Debra Granik’s new film works best when it doesn’t allow the purity of its empathy to get in the way of its critique of…
If Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc doesn’t scale the insurmountable heights of St. Joan films by Dreyer or Bresson, it’s for Bruno…
In transmuting the true-life story of rodeo star Brady Jandreau into the sort-of-fictionalized The Rider, director Chloé Zhao uses low-key character and narrative detail…
“Meta” inadequately describes the interlacing literary and cinematic references, stories-within-stories, digressions, subplots and general convolution that comprises Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts, a dense and appealingly…
The bourgeois Brooklyn of Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits is a “wasteland in the middle.” The film opens with an airplane flying away for somewhere…
Pivoting from the cerebral intensity of Queen of Earth — an Images, or Fassbinder, -like exteriorization of a woman’s mental breakdown — Alex Ross Perry’s…
Philippe Garrel’s career has certainly taken an odd turn. The director, who first made waves in the experimental Zanzibar Group after Mai ’68, now…
Scott Cooper is not a subtle filmmaker. Further proof of this comes in the first five minutes of his Hostiles, when two young children…
The 60 year-old Aki Kaurismäki has declared that his latest, The Other Side of Hope, will be his swan song. There’s cause to treat the excitable…
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut (she co-directed 2008’s Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), demonstrates a casual mastery of filmmaking, intuitively changing emotional registers—something essential to the…
Richard Linklater is a talented director, but it feels like he may be running out of ideas. Last Flag Flying, based on the Darryl…
At the start of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, arrogant Stockholm museum curator Christian (Claes Bang) is preparing to unveil a new installation pinned on a…
Nearly every film Todd Haynes has made is a period piece, and throughout his career he has worked with production and costume designers who…
Working with famed French photographer JR, formative French New Wave auteur Agnes Varda has one goal for her collaborative film Faces Places: to create indelible images. One way the…
For anyone lamenting the political reticence of much of American independent filmmaking, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project—the consensus favorite of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight…
Mademoiselle Paradis tells the true story of the titular musical prodigy, an Austrian contemporary of Mozart, during a most strange period of her life.…
Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, which first premiered at Locarno in August, wastes no time in grabbing your attention, opening with voiceover about the beginning…
Though Romanian director Cristi Puiu sets his latest film, Sieranevada, at a family gathering commemorating the death of a late patriarch, the filmmaker has much…