For the most part, Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature Happy as Lazzaro plays as yet another Italian working-class neorealist drama, this one focusing on the inhabitants…
Hong Sang-soo’s 2009 film Night and Day marks many firsts for the director, including his first film shot on digital and his first to be…
Give Nacho Vigalondo’s latest points for being consistently unpredictable: it’s a monster movie, in a sense, but the monsters turn out to be analogous for its…
Alice Lowe’s character in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers was named Tina; in her own directorial debut, Prevenge, she plays Ruth. Really, though, the different names don’t matter:…
Tom Ford may have overburdened his first film, the Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man, with quick-cut impressionistic montages and an overly polished look, but…
The first two-thirds of Arrival suggest that Denis Villeneuve’s new sci-fi epic might be a genre masterpiece. Certainly, its premise—which revolves around linguist Dr. Louise…
Werner Herzog’s latest has self-referential origins: He met his “co-director,” volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, while making Encounters at the End of the World, and included footage…
Though the presence of Shota Sometani, the tortured lead actor of Sion Sono’s Himizu—who’s even sporting the same gray hoodie he wore in that previous film—establishes a…
Proof of the lasting influence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers can be glimpsed in two relatively recent films making a sizable dent in last…
With a film festival as stacked to the gills as the TIFF, thematic trends are bound to pop up. Last year, doppelgängers appeared to be…
Another year, another insanely packed Toronto International Film Festival. While there are certainly titles premiering at TIFF this year that interest me, my festival experience…
If we’re talking about a “golden age of documentaries,” as many seem to be doing these days, then we really should be talking more about…
Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason at first seems like a standard talking-heads documentary writ large, at least if one were to offer up a brief…
Even in his earlier, more relatively conventional films, Abbas Kiarostami always maintained an eye for radical formal experimentation. Close Up, for instance, is as much…