Movies: The New Yorker All Is Lost A lonely yachtsman (Robert Redford), sailing the Indian Ocean, is asleep in his cabin when a floating steel shipping container bashes a hole in the side of his craft. The boat then gets assailed by weather and every kind of misfortune; Redford (whose character has no name), struggling to survive, grows increasingly battered and hungry. This remarkably radical experiment by the writer-director J. C. Chandor echoes such literary classics as Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." But Chandor's conception is unimaginable as anything but a movie. It's virtually wordless, soberly spectacular, and vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed attention for a tight hundred minutes. Redford, now seventy-seven, is in great shape, and the planes of his face - cheekbones, jawline, forehead - have held up. The shell is wrinkled, but the strength of character comes through, and he does more acting in this film than he has done in all his earlier ones put together. - David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 10/21/13.) In wide release. Bastards To avenge the violent sexual abuse of his niece by a big-businessman, a seaman (Vincent Lindon) jumps ship, takes an apartment in the predator's building, and seduces his wife (Chiara Mastroianni), even while pursuing his own investigation into the crime. The sailor feels guilty - years earlier, he ceded his share in the family shoe factory to his sister and her husband, who incurred ruinous debts to the tycoon. The synthetic but tightly wound plot leaves a hunger for resolution, but the director, Claire Denis, instead makes familiar lurches at social critique and gender politics. Images of the victim (Lola Créton) wandering naked in the street suggest that the female gaze on the female body is no guarantee of empathetic sensibility. Working with the cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis delivers a few shots that get at the heart of surfaces and a few closeups that conjure the heart of character; a concluding flourish evokes the heart of darkness, but scantly - the movie ends where it might have begun, and merely states mysteries that remain unexplored. In French. - Richard Brody (In limited release.) The Big Sky Howard Hawks's loose-limbed 1952 Western begins with the jaunty gunslinger Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas) and the aggressive young pioneer Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) meeting cute in the underbrush, and their campout plays like the start of a big affair. The duo, joined by Boone's Uncle Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt), an antic old coot who turns out to be a serious explorer with a deep and loving knowledge of Native American culture, sign on for a fur-trading expedition up the Missouri River to Blackfoot country - a trip that depends on the troupe's protection of a young Indian woman (Elizabeth Threatt) whom the men are returning to her family. Boone's long-festering hatred of Indians threatens the mission, but, as ever with Hawks, conflict feeds love - which proves even more dangerous. The struggle with enemies and the elements leaves its mark on Jim: from a sprained ankle to a gunshot wound to an amputated finger (a symbolic castration that foreshadows romantic anguish), he is the sacrificial body, the virile hero whom the great national adventure seemingly turns old in real time. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Nov. 10.) Blue Is the Warmest Color Three hours of love, sex, and food, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the director Abdellatif Kechiche and his two main performers. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high-school student in Lille, is always ravenous, often blushing, and unsure about the hungers of her heart. After a couple of early misses, she finds herself drawn, or helplessly pulled, toward Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is in her fourth year of art school - older and wiser, you might think, although it is Adèle who lusts and suffers her way into a more lasting wisdom. The camera studies the women's faces with unstinting devotion, and they repay that curiosity, through flirtation and fracas, as we follow Adèle's fortunes over many years. The movie has gained a certain notoriety for its unabashed view of her sexual encounters; those desires, however, are not set apart like islands but folded into the landscape of her life, more of which is probably spent in the classroom and the kitchen than in the bedroom. Three hours, in short, is only just enough. We are left wanting more. In French. - Anthony Lane (10/28/13) (In limited release.) The Counselor The director Ridley Scott's thriller, written by Cormac McCarthy, joins a modicum of knowledge about drug lords" ruthless violence to a repressed glee in depicting it. The unnamed protagonist is a gangland lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who goes in on a drug deal and gets in over his head with psychopathic killers. The script spreads the action worldwide and paper-thin, and the supporting luminaries - including Penélope Cruz, as the lawyer's girlfriend; Javier Bardem, as a client; Cameron Diaz, as the client's wild lover; Brad Pitt, as a smooth operator; and Bruno Ganz, as a diamond dealer - are stuck playing clichés who spout clichés. The dialogue alternates between throwaway snark and pseudo-philosophical criminal cant; each scene serves as little more than an index card for the mechanistic plot, which Scott films in a glossy and fluid style befitting an industrial promotion for the movie's high-tech weaponry. - R.B. (In wide release.) Dallas Buyers Club Matthew McConaughey, the gleaming young man of a few years ago - an easygoing sport who, spiritually, never seemed more than fifty yards from the beach - completes his transformation into a great actor with his performance as the real-life Ron Woodroof, an electrician, rodeo hot shot, and hetero fornicator who, in 1985, is diagnosed as being H.I.V.-positive. After his initial disbelief, Woodroof pulls himself together and begins importing drugs from all over the world, selling a kind of pre-scientific cocktail to afflicted young men in the Dallas area. The French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée shot the bulk of the movie at trailer camps, scrappy construction sites, and seamy rodeo pens. He doesn't clean anything up, and he doesn't avoid scenes of suffering. But he has given the film the pace and the verve of a classic commercial movie such as "Erin Brockovich" - both are stories about a cocky, self-taught outsider who takes on the establishment. Woodroof, the American rodeo bum, is reborn as both a huckster and a savior (in this case, the distinction seems meaningless). Jared Leto gives a sensational performance as a cross-dressing AIDS patient who goes into business with Woodroof. The tough-minded script is by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack. - D.D. (11/4/13) (In wide release.) Diana If you are going to make a film about the late Princess of Wales, you are obviously going to choose the guy who directed "Downfall," about the last days of Hitler, and the actress who played opposite King Kong. But why concentrate on the dull and testy affair that Diana (Naomi Watts) enjoyed with a hardworking heart surgeon (Naveen Andrews), given that its dramatic highlight comes when he hides in the back of her car? And why burden the story with a script, by Stephen Jeffreys, that S. J. Perelman would have considered too ludicrous by half? Yet, although Oliver Hirschbiegel's film has been met with flaming hostility in Britain, there is more to it than meets the ear. Watts may be too short for the role, but she nails some vital things: the rangy stride and the breathy voice, which, like Tony Blair's, could make even sincerity sound bogus. Also, if you could watch the movie with the sound off, you might notice how carefully the camera plots Diana's entrapment in an endlessly probing world and explores her solitude - right down to the final image of her, caught on closed-circuit television, in the elevator of a Paris hotel. - A.L. (In wide release.) Ender's Game Any Samuel Beckett fans hoping that this might be a bold cinematic reinvention of "Endgame" will be disappointed. Indeed, most adults will find it hard to comprehend and even harder to endure. Asa Butterfield plays Ender Wiggin (one of many laughable names in the dramatis personae), a pale-faced adolescent who is offered the minor, take-it-or-leave-it task of saving the human race. We are under attack from the Formics, an antlike species that will not be deterred even with a giant can of Raid. Ender and his contemporaries are crucial to our fate because - and this is made quite explicit - they are good at video games. A talent for computer simulation on the galactic battlefield has become the modern equivalent of military prowess, and Ender himself is viewed as messianic. Gavin Hood's film, in other words, is not just aimed at teen-agers but solemnly dedicated to their apotheosis; its implication is that they should be urged to stay in their bedrooms and burnish their online skills, in the interests of civilization. Parents, have you considered a boycott? With Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, and Harrison Ford, who looks both tired and bored. - A.L. (In wide release.) I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar This quiet, stark love story, from 1991, is Philippe Garrel's most radical attempt at confessional melodrama. The long-range tale starts with a simple setup - two bohemian couples in a beach house, talking about love - and quickly crystallizes around one pair, the romantic dialectician Gérard (Benoît Régent) and a troubled woman, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege), and their bitter breakup. When they get back together, it's a match made with heroin and other artificial pleasures. After their inevitable degradation, Gérard manages to remake his life, into which Marianne once again intrudes. Holding tight to his characters with long takes and closeups, capturing them only at the breaking points in their lives, Garrel balances a hypnotic romanticism with the frightening lurch of unsteady emotions. Leaping effortlessly, audaciously ahead in time, the fractured form embodies Garrel's themes: the speed of life passing, the inescapable burden of memory. He dedicates the film to the singer Nico, with whom he lived in the seventies, and who died in 1988. In French. - R.B. (French Institute Alliance Française; Nov. 12.) Red Line 7000 Starting in the nineteen-twenties, Howard Hawks filmed love and death among tough men in dangerous professions and the well-travelled women who are drawn to them. But on this movie, from 1965 - his last in a contemporary setting - the rapidly changing times disturbed his long-established habits. The story, about the romantic wranglings of stock-car racers on the Southern circuit, is mainly a string of erotic confrontations that mask vulnerability with pugnacious banter. But the young James Caan, in his first leading role, brings something new to the Hawksian universe: a compressed, combustible neurosis, embedded in a Method-juiced bundle of tics and involutions. The brassy Hollywood stabs at rock music, the fashions caught between 007 and bluejeans, and the casual manners of the Pepsi Generation only heighten the contrast between Hawks's typical brisk suaveness and the air of shambling confessionalism, with its implications of therapy and regression. The supercharged sexual ambiguities reach their apex in a stunning morning-after scene, filmed in a tense three-minute take, between a deflowered virgin (Laura Devon) and a swaggering rural stud (John Robert Crawford); it's one of the greatest bedroom moments in cinema. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Nov. 10.) 12 Years a Slave Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an African-American born and educated in New York State, is a musician living a gracious life with his family when, in 1841, he's kidnapped while on tour in Washington, D.C., and sold to the owner of a Louisiana plantation, where he's traded, loaned out, and used as collateral for a mortgage. Throughout his brutal years of captivity, he maintains the enraged consciousness of a free man, yet he can't reveal much of his mind and temperament without incurring the wrath of men and women whose self-esteem is based on the belief that he's an animal. This true story (based on Northup's 1853 book) has been turned into a soberly powerful, beautiful film by the British director Steve McQueen, who, after several ritualized features ("Hunger" and "Shame"), has powerfully entered the larger world of social reality, landscape, history, and narrative construction. With Michael Fassbender, as a psychotic plantation owner; Sarah Paulson, as his calculating wife; Lupita Nyong'o, as his slave mistress; Alfre Woodard, as a cynical plantation mistress; and Paul Dano, as a brainless overseer. Some of the scenes are almost unbearable in their cruelty. - D.D. (10/21/13) (In wide release.) The Wind Rises The melancholy sweetness of this animated historical drama - based on the true story of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese boy, born in 1903, who dreams of airplanes, becomes a leading aeronautical engineer for Mitsubishi, and gets caught up unwillingly in the buildup to the Second World War - owes much to the painterly virtuosity of the director Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation, whether it's applied to the tender intimacy of faces or to the horrific devastation of the earthquake of 1923. Jiro's stepwise progress from hardworking student to supreme inventor - and the awakening of his sense of impending doom in the face of his unswerving devotion to industrial aesthetics - is a deep and subtle story, but it is undercut by a self-conscious strain of sentimentalized visual poetry that sacrifices astonishment to admiration and invention to cuteness. The studied whimsy hits plot points on the nose and seems likelier to inspire calculation than imagination; rather than just telling a story of regimentation, the movie feels regimented. In Japanese. - R.B. (In limited release.) About Time Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Nov. 8. At Berkeley Frederick Wiseman directed this documentary, about the administration of the University of California at Berkeley. In limited release. Thor: The Dark World An action sequel, in which the comic-book character Thor fights to save the universe from primordial enemies. Directed by Alan Taylor; starring Chris Hemsworth. Reviewed in Now Playing. American Promise: In limited release. Bad Grandpa: In wide release. These Birds Walk: In limited release. Titles in bold are reviewed. Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - Special screenings. Nov. 8 at 7:30 and Nov. 9-10 at 4:30 and 7:30: "Far from Afghanistan" (2012, John Gianvito, Jon Jost, Minda Martin, Travis Wilkerson, and Soon-Mi Yoo). Asia Society Park Ave. at 70th St. (212-288-6400) - "The Iranian New Wave." Nov. 8 at 6:30: "The Lost Cinema" (2007, Jamsheed Akrami). • Nov. 9 at 6: "Dead End" (1977, Parviz Sayyad). BAM Cinématek 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - "Overdue." Nov. 6 at 4:30 and 9:45: "In the Mouth of Madness" (1994, John Carpenter). The 9:45 screening will be introduced by the critics Nick Pinkerton and Nic Rapold. • Nov. 6 at 7: "Dangerous Game" (1993, Abel Ferrara), introduced by Pinkerton and Rapold. • The films of Jan Nemec. Nov. 8-12 (call for showtimes): "Diamonds of the Night" (1964). • Nov. 9 at 7: "A Report on the Party and Guests" (1966). • Nov. 10 at 4:30: "Martyrs of Love" (1967) and "Mother and Son" (1967). Film Forum W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110) - In revival. Nov. 8-14 at 1, 4:35, 8:10, and 10: "Sidewalk Stories" (1989, Charles Lane). • Nov. 8-14 at 3 and 6:35: "The Freshman" (1925, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor; silent). French Institute Alliance Française 55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160) - The films of Philippe Garrel. Nov. 12 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar." Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480) - "To Save and Project." Nov. 6 at 6:30: "It's a Gift" (1934, Norman Z. McLeod), introduced by E. L. Doctorow. • Nov. 7 at 6:30: "Weekend of a Champion" (1971/2012, Frank Simon). • Nov. 9 at 2: "Batang West Side" (2001, Lav Diaz). • Nov. 9 at 8: "Manila in the Claws of Light" (1975, Lino Brocka). Museum of the Moving Image 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - The films of Howard Hawks. Nov. 9 at 2: "Rio Lobo" (1970). • Nov. 10 at 2: "Red Line 7000." • Nov. 10 at 4:30: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953). • Nov. 10 at 7: "The Big Sky."