Critics out of Cannes labeled Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Unknown Girl “a lesser work.” If that’s the case, it just proves that the brothers…
Bertrand Bonello’s controversial new feature Nocturama, which was passed over by both the Cannes and Venice film festivals, has been pigeonholed as a film that…
While it’s exciting to discover completely unknown directors, it’s equally—if not more—interesting to watch a (relatively) well-known artist transition into feature filmmaking. Making his…
The stateside media-consuming public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for standup comedy product (The Comedian, Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, infinite podcasts) is the target audience…
Admirers of David Lowery’s third feature (and second with stars Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, after 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) have and will…
The high-stakes world of standardized testing may sound like a punchline, but that’s essentially the setup to Nattawut Poonpiriya’s NYAFF-opening Bad Genius. The film follows Lynn…
Utterly adventurous, João Pedro Rodrigues’s dizzying and highly personal The Ornithologist is loosely based on the life of St. Anthony of Padua and unfolds in…
An auteurist invention of the highest order, Matías Piñeiro’s ongoing “Shakespeare series” is the ideal platform to showcase the Argentinean director’s enticing and increasingly…
Though Terence Davies was absent from the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2015, his Emily Dickinson film A Quiet Passion makes its appearance this…
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…
“Everything disgusts me,” exclaims dying King Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The most disgusting thing present? The repulsive nature of aristocracy, laid out in full…
That advice may well be applied to Olivier Assayas’s slippery, sensual Personal Shopper, which does for horror what Irma Vep (still the high watermark…
In the case of Alain Guiraudie’s relentlessly weird Staying Vertical, there may not be anything to do except surrender to the strangeness. The story…
What Kenneth Lonergan understands, probably better than any other writer-director working today, is how difficult it is to communicate grief in a convincing way…
Park Chan-wook’s career has largely been steeped in a particular fusion of twisty revenge narratives padded with philosophical implications. His latest, The Handmaiden, feels…
Jim Jarmusch’s career trajectory has afforded distinct perspectives on his work, especially as that relates to the idea of a monotonous kind of living.…
On paper, the premise of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann — a prankster father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), drops in unannounced on his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller),…
Relationships fray without stated explanations in Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta—but the settings reveal what information characters don’t. Julieta (Emma Suarez) receives startling news from a friend…