Finalist: The New York Times, by Manohla Dargis

PARK CITY, Utah — Now in its 28th edition, the Sundance Film Festival has eased into a mellower groove, hallelujah and pass the parka. Despite the predictable hazards and hassles, like slip-sliding on black ice and waiting for shuttles in the frigid cold, it no longer is the nightmare it had become back when Paris Hilton and frat types descended. The economic downturn plays a part — there are fewer self-important industry players crowding the scene — as does the affable presence of the festival’s director, John Cooper, who took over in 2009.

 

These remain uncertain times in the independent-film world, as distributors continue to try to seduce ticket buyers away from the mainstream. Both Magnolia Pictures and IFC Films, for instance, now routinely show movies through video on demand before putting them on the big screen. That they continue to use brick-and-mortar theaters indicates that this strategy works for them, though it’s difficult to know what it means for the future of cinema. Audiences clearly still want to see indie movies in theaters (or at least festivals: last year’s Sundance lured some 45,000 attendees), but getting them to pony up for smaller, starless work remains tough, as suggested by the $1.3 million domestic box-office haul for “Another Earth,” which was picked up at Sundance 2011 by Fox Searchlight.

 

IN his 2004 book, “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film,” Peter Biskind recounts a striking story about October Films, the little movie company that could and sometimes did in the 1990s. It was December 1999 and October, which had helped push independent film into the mainstream, was at a crossroads. Barry Diller wanted to buy the company and have Scott Greenstein, an unpopular October executive, run it. Three October loyalists, including Bingham Ray, one of its founders, met to try and figure out what to do.

 

“We all came away,” John Schmidt, an October partner, said, “reaffirming the things we believed in deeply in terms of the kind of company we wanted, the morality of the company, what it stands for, how to treat people, friendship and loyalty — things that count more in the balance than taking a three-quarter of a million dollar a year job from Barry Diller.” I think that may be the only time I have ever read the word “morality” in a book about the movie industry. Certainly mushy talk about values and loyalty isn’t what feeds the celebrity-crazed entertainment maw, one reason why a lot of people, even passionate movie lovers, have never heard of Mr. Ray, who died at 57 on Jan. 23.

 

These days it is routine to find independent and studio-dependent releases, like “The Tree of Life” (a Fox Searchlight pickup) in the best picture lineup. That wasn’t always the case. In the mid ’90s, however, as studio-dependent films like “Pulp Fiction,” shook up critics and the box office, they also started to win increasing, increasingly bigger awards. By 1997 only one big-studio movie, “Jerry Maguire,” was up for best picture, a disparity that angered some insiders. “I resent this business of looking down on the studios,” William Mechanic, chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said at the time. “It’s chic of Miramax,” he continued, “to say that they’re independent when they’re owned by Disney.” He was right of course: independent film was hot, even if the biggest players were no longer independent. No matter. They called themselves independent, and the entertainment media gladly played along.

 

Those were heady times in the independent film world; it was a veritable gold rush characterized by hopeful dreams and excited talk about a new era in which aesthetically challenging, risky movies could breach the studio barricades and ring up fat returns. It’s no surprise that October Films, which also brought that eternal bad boy Lars Von Trier to wider American audiences (his “Breaking the Waves” earned an Oscar nomination in 1997) caught Hollywood’s eye. In Mr. Biskind’s book Chris McGurk, the former chief operating officer of Universal Pictures, explained why the studio bought 51 percent of October in 1997: “We saw an opportunity to take October Films and position it as the anti-Miramax, the Bingham Ray alternative, with Bingham the more talent-friendly Harvey Weinstein.”

 

It would be a mistake to reduce Mr. Ray’s career to being the anti-Harvey Weinstein, even if there’s also some truth to this description. In the ’90s Mr. Weinstein, who by then had already earned the nickname Harvey Scissorhands (because of his interfering ways with filmmakers), became the most visible nominally independent figure in America, partly because of the movies Miramax released but also because of his genius for self-promotion. As Miramax’s movies grew bigger and increasingly more bloated, and its focus shifted from risky little releases like Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” to would-be blockbusters like “Cold Mountain,” it became incontrovertible that authentic independence — of vision, style, aesthetics and politics — had nothing to do with the Miramax machine.

 

 

SOON after Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” had its premiere in Paris in 1927, he wrote a letter to his audience, soliciting open eyes and hearts. “I have made,” he wrote, “a tangible effort toward a somewhat richer and more elevated form of cinema.” He had created a film towering in ambition, scale, cost, narrative and technical innovations, and believed that nothing less than “the future of the cinema” was at stake. His audacity had merit. The origins of the widescreen image can be traced to “Napoleon,” which also featured hand-held camerawork, eye-blink-fast editing, gorgeous tints, densely layered superimpositions and images shot from a pendulum, a sled, a bicycle and a galloping horse.

 

The film was an astonishment, and it was doomed. One hurdle was its length — his early versions ran from 3 hours to 6 hours 28 minutes (down from 9 hours) — while other difficulties were posed by Gance’s advances, specifically a process later called Polyvision that extended the visual plane into a panorama or three separate images and that required three screens to show it. Partly as a consequence, distributors and exhibitors took harsh liberties: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cut it down to around 70 minutes for the American release, a butchering that seemed to encourage bad reviews. Gance continued to rework the film, adding sound for a 1935 version and, decades later, new material. Yet even as he was taking it apart, others — notably the British historian Kevin Brownlow — were trying to restore “Napoleon” to its original glory.

 

Budget woes forced him to settle for an abridged telling of Napoleon’s life, but this was about the only limitation that he allowed. Cinema was young, and so was he, and he burned with ambition for both the art and his film. He wanted viewers not simply to watch “Napoleon,” but also to become participants in a revolution of his making. To that end he liberated the camera, setting it in almost constant motion. For a schoolyard snowball fight during Napoleon’s childhood, the camera was attached to a cameraman’s body, which allowed Gance to thrust the viewer into the melee. He sought a similar immersion with Polyvision, which tripled the image size. For one critic these enlarged visuals meant that the “spectators suddenly become a crowd watching a crowd”; they also helped inspire Henri Chrétien to invent CinemaScope.

 

“Napoleon,” under its full title “Napoléon Vu par Abel Gance,” had its admirers when Gance rushed an edit of three or so hours into the Théâtre National de l’Opéra for the premiere, where, as Mr. Brownlow writes in his book, the audience included the future enemies Marshal Pétain and Charles de Gaulle. Gance’s problems during production, including budget shortfalls and on-set calamities, were as well known as his brilliance. Perhaps because of the buildup, and because of some technical mishaps during the premiere, the reviews were strong but conditional. A few critics attacked its spectacular advances; one labeled the film “a Bonaparte for apprentice fascists.”

 

“Napoleon” was brutally received in the United States when it, or rather the MGM hatchet job, was released here in 1929. In one review a wisenheimer at Variety wrote that it was “made by the French for the French.” The film “doesn’t mean anything to the great horde of picture house goers over here,” he continued. “Nap wasn’t good looking enough and they didn’t put in the right scenes for the flaps here.” Then, because of a series of untimely events — including the advent of sound — the full “Napoleon” disappeared, becoming one of cinema’s most elusive objects of desire, alongside Erich Von Stroheim’s nearly 10-hour version of “Greed.”

 

Afterward this four-hour “Napoleon” was shown infrequently and never released on DVD in America, though it was put out on VHS and laserdisc. Mr. Brownlow’s complete restoration never made it over here, until now. The reasons are clouded, and in keeping with the film’s tortured history. In 2004, at the National Film Theater in London, Mr. Brownlow said Francis Ford Coppola had “suppressed the full version for the last 23 years.” Mr. Brownlow suggested that the problem was the score by Carmine Coppola (father of Francis) fit the four-hour cut shown in 1981 and not Mr. Brownlow’s restoration, which by 2000 had grown to its present 5 hours 31 minutes. At the time he said he hoped it could be sorted out, and clearly something has been agreed upon, although the details remain murky.

 

When I recently reached Mr. Brownlow, who spoke by phone from his London office, he declined to talk about Francis Ford Coppola’s past involvement with “Napoleon.” “No way we can go into that,” he said. James Mockoski, who works as an archivist at Zoetrope, was similarly reluctant to discuss the past. The presentation at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, he said by phone, “is something that people wanted to see and has been long in coming.” Mr. Mockoski said the reason “Napoleon” hadn’t been shown in the United States came down to simple economics: it’s expensive. “We are a small company,” he said. “It’s not like this is bringing a lot of money in.” He added, “Of course we want people to see it.”

 

“Napoleon” doesn’t come cheap, especially when accompanied by a full orchestra, as it will be at the festival, where Carl Davis will conduct his score with the Oakland East Bay Symphony. (The film is being shown at the 3,000-seat Art Deco Paramount Theater in Oakland because there isn’t a screen big enough in San Francisco.) These four shows, according to the festival’s executive director, Stacey Wisnia, will cost about $720,000. The print and its rights alone run about $130,000; the symphony, conductor and understudy eat up another $240,000. The festival is hoping movie lovers will be so tempted by “Napoleon” that they’ll pay $40 to $120 a ticket for an event that begins in the afternoon and incorporates three intermissions, including a dinner break.

 

For American cinephiles there’s an indisputable reason to see “Napoleon” now: film. “This print will probably never be seen again in the United States,” Mr. Harris said, given that a digital restoration is under way. (Version 21?) “Projectors are going away,” he said and, alas, so too is film. Mr. Harris agreed with the characterization of the festival screenings as a kind of a test run for the digital restoration, which suggests that he and Zoetrope have plans for future exploitation, including, maybe, a DVD and Blu-ray. Over its history “Napoleon” has been taken apart and pieced back together by so many hands, and it’s somehow survived distributor assaults, Gance’s tinkering, legal suits, rights claims and dueling restorations. In the end all that should matter is that this elusive, seemingly indestructible film — which, as Mr. Brownlow said, has “found its place again in world cinema” — be seen.

There’s a short anxious scene in the new film “The Hunger Games” when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), races through a deep, dark forest; falls down a hill; and rolls and rolls, only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown. Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy and now a rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. When she runs through that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed.

 

For as long as this brief scene lasts, it seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s “Last of the Mohicans” if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Alas, Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments “Pleasantville” and “Seabiscuit,” and whose script credits include “Big,” has a way of smoothing even modestly irregular edges. Katniss, who for years has bagged game to keep her family from starving, was created for rough stuff — for beating the odds and the state, for hunting squirrel and people both — far rougher than Mr. Ross often seems comfortable with, perhaps because of disposition, inclination or some behind-the-scenes executive mandate.

 

For decades Nathaniel Dorsky has been making work of rare and sometimes startling beauty. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because he makes short, silent experimental films that feature brightly colored flowers, bursts of sunlight and shifting pools of shadow instead of characters, plots and stories. Mostly he remains unknown to the larger audience because his work is relegated to that ghetto known as American avant-garde cinema. On Monday a program of his recent work will be shown in downtown Los Angeles at Redcat, an exhibition space in Walt Disney Concert Hall; Mr. Dorsky, who talks about his work in accessible, charming fashion, is scheduled to appear in person. On Friday another program of his work will be at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, also in Los Angeles.

 

Watching Mr. Dorsky’s films is a joy. Explaining why they can have such a profound effect on you, however, can present something of a challenge, partly because the films can’t be reduced to the old boy-meets-girl or any other kind of plot synopsis. This means you may watch them once or twice, perhaps while scribbling notes (and diagrams) in the dark, and then try to consider what you saw. As I recall, the 18 ½-minute “Compline” (2009) opens with glistening bare tree branches that create vertical slashes across the image. What follows initially appears random — pulses of yellow light, flashes of green leaves — but from the vertical lines of purple flowers in one shot and what look like parallel threads of yarn in another, it becomes clear that choices have been made here.

 

Although the narratively conditioned brain may attempt to piece together a story from these images (once upon a time in winter there was a tree), Mr. Dorsky’s work requires a different kind of engagement. These are films created for contemplation, and they both invite and resist interpretation. Consider Mr. Dorsky’s fondness for windows that, because of the light, camera angle and his manipulations, turn into mirrors and prisms. In a single image of a restaurant window it’s possible at once to see the interior of the empty space with its set tables, the gleaming glass and the street scene reflected in it, a multiplicity that has a material, concrete aspect (this is a restaurant without patrons) and also room for lyricism (this is a restaurant yearning for patrons).

 

Because the films are silent and don’t come with explanatory on-screen text, you can luxuriate in the visual complexity of the images. You may, amid all this loveliness, worry about what it all means. Although Mr. Dorsky gestures in certain interpretive directions, notably with his titles — “Compline” is the name of the final prayer of the day in the Roman Catholic Church — he never forces you down this or that path. Then again, what can the image of eye-poppingly purple flowers mean? “Interpretation,” as Susan Sontag memorably wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” A few pages later in the same essay, “Against Interpretation,” she extols transparence in art (and criticism), writing that it “means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”

 

Art, as Sontag persuasively argued, doesn’t stand for something else but is itself a thing, and while Mr. Dorsky’s films can inspire explanatory reveries, they are also beautiful objects. His 2009 “Sarabande” — the name of a slow dance in triple time — opens with what looks like the sun or a bright moon shining behind a tangle of dark, bare tree branches and what may be mesh fencing. The shot lasts for about 30 seconds, during which a black blot (a cloud?) moves left, bringing more light into the frame. What follows in the next 14 or so minutes are gently hovering, sometimes layered and obliquely angled images of windows and reflections, as well as more flowers and trees. The film ends with the sun dipping (or rising) behind trees that stretches across the frame.

 

Here’s some of what else you see in “Sarabande”: a woman walking through a glass door while pulling and pushing a carriage, a green blur, a yellow circle, two luminescent red leaves in extreme close-up. As one image gives way to the next, a series of contrasts, even gentle tensions emerge: interior and exterior, bright and opaque, sharp and blurred, a perception of movement and stillness. While some of what you see is readily distinguishable, at other times it’s impossible to know what you’re looking at beyond shifting blots of black. Among the most striking moments are floaty shots of dense, seemingly impenetrable foliage that suggest a tentative, searching presence behind the camera.

 

Toward the end of “Sarabande” Mr. Dorsky cuts to the orange flowers of some green aloe plants set against a dark blue sky, the camera panning down from the spearlike blooms along the thin stems. The flowers pop out because of their brightness, the clarity of the image and the emphatic camera movement that insistently announces the human being shooting it. The directness of the image (behold, the bloom) is in contrast to many of the earlier, partially concealed shots, and this progression from the obscure to the obvious literalizes the experience — from darkness to revelation, unknowing to knowing — of watching the film itself.

 

“If we do relinquish control,” Mr. Dorsky wrote in his short 2003 book “Devotional Cinema,” “we suddenly see a hidden world, one that has existed all along right in front of us. In a flash, the uncanny presence of the poetic and vibrant world, ripe with mystery, stands before us.”

 

Not all of Mr. Dorsky’s films unfold in the same way, despite some recurrent motifs and juxtapositions, notably between the natural world and its human-made counterpart. Again and again, in images of trees and plants glimpsed through windows and in shadow, there’s a strong sense in Mr. Dorsky’s work that nature is just out of grasp, intoxicatingly near and unreachable. And then abruptly he will plunge deep into a thicket of branches or a tangle of flowering plants that looks like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, the camera moving through the foliage like a bushwhacker or holding steady on the gently bobbing blossoms. In several shots he brightens and darkens the image, a manipulation that underscores the sense of discovery.

 

There’s a sense of freedom in these visions of nature. Even so, one of the most stunning images in his recent work is of the flower shop seen briefly in the film “The Return” (2011), a shot that invokes a famous moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” when James Stewart’s character spies on Kim Novak’s mystery woman. Whether calculated or serendipitous — Mr. Dorsky lives in San Francisco, where “Vertigo” is set — the flower store, like all his images of trees seen through windows, bridges the natural and human-created worlds. Like “Sarabande,” “The Return” ends with an image of the sun pushing past a cloud, as if insisting on its reappearance. Yet while Mr. Dorsky ends with nature, the image’s moody beauty affirms that this is also very much a representation, a devotional song, art.

 

In a post-screening discussion at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, Mr. Dorsky said his films were of “the world as it comes through the hole of” his Bolex camera. Thoreau said that “you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” There’s a similar imperative, an urgency, about being in the here and the now in Mr. Dorsky’s work, even if the world in his films is of his own making. (Thoreau wrote that it was “necessary to see objects by moonlight — as well as sunlight — to get a complete notion of them,” which nicely fits Mr. Dorsky’s duskier imagery.)

 

Mr. Dorsky, who is 68 and makes a living as a film editor, has said that he can spend months just shooting material while walking around with his 16-millimeter camera, a pursuit he has continued even after his favorite film stock disappeared. Recently, while speaking on the phone from San Francisco, he told a story about a reluctant visit to a friend’s home. He didn’t want to go, but did, bringing his camera with him, as is his custom. During the visit sunlight poured into the room, bathing his friend’s arm in an ethereal gold. The shot made it into “Pastourelle” (2010) — a type of lyric poetry — and immortalized a moment in time and a friendship. “I went out with a camera,” Mr. Dorsky said, in describing his entry into filmmaking, “and tried to discover things.”

Wes Anderson makes films about small worlds in which big things happen: love, heartbreak, calamities, death. In his latest, the wondrous storybook tale “Moonrise Kingdom,” a girl and a boy, both 12, run off to a remote inlet on an island where most of the adults seem disappointed and more than a little sad. The girl and the boy are very serious — about love, their plans, books, life itself — and often act older than their age. She wears bright blue eyeliner; he puffs on a corncob pipe. You wonder what their hurry is, given that here adulthood, with its quarrels, regrets and anguished pillow talk, can feel as dangerous as the storm that’s hurtling toward the island, ready to blow it all down.

 

The two young romantics in “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival on May 16, are gifted and, according to grown-ups who are supposed to know about such things, problem children. Suzy (Kara Hayward) definitely knows this about herself because she discovered a copy of a pamphlet, “Coping With the Very Troubled Child,” on top of the family fridge. She does have a temper, but she also has three younger brothers, which may help explain her tantrums. Yet, like many characters in Mr. Anderson’s films, she’s also troubled on a deeper level, beset by an existential despair that waned when, while getting ready for a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Noye’s Fludde” a year earlier, she met her match, her soul mate, her co-conspirator, Sam (Jared Gilman).

 

The film opens shortly before the two rendezvous in a field — she brings her favorite books in a suitcase; he brings her flowers and the camping gear — and head off on a journey that’s part quest, part romance, with a touch of film noir and a hint of the French New Wave. Along the way, there are dangers, both natural and human, and finally paradise, in a small, pretty cove they rename Moonrise Kingdom. (Working with his regular cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, Mr. Anderson softens the colors and gives them the slight tint of a faded Polaroid photograph.) There, with a tent, a French pop song and unembarrassed honesty (Sam warns Suzy that he may wet the bed), they consummate, metaphorically, an enchanted, chaste affair capped with a hilariously symbolic deflowering.

 

Since his first feature in 1996, “Bottle Rocket,” Mr. Anderson has directed a series of personal films about characters — a schoolboy visionary, traveling brothers, wily thieves — who, through their harebrained schemes, grand pursuits or art (these are finally indistinguishable), transcend the ordinary. The same is true in “Moonrise Kingdom,” which traces how Suzy and Sam met, how they wrote to each other, shared their secrets and plans, and then went off on their adventure (their life), throwing the island’s adults into a panic. In other words, it’s about how they construct a world parallel to the larger one, carving out an intensely individual space and defining themselves through their shared visions and actions, which means that the movie is also very much about creation as an act of self-creation.

 

Like many of Mr. Anderson’s films, including his last one, the truly fantastic “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” there’s a deliberate, self-conscious once-upon-a-time quality to “Moonrise Kingdom.” From the minute the film opens, quickly settling on a needlepoint image of a house — a representation of the one in which Suzy lives, where it all begins — Mr. Anderson, who’s more fabulist than traditional realist, underscores the obvious point that you’re watching a story. This heightened sense of self-awareness is underscored by the exhilarating camera movements that sweep across the house from right to left, left to right, and up and down, and take you on a time and space tour through the house, past Suzy’s father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, both touching).

 

A marvel of choreographed motion, machine and human, this overture introduces the Bishops, suggesting who they are and what they’re like (the books indicate that this is a reading family), and some crucial leitmotifs. A pair of binoculars points to the coming adventure (and suggests a far-reaching vision), and a kitten alludes to the vulnerability of the future adventurers.

 

The children and parents are in separate rooms, a spatial configuration that underscores that they might as well inhabit separate universes (which they do). Early in the scene one of the boys puts on a record of Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” (Op. 34, Themes A-F),” which the composer, working off Purcell’s “Moor’s Revenge,” wrote as an instruction for children about musical composition.

 

The use of “Young Person’s Guide” — which introduces the individual instruments of an orchestra and then joins them in a fugue — is clever in that it underlines the construction and framework in a collaborative artwork like this film. “Clever” is sometimes used as a cudgel against Mr. Anderson (along with “twee” and “quirky”), primarily, it seems, because he makes personal, rather than industrial, films that don’t look, move or feel like anyone else’s. The people in his work, their passions and dramas, are true and recognizable — and rarely more deeply felt than in “Moonrise Kingdom” — but they exist in a world apart, one made with extraordinary detail, care and, I think, love by Mr. Anderson. Sometimes they’re called dollhouse worlds, though, truly, they feel more authentic than many screen realities.

 

Mr. Anderson’s visual style and narratives, in other words, are his own. He draws you into his fantastical worlds with beauty and humor, and while their artifice can keep you at somewhat of a distance, this only deepens the story’s emotional power, especially when he lowers the boom, as he always does. The New England coastal island of Penzance, for instance, where “Moonrise Kingdom” takes place, is firmly set in Wes Anderson-land, as is the Bishops’ home and the scout camp that Sam runs away from. Like the Bishops, the Khaki Scouts at Camp Ivanhoe are initially something of an isolated ecosystem. Led by Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), the boys do all the usual scouting things but with funny, alarming, strange twists, like building a tree house as high as an eagle’s aerie.

 

As he does with the Bishop home, Mr. Anderson shoots the camp with a moving camera, one that follows Ward, in profile, during his morning inspection. Although you can see well into the distance, to the rolling, treed hills that serve as the camp’s backdrop, Mr. Anderson has shot the scene so that the depth of the image has been flattened. This visual compression makes the campsite look something like a page out of a book, and is even more obvious elsewhere, as in a long shot of a lighthouse, a car and a small building. That’s where the island’s law officer, Captain Sharp (a wonderful Bruce Willis), learns, soon after Sam and Suzy run off, that the boy is being given up by his foster parents because they’ve decided that he’s emotionally disturbed. Wouldn’t you be, with parents like these?

 

Written by Mr. Anderson and Roman Coppola (they worked together several times before), “Moonrise Kingdom” breezes along with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick. Like all of Mr. Anderson’s films, though, there’s a deep, pervasive melancholia here too, a sense of regret evident in Mr. Bishop’s slouch (with his plaid pants, he is a walking John Cheever tragedy) and in the way Captain Sharp and Mrs. Bishop look, and don’t look, at each other. Adulthood can seem so desperately painful, so maybe Sam and Suzy shouldn’t be quite as eager to grow up.

 

But Sam and Suzy, while their story has the charms of a fairy tale and some of its terrors, aren’t playing at love. They are in love, and that is the most real thing in the world.

 

“Moonrise Kingdom” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There’s smoking, tent-sharing and a bloody ear-piercing.

 

Moonrise Kingdom

 

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

 

Directed by Wes Anderson; written by Mr. Anderson and Roman Coppola; director of photography, Robert Yeoman; edited by Andrew Weisblum; music by Alexandre Desplat; production design by Adam Stockhausen; costumes by Kasia Walicka Maimone; produced by Mr. Anderson, Scott Rudin, Steven Rales and Jeremy Dawson; released by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

 

WITH: Bruce Willis (Captain Sharp), Edward Norton (Scout Master Ward), Bill Murray (Mr. Bishop), Frances McDormand (Mrs. Bishop), Tilda Swinton (Social Services), Jared Gilman (Sam), Kara Hayward (Suzy), Jason Schwartzman (Cousin Ben) and Bob Balaban (the Narrator).

There are several entrancing mysteries circulating in “Searching for Sugar Man,” a hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing. One mystery involves its title subject, a Detroit singer-songwriter known as Rodriguez who, after being discovered in a dive bar, cut a well-regarded record in 1969. The album, “Cold Fact,” earned good reviews and four Billboard stars, but it bombed in the United States, and Rodriguez faded from view. Where he went and why are just a few of the questions that a Swedish filmmaker, Malik Bendjelloul, sought in answering the riddle of Rodriguez.

 

Mr. Bendjelloul, fittingly, begins his worldwide search on screen in South Africa and with an irrepressible music fan named Stephen Segerman, nicknamed Sugar, after the Rodriguez song “Sugar Man.” It was Mr. Segerman who introduced Mr. Bendjelloul to the implausible story of how Rodriguez, after copies of “Cold Fact” hit South Africa in the early ’70s, became an anti-establishment inspiration there and something of a political cause. Rodriguez, with his soft guitar strumming and lyrics that hit hard, blunt notes (“I’ve tasted hate street’s hanging tree”), became a star. His curtain of dark hair, ubiquitous sunglasses and inscrutable smile, as well as the fact that no one in South Africa knew much about him, only burnished his appeal.

 

There is a single image in “Flight” of a miniature bottle of vodka that’s more nerve-racking than almost anything in the thrillers released this year. Shot in close-up with a room blurred in the background, the bottle looks so very big for something so small, like a totem of some mystical deity. It represents a million earlier drinks downed in a forlorn, existential frenzy, but it also resonates with a foreboding that the director Robert Zemeckis sustains for several unsettling seconds. What gives the image such tension, an almost unbearable throb of suspense, is that you know that right outside the frame is a man who is just dying for that drink. And you’re dying a little along with him.

 

The man going down, down, down is Whip Whitaker. Played by a titanic Denzel Washington, he’s a veteran commercial pilot whose greatest vocation should be his flying but, for this and that reason, has become his drinking. Whip doesn’t drink to excess and quietly fade, he stumbles, shouts, flails, blacks out. Mr. Zemeckis, directing his best movie since “Cast Away” (2000), about a different kind of disaster, makes you see that Whip is a beautiful indulger, as does the erotically hyped-up Mr. Washington, with his switchblade strut and aviator shades. As crucially, they also show you the ugly, mean, angrily unrepentant drunk, the one whose sunglasses hide bloodshot eyes and who, when he passes out on the floor, needs someone to tilt his head so he doesn’t choke on his own vomit.

 

“Silver Linings Playbook,” the exuberant new movie from David O. Russell, does almost everything right. The story tracks the feverish, happy, sad, absurdly funny ups and downs of a head case named Pat Solatano, played by a surprisingly effective, intensely focused Bradley Cooper, just as he returns to his parents’ home after eight months in a mental institution. Pat had been put away for a scarily violent crime, but now, having shed fat and the defense it offered him, and feeding on the shiny philosophy of the title instead, he feels ready to tackle the world. The world may not be ready.

 

What the world is — at least, as it’s personified by the family and friends zigzagging through the movie fielding jokes, confessing fears and tightly holding onto a man who nearly spun into the void — is welcoming, accepting, loving. “Silver Linings Playbook” is an outright comedy, but like Pat, it’s a bipolar one that swings between passionate highs and intentionally painful lows. When Pat’s mother, Dolores (a sensational Jacki Weaver), brings him home from the asylum— briefly accompanied by his pal in kookiness, Danny (Chris Tucker) — her husband, Pat Sr. (a moving Robert De Niro), complains that she didn’t tell him about springing their son. Dolores, her Kewpie Doll eyes darting with animal panic, responds the only way any loving mother and wife could: “It’s all under control.”

 

Robert Frost wrote that “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Mr. Russell must agree because he has always played with the definition of family, pushing at its normative boundaries with humor and tales of incest, addiction and insanity. Like almost all his features “Silver Linings Playbook” features a large cast that seems to grow with each scene. Pat is alone in a room when you first see him in the movie, but as he nears the ridiculously wonderful finale he’s fighting for space, crowded in the frame and being jostled by family and friends in his parents’ house where, between plot twists and poignant details (his father’s worried caress of a good-luck charm, his mother’s anxious cooking), he find his place and a filmmaker’s worldview shines.

 

As its title announces, “Silver Linings Playbook” honks, waves and pleads for happiness. Not long into the story Pat angrily tosses out a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” and rails about Hemingway’s sucker-punch finale. The world, Pat yells — at his parents, the neighbors, us — is hard enough. It’s both comical and somewhat pitiful, but it also feels like an authorial declaration because it dovetails with Mr. Russell’s belief in joyous, transporting cinema. It’s no wonder that Tiffany shows Pat a clip from “Singin’ in the Rain,” that blast of pure euphoria. Happy endings used to be de rigueur in American movies, and while they often still are, the feelings accompanying them tend to feel as canned as Katherine Heigl’s laughter, maybe because filmmakers no longer buy them, or think that we don’t.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I like a bleak, despairing cry in the dark as much as the next existentially anguished, post-film consumer, but there is a great deal to be said for delivering the bad news on screen with a pratfall. Mr. Russell’s affinity for sight gags and the slap and tickle that makes lovers of combatants derives from his affinity for screwball comedy, a genre that emerged in the 1930s and that he borrows for his own singular purposes. His movies embrace different problems and character types — a strung-out drug addict rather than an alcohol-soaked swell — but like the classics of the form, they have zippy, at times breakneck pacing, rapidly fired zingers and physical comedy that, taken together, reflect the wild unpredictability of the greater world.

 

The world in “Silver Linings Playbook” looks different from the way it does in old screwball comedies, of course, but it too is racked by pain and worry, and there are lost jobs and pensions amid its hiccupping laughter. For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks. “Silver Linings Playbook” is crammed with people talking and shouting and weeping and also yielding to what are sometimes called boundary issues but which here turn out to be the mad, loving scrambling of people finding and saving one another. These are characters who get in one another’s faces and occasionally punch a loved one right in the kisser. They must go on, they can’t go on, but together they do.

 

“Silver Linings Playbook” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language, prescription drugs, institutionalization and a violent, graphically bloody beating.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

 

Opens on Friday in New York; Los Angeles; Miami; Boston; Chicago; Washington; San Diego; San Francisco; Austin, Tex.; and Philadelphia.

 

Written and directed by David O. Russell, based on the novel by Matthew Quick; director of photography, Masanobu Takayanagi; edited by Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers; music by Danny Elfman; choreography by Mandy Moore; production design by Judy Becker; costumes by Mark Bridges; produced by Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen and Jonathan Gordon; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 2 hours.

 

WITH: Bradley Cooper (Pat), Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany), Robert De Niro (Pat Sr.), Jacki Weaver (Dolores), Chris Tucker (Danny), Brea Bee (Nikki), Anupam Kher (Dr. Cliff Patel), John Ortiz (Ronnie), Shea Whigham (Jake) and Julia Stiles (Veronica).

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” takes a long, hard, tender look at an elderly French couple, Georges and Anne — played by two titans of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva — in their final days. Set in contemporary Paris, it begins with the couple’s front door being breached by a group of firemen. One moves through the rooms, delicately raising a hand to his nose before throwing open several large windows. He may be trying to erase the smell that probably brought the firemen there in the first place and which has transformed this light, graceful, enviable apartment into a crypt.

 

Did I mention this is a love story? It is, as well as a mystery of a type that, like some classic films noir and detective stories, reveals its secrets by rewinding to a past moment and then moving forward in time to return to the present. It opens with Georges and Anne, former music teachers, watching a concert by one of her prized students, the noted young pianist Alexandre Tharaud (as himself). Afterward they greet him backstage — Mr. Tharaud slices through a swarm of admirers to kiss her — and return home, an interlude set to his performance of Schubert’s Impromptu (Op. 90, No. 1), a type of music that’s called a character piece and is meant to convey a mood or idea.

 

The music helps set an air of soothing, restrained elegance as does Mr. Haneke’s meticulous compositions, his impeccable, steady framing and harmoniously arranged people and objects. Everything seems just so, just right, creating a sense of order that carries through until the couple reach their apartment and discover that the lock on their front door is broken. Someone apparently has tried to break in, a would-be intrusion that sends a shudder through the movie and down your spine. That’s because it echoes the first image of the firemen bursting into the apartment and because you never know what shocks, what brutality, Mr. Haneke — whose films include “The White Ribbon” and “Caché” as well as the Austrian version of “Funny Games” and its American redo — will let loose.

 

There is a jolt of violence in “Amour,” never fear (or do!). Nothing, though, seems amiss the next morning while Georges and Anne eat breakfast in a corner of their kitchen, talking amid the clatter of dishes and cutlery. He notices that the salt shaker is empty and rises to refill it, and he continues to chatter unaware that Anne has frozen in her chair, as if turned to stone. Perplexed, he waves a hand in front of her seemingly unseeing eyes. After a few beats, he dresses, presumably to get a doctor, but, as abruptly, Anne seems to return to normal. She scolds him gently — she doesn’t remember what just happened — and then she pours the tea and misses her cup.

 

By the time you next see them together, Anne in a wheelchair. She has had an operation for a carotid artery obstruction and while the procedure has a high success rate, she has drawn a fatal short straw. “It’s all terribly exciting,” a visibly unexcited, deadpan Georges explains to their daughter, Eva (a fantastic Isabelle Huppert). Wildly self-centered, Eva asks about the operation only after she natters on about her work (she’s a musician), her husband and children. She may be embarrassed or unsettled by her mother’s illness, but when Eva asks what she can do, her words sound hollow. “We’ve always coped, your mother and I,” Georges says, maybe to reassure himself as much as a daughter who can feel like a stranger.

 

A grace note of the movie is that the distance between Eva and her parents, an alienation that adds an edge into her voice when she talks to Georges and he to her, is never explained. Mr. Haneke doesn’t put his characters on the couch, offering up personalities that can be easily scanned and compartmentalized. As a consequence, his characters can be difficult to get a handle on, opaque, which might be frustrating if there wasn’t so much meaning packed into their everyday conversations and gestures, including what they leave unsaid. Early on, for instance, Anne teases Georges — at least she seems to be teasing — by calling him a monster. She doesn’t explain herself and neither does Mr. Haneke, which allows her meaning to reverberate, to grow steadily louder until it booms.

 

After Anne returns home, she gradually goes from bad to worse. Georges tries to care for her by himself, but, in time, is forced to hire nurses. The inevitable is, well, inevitable. But in this movie it is also consistently surprising because of the clarity of Mr. Haneke’s vision. There is a great deal that is difficult to watch here, the indignities of a debilitating illness included, and the equally harsh pain of witnessing a great love, a longtime companion, slowly fade away. The moving, subtly brilliant performances of Ms. Riva (best known for “Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and Mr. Trintignant (“A Man and a Woman”) are a particular gift in this respect. The two are, after all, at once forever young, immortalized in their films, and as familiar to us as our grandparents.

 

The representation of pain can be rightly difficult to watch, yet all too often also meaningless. But “Amour,” despite its agonizing subject, holds you willingly throughout. A key to understanding why comes at the beginning, when you see Georges and Anne at the concert, tucked in the audience that’s facing forward as if it were looking at the camera or, disconcertingly, us. It’s hard to see them, but they’re there, somewhat center and to the left, waiting and then clapping. It’s curious, this impression that the characters you’re watching are in turn watching and even applauding you. The moment can be characterized as an instance of Brechtian estrangement, which is meant to break the effects of illusion and awaken an attitude of criticism in the audience. More simply, the theater audience directly mirrors the movie audience, eroding the nominal distance between them.

 

This erosion of distance actually strengthens the film’s emotional power. Viewers acquainted with Mr. Haneke’s work may find “Amour” too cold, cruel even, and its depiction of suffering a punishing, familiar gesture from a director who’s long been interested in transforming spectators from simple consumers into critical thinkers. There are certainly arguments to be made about whether movie-watching is ever simple or noncritical. Yet there’s another point to be made here, namely that all the violence in “Amour” is crucial to Mr. Haneke’s rigorous, liberatingly unsentimental worldview, one that gazes on death with the same benevolent equanimity as life. All of which is to say: bring hankies. This is a film that will make you weep not only because life ends but also because it blooms.

 

“Amour” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Illness, suffering, death.

 

Amour

 

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

 

Written and directed by Michael Haneke; director of photography, Darius Khondji; edited by Monika Willi and Nadine Muse; production design by Jean-Vincent Puzos; costumes by Catherine Leterrier; produced by Margaret Menegoz, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka and Michael Katz; released by Sony Pictures Classics. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

 

WITH: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Georges), Emmanuelle Riva (Anne), Isabelle Huppert (Eva), Alexandre Tharaud (Alexandre), William Shimell (Geoff), Ramón Agirre (Concierge’s Husband) and Rita Blanco (Concierge)