To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama without laughing. Loosely…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind,…
Simultaneously withholding and smothering, Francine, about a woman just released from prison, provides Melissa Leo (in the title role) another…
When the words “true story” appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid…
Homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur…
A wan comedy about gambling that takes no risks, Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favorite has none of the stinging sordidness…
A sporadically hard-selling homage to a cult hero from an overchronicled era, Radio Unnameable considers the career of Bob Fass,…
Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors stars Denis Lavant, the simian, sinewy actor who played the lead in…
The invaluable American independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1919–1997) once said: “There is no real difference between a traditional fiction film…
The Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Quebec, is, per its website, home to 500 animals of 75 different species; its goal…
Eugene Jarecki’s Sundance award-winning doc is an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the war on drugs. It…
“You were really and truly inside me,” Helen Hunt’s sex surrogate Cheryl assures her client, 36-year-old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes),…
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, and mythomaniac, peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903–1989) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga….
This bloated spin on The Big Chill follows a septet of grating, mostly Gen-X Parisians as they half-guiltily decide to…
An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun’s documentary celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple. Young-chan…
Writer/director Christophe Honoré revisits the musical—the genre of his biggest stateside hit, Love Songs (2007)—in Beloved, a sprawling mess of…
Benoît Jacquot’s soapy, sexy, lezzie adaptation of Chantal Thomas’ 2003 novel about the chaos at Versailles on the eve of…
In this documentary, Kirby Dick lays bare the scandalous epidemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces—the war on women…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of…
Sarah Polley’s second feature, much like her superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and third-party…
Only once is the director’s voice heard in Natalia Almada’s ruminative yet potent documentary about the carnage that has piled…
The origin story of a beloved bedroom gadget, Hysteria, set in London in the 1880s, proceeds as a tedious, clumsy…
