Most seem to agree at this point that the Cannes Film Festival’s competition line-up was not good this year. While the New York Film Festival’s main slate includes more than a few of the same selections, the films that didn’t make the cut are especially…
In this modest second feature, Jang Woo-jin demonstrates a canny eye for separations between people and within space and time. Autumn, Autumn tells two stories neatly partitioned by a title card 35 minutes in, both originating from strangers sitting together on a train from Seoul to…
As a documentary film student newly arrived in America, director Nanfu Wang’s probing I Am Another You begins as she meets a charismatic, intentionally homeless 22-year-old named Dylan, a symbol of the quintessential notion of freedom Nanfu transplanted herself to find. After Dylan grandly announces…
For our third and final dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s number one, here’s number two), we take a look at the film that caused(?) bomb threats at its Cannes premiere this year: Michel Hazanavicius’s nose-thumbing Jean-Luc Godard “biopic.” This dispatch also…
Slovakia-born Canadian director Ingrid Veninger’s Porcupine Lake is a sensitive, sun-dappled summer idyll (with dark undercurrents) on themes of coming of age, preteen-love-fumblings, and the inevitable realization of the adult world’s fallibility. Newcomer Charlotte Salisbury (palpably raw and naturalistic) plays Bea, up from Toronto in the…
Mademoiselle Paradis tells the true story of the titular musical prodigy, an Austrian contemporary of Mozart, during a most strange period of her life. Blind from the age of three, Maria Therese Paradis (Maria-Victoria Dragus), at the behest of her embarrassed, vapid parents, temporarily…
Violeta Ayala’s fascinating documentary Cocaine Prison doesn’t have anything particularly new to say about the failed social and criminal policies of a thoroughly unwinnable war against narcotraffic. But it does boast a heartbreaking worm’s-eye-view of some of the people most caught up in it. When…
The no-budget, dually high-concept premises of Jenna Bass’s High Fantasy: four South African twentysomethings (two women of color, a white woman, and a black man) go camping in some arid Northern Cape preserve, argue loudly about race, gender and apartheid issues, then wake up…
Our second dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (you can find the first here; the third and final one will be up on Friday) includes a new collaborative film from a French New Wave legend; a domestic drama that’s much closer to a horror…
Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a mustachioed bartender at a Parisian strip-club, after her husband commits suicide (a scene that’s drolly narrated by Anjelica Huston) in Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street. To Gina, Jérôme is a figure of fate, a man with “something…
