The Great Gatsby, 2013.

The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don't tell the eighth graders about Gregory Peck's brilliant turn as Atticus Finch in 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird!

Stephanie Zacharek is the new chief film critic at the Village Voice. Alan Scherstuhl is the Voice's film editor. Sometimes they gab about how the review-sausage gets made.

Few films lend themselves to critical reevaluation as well as David Lynch's much-maligned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Booed at its premiere at Cannes in 1992 (and playing at BAM as part of their "Booed at Cannes" series, which runs through May 23), eviscerated by the popular press during its brief theatrical run later that year, and remembered now with bafflement and contempt, the film's reception and legacy might best be characterized by the infamous words of sworn Lynch defender Quentin Tarantino, memorialized in an interview with Elia Taylor that year: "David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie."

"Woody Allen is the reason I wanted to live in New York City so badly," says Greta Gerwig, walking down Tenth Avenue in Chelsea on an April afternoon. Of course, Woody seduced a whole generation with his 1970s cinematic love letters to Manhattan. But that was a long time ago. He doesn't even shoot here anymore, and the New York he revered now seems as remote as Carrie Bradshaw's. So there's something sort of winsome about this fangirl confession from Gerwig, the 29-year-old star and co-writer—with her filmmaker boyfriend Noah Baumbach—of her own Woody-esque film, Frances Ha. And while it may sound odd for an actress to admit an obsession with Woody Allen these days, for Gerwig it makes perfect sense.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight.

Before Midnight may be the greatest film ever made about impermanence -- a fitting theme for a work that also reestablishes the A-list credentials of the mutable Ethan Hawke. Much like his character in Richard Linklater's romantic drama series -- which, in its third iteration, finds Hawke's Jesse and paramour Celine (Julie Delpy) struggling with fortydom while on vacation with their kids in Greece -- Hawke has finally, definitively distanced himself from the youthful persona that first defined him.

The second shoe dropped--or rather exploded--this morning in Cannes. A combination of luck and programming genius contrived to have Lars von Trier's Melancholia screened for the press a mere 48 hours after the first showing of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. On Monday I characterized The Tree of Life as a train wreck--I was wrong. It's Von Trier who has contrived the spectacle impossible to turn away from.

There will surely be people who don't much care for either of these monumentally, even monstrously, ambitious movies--both family dramas drenched in classical music and played against the most cosmic of circumstances--but I cannot imagine there will be many who care for them equally. For when Von Trier obliterates the world in Melancholia he also destroys Malick's worldview, or at least puts it in perspective.

The 82nd Academy Awards were a referendum on what Oscar voters value, versus what moviegoers are willing to pay for.

Director Kathryn Bigelow accepts her Oscar for The Hurt Locker

The headline will be Kathryn Bigelow's stunning, groundbreaking achievement as the first woman to win Best Picture. But considering the Academy's concerted effort to expand the audience for this year's awards by opening up the Best Picture category to 10 nominees, maybe this broken record is more significant: The Hurt Locker is the lowest grossing movie in decades (possibly ever, if adjusted for inflation) to win Best Picture.

The Hurt Locker

Two nights before the Oscars, I attended the Independent Spirit Awards, a less formal ceremony designed to honor lesser-known films, thereby bolstering the independent film community in the face of the Academy's total indifference to non-studio film. As the old joke goes, those who win at the Spirits are doomed to lose the same weekend at the Oscars. This year, it didn't quite go that way: winners at both events included Jeff Bridges, Mo'Nique and, maybe most surprisingly, Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher.

In today's print edition of the Village Voice (and tomorrow's edition of the LA Weekly), you'll find a story I wrote on Daddy Long Legs, the second feature by filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, which premieres at Sundance this week and is now available for rental on cable VOD. The film, starring Ronald Bronstein (the director of Frownland) and Frey and Sage Ranaldo (sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee), is based on the Safdie brothers' own childhood memories of their father, who at one point kidnapped the boys and moved them from Manhattan to Queens. In a crazy alternative marketing move for the indie film, a Daddy producer landed the brothers a spot on CNN's Campbell Brown show talking about familial kidnapping. Watch that above, and find out how you can watch the film on your cable system here.

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Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg have made a name for themselves making documentaries (The Trials of Daryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback, The End of America) that could be considered works of activism, in which charismatic victims of and witnesses to injustice offer evidence intended to raise not just the viewer's consciousness, but their ire. The pair thus did not seem like the obvious choice to tell the story of Joan Molinsky Rosenberg, the nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn better known as foul-mouthed comedienne/plastic surgery addict Joan Rivers.

Amazingly, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work might be best understood as one of a piece with Stern and Sundberg's activist work. If the entertainment industry ain't exactly Darfur, it still hasn't been an easy road for Rivers, whose boundary-breaking comic creativity will likely be listed low in her obituary, to make room for discussion of her obsession with reinvention. Stern and Sundberg sympathize with the star's plight, and provide an excellent platform for her gut-busting politically incorrect comedy to speak for itself.

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Saturday night brought a break from Sundance, and a long trudge in the post-snow storm sludge up to the top of Park City's Main Street, for the world premiere of Steven Soderbergh's Spalding Gray doc, And Everything is Going Fine, at the Slamdance Film Festival. Getting there requires carving a swath through the living hell that is Main Street on the first weekend of Sundance (where do all these kids come from, and why don't the girl ones know better than to wear miniskirts and spike heels when it's 19 degrees?), but once you make it to the Treasure Mountain Inn, the difference between the two local festivals quickly becomes clear

Launched in 1995 by four filmmakers whose movies were rejected by Sundance, Slamdance has since hosted the world premieres of The King of Kong and Paranormal Activity, screened the early work of future auteurs Christopher Nolan and Jared Hess, and has generally blossomed into an institution of its own. While big man on campus Sundance mounts a major campaign touting its return to its roots, Slamdance hasn't drifted far enough from its original lo-fi trappings to necessitate a return. The red carpet scraps lining the aisle of the makeshift Slamdance theater are dingy, the screenings are small and casual and though there are corporate sponsors, when a pre-film bumper flashes their logos the festival organizers themselves shout out snarky heckles. Welcome to an upstart alternative set in its ways.