When the words "true story" appear twice in a film's opening disclaimer, it's a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction.… Continue reading
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of… Continue reading
Homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur Bloom—who based it on a… Continue reading
A wan comedy about gambling that takes no risks, Stephen Frears' Lay the Favorite has none of the stinging sordidness of his 1990 The Grifters.… Continue reading
A sporadically hard-selling homage to a cult hero from an overchronicled era, Radio Unnameable considers the career of Bob Fass, whose late-night free-form radio program… Continue reading
Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Leos Carax's Holy Motors stars Denis Lavant, the simian, sinewy actor who played the lead in Carax's first three movies, as… Continue reading
The Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Quebec, is, per its website, home to 500 animals of 75 different species; its goal is to "protect and preserve… Continue reading
The invaluable American independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1919–1997) once said: "There is no real difference between a traditional fiction film and a documentary. I've never… Continue reading
Eugene Jarecki's Sundance award-winning doc is an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the war on drugs. It rehashes much that will be… Continue reading
"You were really and truly inside me," Helen Hunt's sex surrogate Cheryl assures her client, 36-year-old Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and journalist confined… Continue reading
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, and mythomaniac, peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903–1989) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the… Continue reading
This bloated spin on The Big Chill follows a septet of grating, mostly Gen-X Parisians as they half-guiltily decide to proceed with their summer-holiday plans… Continue reading
An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple. Young-chan is deaf and blind; his… Continue reading
Writer/director Christophe Honoré revisits the musical—the genre of his biggest stateside hit, Love Songs (2007)—in Beloved, a sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which… Continue reading
Benoît Jacquot's soapy, sexy, lezzie adaptation of Chantal Thomas' 2003 novel about the chaos at Versailles on the eve of the 1789 revolution is told… Continue reading
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often… Continue reading
Sarah Polley's second feature, much like her superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and third-party threats. Five years into their… Continue reading
