"Tony Manero" is one of those movies that sneak up on you from behind and take a pickax to your head. Arguably I shouldn't be writing about it at all, except to say that if you dig the terrain where dark comedy, horror movie and political allegory mix, and if you appreciate having your mind well and truly messed with, you should check it out.

There's no question that "Tony Manero" has maximum impact if you don't know what you're in for. You might say that Pablo Larraín, the film's 32-year-old Chilean director, is preying on false expectations. After the movie's premiere at Cannes last year, one studio executive told me that several of her colleagues had emerged from the screening violently angry. While Larraín presumably did not make the film just to piss off a bunch of rich Americans who might theoretically be interested in giving him money, it's nonetheless an accomplishment in which he can take pride. (He eventually found a United States distributor in Lorber Films, the latest creation of indie-industry veteran Richard Lorber.)

The movie's title and premise suggest a certain kind of film, one of those up-with-people sagas about how pop culture can save your life in difficult circumstances. Its protagonist, to stretch that term to its absolute limit, is a disheveled 52-year-old man named Raúl (played by veteran Chilean stage actor Alfredo Castro, who also co-wrote the script), whose life under the Pinochet dictatorship of the 1970s is dominated by his obsession with "Saturday Night Fever." Raúl goes to see the movie alone in empty theaters, mumbling along with the English dialogue he only half-understands. He is the "star" of an SNF-themed nightclub revue in a downtrodden bar on the fringes of Santiago, and dreams of being honored as the leading Tony Manero impersonator on an appalling Chilean variety show.

Unfortunately for Raúl, the first time he shows up to audition for the show, the other guys lined up don't look quite right. It's Chuck Norris night rather than Tony Manero night! This movie is often very funny, if you allow yourself to laugh at it. But then again, so is "The Shining." As you've already gathered, "Tony Manero" is not an up-with-people story. If Larraín and his writers have something to say about the relationship between the global impact of American pop culture and the grinding tyranny of late-'70s Chile, it isn't something positive. One can read all sorts of dark political allegories and observations about human nature into this movie, but thankfully all that is left up to the viewer.

In Castro's phenomenal performance, the corpse-gray Raúl has a dispassionate, perfectionist demeanor, pushing his aging body into impressive if robotic imitations of John Travolta's dance-floor moves. (In one memorable scene, he rehearses his routine while wearing nothing but a pair of soiled undershorts.) It takes us a while to grasp that under his deadpan surface Raúl is a bottomless pit of sociopathic rage and desire, who cares about nothing and nobody beyond his self-appointed Manero mission.

Several of his nightclub partners are involved in the anti-Pinochet underground, and the dictator's secret police are closing in. Raúl barely notices, treating his supposed friends and the rest of human life with blind and vicious disregard. He's more like an abused Doberman than a human being. At this point I'm not giving much away in revealing that Raúl commits dreadful acts of violence (although the nastiest scene in the film involves no physical injury), but he lacks the intentionality and self-consciousness to be called a serial killer. He's just going to build that disco floor (out of discarded glass bricks and fluorescent strip lighting), God damn it, and if you get in his way, there's going to be trouble.

Shot on a low-budget on Super 16 mm film (and subsequently blown up to 35 mm), "Tony Manero" has a slightly dingy look that perfectly suits its oppressive '70s setting. It's not a picture likely to win awards for its cinematographic beauty, but I found it a memorably claustrophobic evocation of its time and place, as well as a reminder that the so-called escape offered by pop culture can sometimes be an escape into soul-sucking madness. Studio executives won't be the only people to hate "Tony Manero," but such hatred only makes the film, like its unforgettable "Stayin' Alive" antihero, that much stronger.

"Tony Manero" is now playing at the Cinema Village in New York, and opens July 17 at the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles, Aug. 14 in Cleveland, Aug. 21 in Seattle, and Sept. 11 in Nashville, with more cities and DVD release to be announced.

Other stuff this week: "The Beaches of Agnès," an inspiring, unclassifiable memoir-on-film from prickly French New Wave legend Agnès Varda, now 81 years young, is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. Varda revisits her movies, her cities, her troubled but loving marriage to fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy, and the artistic-avatar career that has taken her around the world. Never before have Harrison Ford and avant-garde French documentarian Chris Marker (or at least his cartoon-cat stand-in) appeared in the same movie!

Speaking of prickly French women, fans of the always smart, always mean and grossly undervalued Anne Fontaine ("Dry Cleaning," "How I Killed My Father") won't want to miss "The Girl From Monaco," her biting, ambiguous sex farce about the affair between a middle-aged Parisian lawyer (the great Fabrice Luchini) and a supernally trashy Monaco weathergirl (newcomer Louise Bourgoin). Sometimes the satire seems obvious by Fontaine standards, but it still ranges from sunny and enjoyable moments to creepy and Hitchcockesque ones, with a tremendous supporting performance by Roschdy Zem as the lawyer's bodyguard. It's now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow.

Argentine director Pablo Trapero's absorbing crime-and-punishment drama "Lion's Den" is finally reaching American viewers, beginning with the IFC Center in New York. It stars Trapero's real-life wife, Martina Gusman, in a ferocious performance as a perpetually trashed young woman who goes to prison for a crime she can't remember committing, and has to give birth to her son behind bars. As I wrote last year from Cannes, it's marvelously shot and acted, constantly surprising, and completely focused on its heroine's struggle to get from one moment to the next. "Lion's Den" is not a thriller or a social-issue drama or a story of lesbian love in prison, although it has those elements in it. It's a story about a woman who is damaged, angry, beautiful and indomitable, who loves her son and who remains a mystery to us, and to herself, right to the end.

Amid the celebrity death party of the last few days, let's spare at least a brief thought for Karl Malden, the iconic broken-nosed character actor and American Express pitchman whose pugnacious working-class demeanor kept him going in show business for more than 50 years. Malden died Wednesday at age 97, which means he was 46 years old when Michael Jackson was born in 1958.

For someone of my generation, Malden will always be identified with Lt. Mike Stone of the long-running 1970s TV series "The Streets of San Francisco" (whose sidekick was played by Michael Douglas). For younger viewers, I guess he'll always be the "Don't leave home without it" guy from more than 20 years of American Express commercials. But of course Malden was an established film actor long before those gigs. He played opposite Marlon Brando several times, winning an Oscar as the likable Mitch in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and playing the sympathetic priest in "On the Waterfront." He also played Gen. Omar Bradley in "Patton" and the prison warden in "Birdman of Alcatraz," but my personal favorite is probably Malden's vicious crook-turned-sheriff in the terrific revenge western "One-Eyed Jacks" (another Brando film, and the only one he ever directed).

Malden was born in Chicago as Mladen Sekulovich, the son of a Serbian father and Czech mother, and spoke no English until he went to school. This heritage is the source of his great gift to pop-culture trivia collectors, since Malden went to great lengths to include his original name in the dialogue of his films and TV shows. In "The Streets of San Francisco," Stone frequently employed an informer called Sekulovich. In the courtroom scene of "On the Waterfront," one of the union officials' names read aloud is Mladen Sekulovich. Under fire in Sicily, Malden's Gen. Bradley in "Patton" barks, "Hand me that helmet, Sekulovich." And so on. There are a few other examples in Malden's Wikipedia entry, but I just know somebody out there must have a definitive list.

Go in peace, Sekulovich. I don't think they take American Express cards where you're going. Just this once, it was OK to leave home without it.

If she wanted to play the role, Kathryn Bigelow could easily present herself as Exhibit A of the enduring sexism of Hollywood. Beginning with her vampire cult-fave "Near Dark" in 1987 and then the 1991 surf-heist classic "Point Break," Bigelow has directed some of the most visually inventive and exciting films in recent action-cinema history. (Yes, I am willing and even eager to defend "Strange Days" and "K-19: The Widowmaker." Let's leave that for another time.) She has virtually no interest in the kinds of talky, intimate dramas the world expects female filmmakers to crank out (and her one, only partially successful attempt to move in that direction, "The Weight of Water" in 2000, suggests she shouldn't bother).

Bigelow has paid for her eccentricity. Early in her career, it was often assumed that she only had access to the industry because of her brief marriage to James Cameron, whom she hadn't even met when she made "Near Dark." She's had constant difficulty in raising money and getting projects launched, and has made just seven features across 22 years (along with music videos and episodes of "Wild Palms," "Homicide" and "Karen Sisco"). Throughout it all, she's never sounded bitter or come anywhere close to playing the victim. When I meet Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal in New York to talk about "The Hurt Locker," their riveting Baghdad bomb-squad drama (and Bigelow's first film in seven years), she's a friendly and relaxed conversationalist, clearly delighted with the movie's reception so far.

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Last weekend brought the opening of this year's New York Asian Film Festival, a wonderfully rich and strange event that's become a highlight of the Gotham summer for movie buffs. Although the NYAFF began in 2000 as a scruffy, fanboy-oriented celebration of old-school Hong Kong kung-fu flicks, it has evolved into the leading North American showcase for East Asian pop cinema. Now overlapping with the somewhat artier Japan Cuts festival (hosted by New York's Japan Society), the NYAFF has become downright respectable, with airline and hotel sponsors, relationships with the Hong Kong and Korean film-export officials, and other trappings of success.

This year's festival kicked off with the world premiere of Hong Kong writer-director Wong Ka-fai's "Written By," a delirious supernatural melodrama with overtones of Charlie Kaufman-style meta-ness. It's precisely the kind of Asian film some Hollywood producer will try to remake (and undoubtedly will screw up): A grand, quasi-Buddhist meditation on life, death, love and the inescapable nature of suffering, awash with hilariously literal-minded special effects and frank sentimentality. A girl who's been blinded in the car accident that killed her father writes a story to cheer up her widowed mom. In her story, dad survives the crash while mother and daughter die, so he writes a story within the story to keep up his spirits and ... You see where this is going.

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In a turn of events that's been a long time brewing, one imagines, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences  announced on Wednesday that the 2009 Oscar race will yield 10 best-picture nominees, rather than the long-standing quota of five. Academy president Sid Ganis was careful to describe this as a return to ancient Hollywood tradition, since -- as absolutely no one remembers -- there were 10 nominees a year from 1936 to 1943 (and an erratic number, ranging from 8 to 12, in the years before that).

Actually, the Hollywood tradition to which Ganis is reverting is the one about placating producers of big-budget projects that make plenty of dough but don't win awards. He might as well call those five extra slots the We're So Sorry About "The Dark Knight" Memorial Nominations. The near-total Academy brushoff of that bat-scale blockbuster this year brought long-simmering industry grumping about the Oscars to a head, with many Hollywood suits convinced that the awards had been permanently hijacked by mid-level Indiewood films that do well in coastal metropolitan regions but fail to pack 'em in at heartland multiplexes. ("Slumdog Millionaire" and "No Country for Old Men" being the paradigmatic examples.)

I quote herewith from the AMPAS press release: "'Having 10 best-picture nominees is going allow [sic] Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,' commented Ganis. 'I can’t wait to see what that list of 10 looks like when the nominees are announced in February.'"

Well, me neither, Sid! Twitterers are already competing to come up with the most ludicrous potential 2009 nominees; "So 'Hotel for Dogs' has a chance!" someone chirped moments after the announcement was made. Indeed it does, and so does the forthcoming Kelsey Grammer-Bebe Neuwirth remake of "Fame," which I dread more than any other motion picture in history. But aren't we just likely to see more nods for quasi-quirky projects involving Diablo Cody and/or Steven Soderbergh? What say ye, Salon readers? Nominations, please. 

Gone are the days when advocacy documentaries -- films aimed at rallying public support around a controversial or little-known issue -- were grainy, boxy videotapes full of earnest people talking. In the wake of Michael Moore and "Inconvenient Truth," issue-oriented docs have to look and feel cinematic, and follow a rigorous formula: two-thirds rage and despair, one-third inspiration. We've got two sterling examples this week, and they're handsomely reported and photographed works, easy to watch and emotionally engaging even if you're not personally involved with the topic. (See also the excellent "Food Inc.," now in theaters.)

But does this more polished delivery system actually make movies like "The End of the Line" (which is about the overfishing crisis) or "Under Our Skin" (about the controversy surrounding Lyme disease) more effective? I think the jury's out on that one. Both are worth seeing -- but doesn't the simultaneous release of two well-crafted movies that see the end of the world approaching from different directions risk audience fatigue or apocalypse overload? These films convinced me that I should care about the fate of the bluefin tuna and about the suffering of people with misdiagnosed Lyme disease, but they didn't leave me any more able to hold those things in my head amid the infoglut of our civilization.

Amid the fjords and mountains of Norway's Arctic northlands, they've got a different apocalyptic problem, apparently: undead Nazis. Maybe the horror film "Dead Snow" is about the end of the world too, in a more allegorical fashion. Or maybe it's about undead Nazis.

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For the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical motion-picture distribution, at least when it came to independent films, was going the way of the passenger pigeon and the daily print newspaper. (You won't believe this, kids, but somebody used to come to your house every single morning with a rolled-up log of paper wrapped in plastic and rubber bands!) Some mystical convergence of the Internet, cable TV, the handheld SmartHooble and other, yet-to-be-invented networks and devices would open the doors to a hellish new Nirvana of unlimited, 24/7 hi-def cinema, from the most massive Hollywood spectacles to the most obscure art-house offerings.

Well, the future is here, sort of. And as usual with the future, it's not a yes-or-no proposition. Online movie delivery has exploded in the last year, at least compared to its virtual nonexistence before that. Within a few clicks from this page, you could be watching a documentary about barehanded fishing in Oklahoma, the Soviet-era magic-realist classic "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" or "Hotel for Dogs." Come September, Sally Potter's new film "Rage" will premiere as a series of episodes on Babelgum, at the same time it's released in theaters and on DVD. The Palestinian film "Laila's Birthday," an international festival favorite with no theatrical deal, was recently made available for three weeks on The Auteurs, a new cinephile streaming site that's currently in Beta.

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Two warring conceptions of the American food and agriculture business collide in the gripping agitprop documentary "Food Inc.," the result of a collaboration between filmmaker Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. I'm using "agitprop" as a descriptor, not a pejorative, since I personally agree with nearly all the arguments made in the film. Furthermore, if "Food Inc." comes off as a one-sided project, it's easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film -- Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto -- universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.

On one hand, we've got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. "Food Inc" attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from 400 different cows.

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Context is everything: If you saw "Tetro" and were told it was the work of an ambitious, 30-ish writer-director, working with top-notch technical resources and a midsize budget for the first time, it would appear as a lovely, flawed, adventurous movie, ample evidence of its creator's abundant talent and perhaps also his need to grow up a little. It's a luminous, wide-screen, black-and-white melodrama about brothers and fathers and love and art and family secrets, built around wonderfully charismatic performances by Vincent Gallo and teenage newcomer Alden Ehrenreich. It's loaded (quite possibly overloaded) with symmetrical coincidences, film-school references, self-aware theatricality and Kerouac-flavored testosterone. It was shot in Buenos Aires and is set in a quasi-contemporary nevertime that isn't specific enough to be the '60s, the '80s or right now.

To my way of thinking, all those things I said about "Tetro" remain true even when you know that the ambitious young man who made it, the one with tremendous talent and not quite enough maturity, is 70 years old and once -- in an unimaginably different era -- directed the most famous and most widely acclaimed American film since "Citizen Kane." Like a character in some unpublished Poe short story, or like the Tim Roth character in Coppola's 2007 comeback vehicle "Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola has outlived himself and become young again. Let the blogulous chorus of professional nibblers and deriders make sport of Coppola for taking huge chances, for trying and failing, for daring to be vulnerable. After everything he's been through, I'm guessing he can take it.

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No aspect of Tibetan Buddhism is as well-known, or seems quite as mythological to outsiders, as the faith's apparently literalistic belief in reincarnation. Taken as a whole, Buddhism is such a diverse and wide-ranging religion that it very nearly lacks any central doctrines or dogmas. Many Buddhists could be called nontheistic or even atheistic, and the widespread Buddhist belief in reincarnation takes many different forms. To some Zen Buddhists, for example, reincarnation is primarily a metaphor or a folkloric remnant.

But within the Tibetan Buddhist world, as we saw in Martin Scorsese's powerful drama about the young Dalai Lama, "Kundun" -- and as we now see in Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz's remarkable, vérité-style documentary "Unmistaken Child" -- reincarnation is unmistakably real. That is, belief in reincarnation is unmistakably real. What are we actually seeing in Baratz's film, when we watch a group of middle-aged monks identify a 2-year-old from a Nepalese mountain village as the "unmistaken child," a newly reborn version of Geshe Lama Konchog, a world famous Tibetan teacher who died in 2001? Like most Western, non-Buddhist viewers, I'm not quite sure, although I definitely incline toward a cultural or psychological explanation.

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