I could tell you that Damnation is a black-and-white movie from 1987 about adultery, but to be honest, it's hard enough to distinguish between the characters without trying to figure out who's harassing, haranguing, and cheating on whom. The little bursts of plot are incidental to director Béla Tarr's main business: long, lulling takes of rain hitting puddles, or a man who peers around columns, or bucket-trams of coal ascending and descending a mountain. There's a still shot near the beginning of a hill of glasses and steins, beautifully composed and accompanied not by the busy clinking of drinks but by the meditative clack of off-screen billiard balls. It's a shot worthy of a gelatin-silver print, except more mesmerizing. You don't just want to look at the scene, you want to look at it while seated in that rural dancehall—drunk, with a bleary gaze that makes the lights curve and run together. ANNIE WAGNER