Perhaps in answer to fans who complained that The Force Awakens was just a collection of rehashed elements and nostalgia with a shiny paint job, Rian…
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…
With Princess Cyd, Chicago-based director Stephen Cone extends his interest in exploring the push-pull of the mind, body and spirit, with a generous emphasis on the…
“YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES” reads a woman’s shirt near the start of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, the director’s second film from 2016,…
Ominous portents abound from the first moments of Joachim Trier’s Thelma: the film opens with the unsettling sight of a man pointing a hunting rifle at…
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…
Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauian and Senegalese descent, knows the value of a good face. This is why he fills so many of Félicité’s frames…
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…
Dragonfly Eyes, the first feature film from Beijing installation artist Xu Bing, is at least sociologically interesting: It’s comprised largely of repurposed CCTV surveillance camera footage that’s…
Our fifth and final dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, three, and four) includes a couple of films about various forms of…
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…
Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei takes a powerful look at the global refugee crisis in his new documentary Human Flow. Whether the refugees come from Syria,…
Our fourth dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, and three) includes the Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s docudrama The Rider, about South Dakotan…
The Foreigner has the same elements as any number of generic procedurals: innocent victims are killed in a terrorist bomb blast, law enforcement officers track down leads…
Jennifer Reeder’s feature debut is a brisk, charming story of asserting one’s identity in the midst of cultural expectations. Zaynab (the charismatic Fawzia Mirza) works as…
Fitting snugly into Noah Baumbach’s tragicomic oeuvre, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) approaches dysfunctional families with the same intuitive understanding of complex interpersonal dynamics…
In our third dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (the first is here, second here): the “director’s cut” version of Arnaud Desplechin’s sprawling career summation, Ismael’s Ghosts;…
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…