“No Home Movie,” directed by Chantal Akerman, BAM, through April 14One of the saddest things about the release of “No Home Movie,” the last film made by Chantal Akerman, along with a city-wide celebration of her work stretching across various venues, is that it took her death to spark this kind of appreciation. Akerman has been making films, many of them great and all worthy of attention, at an almost regular pace since her most famous work in the 1970s. But most of them have been ignored, even critically. Part of this has to do with the fashions of film programming and, I suspect, the politics of film restoration. Either way, Akerman is getting more recognition now than ever before, and it’s all well deserved. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, start with the heralded classics. Next, watch “No Home Movie,” and if you want to dig a little deeper, there are plenty of directions to take: “Là-bas” (2006), which opens at Anthology Film Archives on April 15, or pretty much anything from the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s massive retrospective, which is running through May 1. There will be more on Akerman in this column in the coming weeks.“Everybody Wants Some!!”, directed by Richard Linklater, wide release, ongoingRichard Linklater’s latest, the years-in-the-making “spiritual sequel” to his last-day-of-high-school kegger comedy “Dazed and Confused” (1993), concerns the male bonding between members of a college baseball team in early 1980s Texas. Using a cast of little-known actors, the film, much like its predecessor, is nostalgic for the innocence of the period, where the self was under constant and ever-shifting formation and responsibility was a thin notion. Linklater positions the group of baseball players — jocks who are also stoners — amid a changing cultural landscape, where disco-dance nights and “Urban Cowboy”-style parties are necessary parts of the social scene, and teenage purity is slowly making way for the romantic idealism of adulthood. Even when it falls into avoidable cliches, the film’s drowsy narrative progression — very little “happens” — is admirable and irresistible. Linklater’s ability to capture the minutiae of hanging out — the constant one-upmanship, the bragging and exaggerating and philosophizing — proves that it’s his greatest strength as a storyteller and filmmaker.“Twilight City” (1989), by Black Audio Film Collective, Light Industry, April 12The third feature film billed under the name Black Audio Film Collective (directed by Reece Auguiste, the film followed 1986’s “Handsworth Songs” and 1988’s “Testament,” both directed by John Akomfrah), “Twilight City” is, in the mode of much of the group’s work, a documentary that incorporates various techniques, including interviews, fictional scenes, and archival footage. The screening will be introduced by the writer Tobi Haslett.“Neon Bull,” directed by Gabriel Mascaro, Film Society of Lincoln Center, opens on April 8A stunning new film, one of the best at the latest edition of New Directors/New Films, concerns a group of people who work together, traveling around to bull-riding competitions. Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), who in his spare time is interested in women’s fashion, works for Galega (Maeve Jinkings), a single mother whose daughter travels with the group. The three form a little family that begins to be separated when Galega starts spending more time with a new co-worker and Iremar meets a pregnant woman who works security at a nearby textile factory. Told with restraint and quiet compassion, the film will be accompanied by “Ebbs and Flows,” a series dedicated to the previous work of Mascaro.“The Passenger” (1976), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthology Film Archives, April 10“The Passenger,” Antonioni’s underappreciated film starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, is being screened as part of a fascinating series called “Barthes at the Movies,” pegged to the release of the book “Roland Barthes’ Cinema” (Oxford University Press) and dedicated to the films the critic Roland Barthes wrote about for most of his career — despite his acknowledged dislike of movies. In 1980, toward the end of his life, Barthes wrote “Dear Antonioni,” an appreciation of the filmmaker in the form of a letter that was first presented in a speech and later published in Cahiers du Cinema. It would be one of the final things he wrote before his death that same year.
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