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…
Ted Fendt’s first feature, the refreshingly droll Short Stay, centers on Mike (Mike MacCherone), a passive, socially awkward twenty-something living in New Jersey. When…
Soon, just as there are plenty of adults who no longer remember a world before The Simpsons, nobody will recall a time when, for good…
Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come—that other film at TIFF ’16 in which Isabelle Huppert acts alongside a cat—tracks several years in the life of philosophy teacher…
Focusing on a period that begins in 1948, during which Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda was declared an enemy of the state…
The Harry Potter franchise officially becomes an Expanded Cinematic Universe with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first in what Warner Bros.…
Delivering as both a remarkable exercise in sensuousness and a wholly affecting look at suffocated identity, Barry Jenkins’s second film is one of remarkable…
Tom Ford may have overburdened his first film, the Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man, with quick-cut impressionistic montages and an overly polished look,…
Ever since Quentin Tarantino arrived, and especially since his Kill Bill and Grindhouse films, the market has seen a deluge of faux-exploitation garbage—from high profile stuff like…
The first two-thirds of Arrival suggest that Denis Villeneuve’s new sci-fi epic might be a genre masterpiece. Certainly, its premise—which revolves around linguist Dr.…
Cinema’s nominal purveyor of ruralism, most successfully of the Southern sort, Jeff Nichols is the de facto director to handle a story such as the…
If the source material for Doctor Strange, the 14th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, suggested the company might finally be open to the surreal potential…
Based on the true story of Army Medic Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield here), a devout Seventh-Day Adventist and conscientious objector who rescued dozens of…
One of the most exciting developments of this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival was the introduction of Future // Present, a program focused on new…
Werner Herzog’s latest has self-referential origins: He met his “co-director,” volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, while making Encounters at the End of the World, and included…
Ti West has repeatedly demonstrated himself capable of a certain kind of virtuosic genre craft, enough at least for it to seem like he could one…
After last year’s tepidly-received Journey to the Shore proved a curious misfire, Kiyoshi Kurosawa chose to return to the familiar motifs of his most…