscular, raspy-voiced, impulsive Aldo Ray (in his first lead role) play Flo and Chet, two hardworking city people who meet cute in Central Park, marry amid a gaggle of relatives, move into a clean but soulless apartment in Peter Cooper Village, and find that minor irritations quickly become open wounds. Money worries are constant and get worse when children arrive; when family tragedy strikes, the fragile couple breaks down. The screenwriters, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, offer sharply nuanced scenes of tight bonds at work and home, and Cukor's agitated direction mixes emotions hard until they overheat. The courtroom framework, which turns the pain of memory into a therapeutic obligation, evokes a new era of cultural modernism - of the private realm exposed in glaring clinical light. Released in 1952. - R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Dec. 19.) The Past An Iranian man, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), peaceable and self-contained, arrives in France, to be greeted by his wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo). He has been absent for some years, and is returning because she wants a divorce; meanwhile, unwisely, he stays in her house. By a kind of narrative drip feed, we learn that Marie has no children by Ahmad, but two children by another man. Now she is pregnant by a third, Samir (Tahar Rahim), whom she wants to marry, and whose young son, Fouad, is also part of the household. As further characters are added (among them, Samir's wife, who is hospitalized), the tangle of relationships grows almost comically knotted. Yet the mood shifts ever further away from comedy, and there are times when the blend of chaos and gloom feels hard to endure; as Fouad, Elyes Aguis, with his tantrums and permanent frown, gives all too persuasive a picture of youthful distress. The director, Asghar Farhadi, caused a stir with "A Separation," set in Tehran; the new film makes less of an impact, in part because its Parisian backdrop is more familiar, and also because some of its symbolic choices - the glass wall that divides the couple at the start - seem more calculated. But his gift for pulling us deep into the story, and for conveying the major burdens of these supposedly minor lives, is unimpaired. In French and Farsi. - A.L. (Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.) Stalker In the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction drama from 1979, the near-future is a cold and mucky ruin, both physically and emotionally. A man whose strange status as a "stalker" allows him to enter the Zone - a sealed-off area of menace and promise - defies his distraught wife to lead two voyagers there, the cynical Writer and the rationalistic Professor. Their perilous trip, however, resembles nothing more than an escape through the marginal Soviet Union's industrial wastelands and highly militarized border regions to an isolated glade of psychedelia that stands in for the ostensibly utopian West. Tarkovsky realizes the allegorical tale with an overwhelming density of visual detail; the riot and clash of textures - between black-and-white and color, agonized contrasts of light and murk, shimmery reflections on vast pools of water, and abrading striations of grass and stone - form a frenzied vocabulary and lend the film the torrential inner force of Dostoyevskian rhetoric. One vast subterranean dialogue sequence, in which the three travellers wrangle over metaphysical fantasies and long-stifled grudges, could be borrowed directly from a grand existential novel. In Russian. - R.B. (BAM Cinématek; Dec. 18-19.) There's Always Tomorrow The director Douglas Sirk brings an Ibsenesque psychological acuity to this marital melodrama, from 1956. Cliff Groves (Fred MacMurray), a self-made California toy manufacturer whose wife, Marion (Joan Bennett), is preoccupied with their three children, is jolted from his routine by the visit of Norma Vale (Barbara Stanwyck), a former employee. Now a prominent New York fashion designer, Norma is a divorcée who, as Cliff discovers, has carried a torch for him since they last met, twenty years earlier. Dazzled by Norma's worldliness, Cliff is tempted to remake his life with her - but his teen-agers get suspicious and prepare to take action of their own. Sirk, who began his career in prewar Germany, infused his Hollywood films with a consciously high-cultural sophistication and irony. With an outsider's sharp eye for American artifacts, he invokes "An American Tragedy," a vulgar stage show, and Cliff's pathetic new creation, Rex the Walkie-Talkie Robot, to expose the muffled cries of pain beneath the proprieties of suburban comfort. In contrast to the typical stoic masculinity of fifties Hollywood, this is "A Doll's House" for the sensitive, passionate married man. - R.B. (Film Forum; Dec. 19.) Opening Dec. 20. Opening Dec. 18. August: Osage County An adaptation of the play by Tracy Letts, about a family's turmoil after the suicide of its patriarch. Directed by John Wells; starring Sam Shepard, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, and Juliette Lewis. Opening Dec. 25. Her The Invisible Woman A drama, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, about Charles Dickens's late-life affair with a younger woman (Felicity Jones). The New Rijksmuseum A documentary, directed by Oeke Hoogendijk, about the renovation of the Amsterdam art museum. Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese directed this drama, based on the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, a Long Island stockbroker who lived lavishly before being convicted of fraud. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio; co-starring Jonah Hill, Rob Reiner, and Margot Robbie. The Crash Reel: In limited release. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: In wide release. A Madea Christmas: In wide release. 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - "Ulrich Seidl's Paradise Trilogy." Call for showtimes. Dec. 18-19 and Dec. 22: "Paradise: Faith" (2012). • Dec. 18-20 and Dec. 22: "Paradise: Hope" (2012). • Dec. 19-22: "Paradise: Love" (2013). 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - Special screenings. Dec. 18-19 at 4:30 and 8: "Stalker." Dec. 18 at 1, 5:10, and 9:10: "The Furies" (1950, Anthony Mann). • Dec. 19 at 1, 4:25, and 7:50: "There's Always Tomorrow." • Dec. 19 at 2:45, 6:10, and 9:35: "All I Desire" (1953, Douglas Sirk). • Dec. 20 at 2:50, 6:20, and 9:50: "Forty Guns" (1957, Samuel Fuller). • Dec. 21 at 1:10, 5:10, and 9:10: "Clash by Night" (1952, Fritz Lang). • Dec. 22 at 3:20 and 7:20: "Stella Dallas" (1937, King Vidor). • Dec. 25-31 (call for showtimes): "Remember the Night" (1940, Mitchell Leisen). Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - The films of George Cukor. Dec. 19 at 1:30 and 6:30: "Rich and Famous" (1981). • Dec. 19 at 4:15 and 9:15: "The Marrying Kind." • Dec. 20 at 5:15 and Dec. 22 at 6:30: "Zaza" (1938). • Dec. 20 at 7:15: "Sylvia Scarlett" (1935). • Dec. 22 at 4 and 8:30: "Edward, My Son" (1949). • Dec. 25 at 7 and Dec. 27 at 3 and 8:30: "A Star Is Born" (1954). • Dec. 26 at 7:15 and Dec. 28 at 6:30: "The Actress" (1953). • Dec. 26 at 9:15 and Dec. 28 at 4:10: "A Life of Her Own" (1950). • Dec. 27 at 1 and 6:15: "What Price Hollywood?" (1932). • Dec. 28 at 8:30 and Dec. 29 at 1:20: "The Philadelphia Story" (1940). • Dec. 30 at 7:30: "Rockabye" (1932). • Dec. 31 at 4:45: "Born Yesterday" (1950). • Dec. 31 at 7: "It Should Happen to You" (1954). Dec. 18-20 at 1:30: "Gertrud." • "Films Albatros." Dec. 18 at 7 and Dec. 21 at 1:30: "The Burning Crucible" (1923, Ivan Mosjoukine; silent). • Dec. 21 at 7:30 and Dec. 22 at 5: "The Late Mathias Pascal" (1924, Marcel L'Herbier; silent). • Dec. 27 at 4 and Dec. 29 at 5: "The Italian Straw Hat" (1927, René Clair; silent). • Dec. 30 at 7 and Dec. 31 at 4: "The Lower Depths" (1936, Jean Renoir; in French). • "Our Town: Baltimore." Dec. 18 at 8: "Desperate Living" (1977, John Waters). • Dec. 21 at 2 and Dec. 22 at 5:30: "Hamilton." • Dec. 21 at 5 and Dec. 23 at 4:30: "I Used to Be Darker" (2013, Matthew Porterfield). 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - Special screening. Dec. 19 at 7: "American Hustle," followed by a discussion with the director, David O. Russell. • "See It Big! Dec. 20-21 at 3: "How Green Was My Valley" (1941, John Ford). • Dec. 22 at 3: "Black Narcissus." • Dec. 22 at 6: "Lola" (1961, Jacques Demy). • Dec. 28 at 3: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971, Robert Altman). • Dec. 29 at 2:30: "Persona" (1966, Ingmar Bergman).