Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its title…
The spectre of doom looms over the besieged town of Srebrenica for the entirety of Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, but the portended massacre only…
A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering amidst…
Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly as a…
The Father can veer into indulgence, but largely works as a nuanced, compassionate portrait of aging’s ravages. Like the captain of his soul, Anthony — played…
Night of the Kings thrives on both its powerful sense of artifice and brutal reality. Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature,…
The World to Come is a narratively austere but emotionally and sociologically potent study of women and love under patriarchy. Set on the frigid expanse of…
Mitra was a daughter and a revolutionary. In 1982, during the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, she was among the thousands arrested by the authorities…
Fernanda Valadez’s debut, while sometimes frustratingly broad, tells a well-known tale through unusual eyes, giving the classic immigration tale a welcome twist. Within a cinematic…
To delve into the world of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU. is to forgo the comfortable spectatorial positions of detachment and objectivity, and submit to its fantastical reconstruction of…
Finding Yingying smartly avoids its early promise of true-crime procedural in favor of something more rawly emotional. Mere weeks after her arrival in the United States,…
Dreamland is a beautiful, lite-Malickian effort than smartly boasts both gorgeous, mythopoeic expositions and thrilling storytelling. Set during the Great Depression and amidst the dusty storms…
Woody Allen’s long-delayed latest isn’t among the director’s most psychologically incisive works, but its minor-key efforts reflect a curious transposition of the director’s old-fashioned absorptions…
Ham on Rye is a welcome departure from the typical trappings of a coming-of-age film. Coming-of-age narratives make up a significant proportion of contemporary independent…
Like R.W. Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Under the Open Sky opens with an aging man being released from prison after serving thirteen years for murder. During…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…