Film
In the Family: The Ardors of Being a Gay Single Parent
With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don’t feel so much stretched…
Andrew Schenker
Film
Looper: Bruce Willis Tries to Kill Himself
Early in Rian Johnson’s time-travel thriller, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self…
Film
Wish Me Away: A Country Star’s Carefully Stage-Managed Coming-Out
What it lacks in artfulness, Wish Me Away makes up for in emotive force. Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly…
Film
High School: Making Pot No Fun at All
Its opening shots replete with heavily fetishized close-ups of kids taking hits off joints and its dialogue peppered…
Film
The Double: Richard Gere, Fire Your Agent
Michael Brandt’s post–Cold War spy film is grade-B hokum, but it’s not without its occasional generic thrills. Apparently…
Film
Chasing Madoff: The Whistleblower’s Lament
Brimming over with outrage not so much at the eponymous Ponzi schemer as at the government body that…
Film
The Sky Turns: The Portrait of a Dying Spanish Village
An award winner at Rotterdam way back in 2005, Mercedes Álvarez’s The Sky Turns, a film that aims…
Film
Teza: Ethiopia, Then and Now
Spanning two decades of his nation’s fraught history and invoking the legacy of at least three more, Haile…
Film
Home: Isabelle Huppert Versus the Freeway
The opening scenes of Home—a nighttime game of street hockey, a bathing session that turns into a five-way…
Film
The End of Poverty?: The Economic Meltdown Is Global
“Colonialism is always part of the expansion of capitalism,” opines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera in Philippe…