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 Dumont’s…
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 to…
“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 sloppy…
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 else,…
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 latest is…
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 sits…
Scott Cooper is not a subtle filmmaker. Further proof of this comes in the first five minutes of his Hostiles, when two young children and…
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 director’s…
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 teenage…
Richard Linklater is a talented director, but it feels like he may be running out of ideas. Last Flag Flying, based on the Darryl Ponicsan…
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 large…
Nearly every film Todd Haynes has made is a period piece, and throughout his career he has worked with production and costume designers who have…
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 two…
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 Program…
Mademoiselle Paradis tells the true story of the titular musical prodigy, an Austrian contemporary of Mozart, during a most strange period of her life. Blind…
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 of…
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 more…
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 are…
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 supports…
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 debut…