“Van Gogh,” Museum of the Moving Image, October 25There are many great films — all of them, really — to see in the Museum of the Moving Image’s essential, full retrospective of the work of French director Maurice Pialat. Although associated with a highly naturalistic style, Pialat dedicated the later part of his career to more expansive and refined portraits of singular figures. The best of this late period (the director died in 2003) is “Van Gogh” (1991), his controversial portrait of the artist. At the time of its release, the film was quizzically received, for it bore little resemblance to the narrative we know of Van Gogh, specifically how he severed his own ear. The Van Gogh we meet is not that unlike Pialat’s other alter egos, especially the characters played by Gérard Depardieu (most notably, to my mind, in “Loulou”), bearing what the critic Kent Jones described as “alternately endearing and misanthropic, hungry for experience yet fed up with life, looking for community but shunning the company of others.”“Beasts of No Nation,” Landmark Sunshine Cinema, ongoingThe latest film from Cary Joji Fukunaga, best known for directing the entire first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” premiered simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix at the end of last week. This caused four major theater chains to boycott the film, a blatant jab at the streaming juggernaut’s first foray into major motion picture production. Luckily, if you live in New York and don’t have a Netflix account — or still believe that seeing a film in a theater is the best way to experience it — you can still watch “Beasts,” a brutal if flawed character study of a child soldier (Abraham Attah) and the warlord (Idris Elba), who takes him under his wing. The film loses some of its potency due to a lack of context, and has much less to say on the politics of Africa than it does on the power dynamics of war and the lasting effects of violence. Fukunaga’s camera-eye is impressive, though, especially during a few crucial scenes where the film dives into an expressionistic color palate.“Experimenter,” Landmark Sunshine Cinema, ongoingOne of the highlights of the recent New York Film Festival was Michael Almereyda’s “Experimenter,” a wildly discursive portrait of social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard). Beginning at Yale University in 1961 with his famous study of obedience, Almereyda presents Milgram as a surrogate director, the audience his actors. The film, in this scenario, is the experiment, and we are led through a revolving door of moments in Milgrim’s life, with the main character speaking to us through direct-address, often stopping a scene midway through to comment on what is happening or bring to light a contradiction or manipulation at play. The film has as much to do with the act of filmmaking as it does psychology, and can be seen as a refracted self-portrait of the director. Winnona Ryder co-stars as Milgrim’s wife, Sasha, and the film boasts blink-or-you’ll-miss cameos from writer Sam Lipsyte and artist Dustin Yellin.“Field Niggas,” Made in NY Media Center, through October 22“There’s no separation between my subject matter and I,” the photographer and filmmaker Khalik Allah said in an interview with ARTINFO back in January. “I see everything as one and so I’m in it. Every SLR has a mirror in it.” This hazy, dream-like documentary of the people who gather around the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem is, as I wrote earlier this year, “indebted to classic street photography but infused with an empathetic glow, shining light on faces that are routinely pushed into the dark.”“Andrew Lampert: The Scream House, Compositions 2015,” Issue Project Room, October 19Lampert, an artist who also works at local theater Anthology Film Archives, will present “a collection of new and recent pieces from his deep back catalog of films, videos, and performances.” What we will see exactly is anybody’s guess, but the description warns that there will be audience participation (I once saw Lampert project a film from a seat in the audience, but I’m guessing it’s more than that) and a new entry in his “Projector Destruction” series of performances, which is just like it sounds.
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