Malcolm and Marie is an affecting meditation on the private life of relationships and the closed-door conflicts that arise in the absence of an audience. When film and television production came to a halt last March due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, the…
The Salt of Tears is a pensive film that finds the aged director again reckoning with notions of parenthood, permanence, and familial legacy. Over the course of his half-century career behind the camera, 72-year-old French master Philippe Garrel has traversed a multitude of styles. From…
Dick Johnson is Dead forgoes potentially rich avenues of more universal concern, but remains a heartfelt portrait and preservation of the filmmaker’s father. Documentarian Kirsten Johnson is magnificent at integrating certain presentational modes — montage, time capsules — into works of memory preservation. She…
Alain Resnais’s ingenuity as a filmmaker is on full display in his adaptation of one of the British theater’s most complex and rewarding works, Intimate Exchanges. A theatrical octet written between 1982 and 1983 by prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the work is comprised of…
A driving force behind the work of Andrew Bujalski is his passion to transcend the vapidness found in so much of contemporary American independent filmmaking. Funny Ha Ha inaugurated “mumblecore” — one of the most important and influential movements in international cinema since the French New…
There’s scarcely been a better time for a film like BPM (Beats Per Minute), with its genuine and rare sense of empathy, and its yearning spirit of liberation from the influence of oppressive forces. Unfortunately, Robin Campillo’s third feature is bogged down by the shortcomings of its filmmaking. BPM follows…
Frederick Wiseman is one of a handful of contemporary filmmakers who can make duration a virtue: Ex Libris uses its staggering, 197-minute runtime to thoroughly examine the institution of the New York Public Library. Going back to the 1960s, Wiseman has proven a master of vivisecting spaces and…
