“I hope we’ll have fun and party, that’s why I’m here!” This is what Lilly (Laure Calamy) tells an excited crowd of French retreaters in The…
Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us is the type of film that’s inevitably described as “spare,” “rigorous,” and “conceptually bold.” Unfolding over a distended 94…
The 46th edition of New Directors/New Films concluded this past Sunday with Dustin Guy Defa’s much-discussed Person to Person. Our final dispatch from the festival takes a look at…
Alice Lowe’s character in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers was named Tina; in her own directorial debut, Prevenge, she plays Ruth. Really, though, the different names don’t matter:…
If there’s one noticeable (and troubling) trend in this year’s ND/NF , it’s a pointless rigor exerted in an effort to appear more “serious.” Case in point, Zhang…
The 46th edition of New Directors/New Films kicked off last Wednesday (March 15th) and ends this Sunday (March 24th). For our first of two dispatches…
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 of…
Eduardo Williams’s debut feature, The Human Surge, may well benefit from a second look, but it doesn’t incentivize one. That’s certainly not for lack of ambition: Structured…
Park Kwang-hyun’s Fabricated City seems at first to play its premise straight: Kwon Yoo (Ji Chan-wool) uses a popular MMO game to escape from the growing…
Duckweed is a Chinese Back to the Future with quite a bit of Capra in it. Celebrated novelist (and rally car driver) Han Han rebounds from 2014 road…
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 follows…
Whether one enjoys Son of Joseph will depend on how well one takes to Eugene Green’s very particular style. Favoring declamatory acting, controlled framing and…
It’s heartening to realize that in a year of seemingly constant death—one in which the passing of great filmmakers was no exception—the best films here seemed intent on…
Our top 25 performances, before whittling it down to the 10 you’ll find below, featured votes for two actors from Manchester by the Sea, two from Toni Erdmann,…
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 on…
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 particularly…
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. Paterson is…
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), a…
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 on…
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 Mark…