Like the NYFF's other Korean title, Hong's latest is interested in how life is transmogrified into art, and draws conclusions that seem credible because of how open-ended the relationship ultimately is. In Hong's 11th feature since 1996, and his second of the year (Hahaha, like last year's Like You Know It All, was passed over by the NYFF), Hong's threads his by-now familiar themes—youthful romantic gaffes and the lingering pain they fuel in midlife; the petty spats and deepening disappointments of the professional artistic life; how groups interact over alcohol and how pairs interact on long walks—through four shorts, the first and last seemingly the respective student films by a couple who appear in the middle two, and all explicitly or obliquely shaded by the female student's affair with their professor, who appears as an actor in both the student films, advises them in the second segment, and is the subject of the third.

Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men played this Saturday and Monday at the 48th New York Film Festival. Sony Classics will release the film next year.

Films about religious faith that come from a secular perspective free themselves from the burden of advocating dogma or tenets: the ritualized, physical aspects of devotion are hypnotic in and of themselves, even for non-believers. And Xavier Beauvois knows physical: his last feature, 2005’s Le Petit Lieutenant, is as nuts-and-bolts depiction of routine police drudgery as there is. So why is Of Gods and Men—his chronicle of the last days of French Trappist monks killed in Algeria in 1996 as sharia-advocating insurgents ran riot—so strangely enervated? Religious devotion should be filmed ascetically, as Bresson showed by example and films like Alain Cavalier’s Therese wisely copied; Beauvois treats monkish ritual like an editorial timekeeping device in an otherwise conventional film.

• With then-wife Janet Leigh and daughters Kelly and Jamie Lee, in 1959.

Dave Kehr's Times obit, linked above, is as ever definitive, and perhaps the best thing I can think to say about Tony Curtis is that, as his final gift to an adoring public, he left behind an obituary that's a hell of a lot of fun to read, from his coded object-of-desire performance in "Spa-rat-a-cus" to his private life as "vigorous heterosexual" to a rundown of a fascinating, sometimes troubled career in the late days of the Hollywood studio system and beyond. Keep up with the Notebook for more news and tributes.

A "festival film" (both descriptively and pejoratively) carries with it certain expectations. The most crucial: no matter how vile things get, carefully composed long shots, anti-suspenseful editing and a general contempt for what-happens-next narrative momentum will keep the audience decently removed, safely assured the director is on the same liberal-humanist page. So how to respond to a film like My Joy, which is incoherent if you ignore its agenda and objectionable if you do? Myopia. There's no way around it: My Joy has no values to throw yourself behind. Like Alexei Balabanov's Cargo 200, it has technical merits to spare and moral ones to gain.

Weather does most of the heavy lifting in Silent Souls: remote Russia in a permanent November, endless hills and woods blanketed in cold and wet, with the occasional footbridge undulating over a river, or old temple barely visible through the mist, and often framed through rain-streaked car windows, for an extra sense of benumbed remoteness. It's easy to mistake the film for an exquisitely morose journey through the chilled and ancient soul of Russia—except that most of what fills the screen is so painfully, self-seriously inane.

Menke started her career cutting together the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie before Q.T. gave her the splicers for Reservoir Dogs; she went on to cut every Tarantino film thereafter, as well as the occasional movie (like Mulholland Falls and All the Pretty Horses) for others. It looks like her last credit, after Inglourious Basterds, will be the well-cast but straight-to-DVD Peacock.

"Pumpgun Ronnie" was the name the Austrian press gave to the man who, armed with a shotgun and disguised in a Reagan mask, went on a bankrobbing spree there in the late 1980s; aside from inspiring Point Break, this man, Johann Kastenberger, was in fact an accomplished marathoner. With his adaptation of Martin Prinz's historically close-hewing novel Der Räuber, Benjamin Heisenberger makes another movie about a bank robber who does it for the rush: Johan Rettenberger, as he's called here (Andreas Lust), goes out on cross-country runs, and robberies, with a heart-rate monitor strapped to his chest.