In her feature-length directorial debut, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, writer-director Laura Piani effervescently manages the tricky task of bringing the deep emotionality and…
There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name,…
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen…
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short…
“You’re an improbable person, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity. An inability to love or be…
Throughout Nora Fingscheidt’s film The Outrun, we are thoroughly stuck in Rona’s (Saoirse Ronan) head. Fresh out of rehab, Rona has returned to the…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a…
How do you prove that you don’t speak a language? Especially when that language, English, is a tool of centuries-old oppression wielded by one…
Late in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winner, Harvey, the theme of the play is delivered by — who else? — a salty cab-driver. The aptly-named E.J.…
In an interview with Michael Haneke about 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the final part of the director’s then lesser-known Glaciation Trilogy (1989 -…
A pervasive distrust has infiltrated a German middle school in Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, roiling both the students and the faculty. Insinuations fly freely, along…
In the pantheon of late-19th to early-20th century intellectuals, there are few with such starkly opposing views as Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. At…
An experiment of replacing craftspeople, necessary in most film productions, with an entourage of artists, The Peasants is a pictorially impeccable film. Artistic partners…
The legacy of a venerated musician comprises the myriad testimonies in They Shot the Piano Player. Colleagues and family of Francisco Tenório Júnior share…
A 32-minute queer cowboy melodrama paid for by Yves Saint Laurent, Strange Way of Life is Pedro Almodóvar’s second English-language short and, like The…
Randall Park’s directorial debut, Shortcomings, is sure to draw immediate comparisons to Crazy Rich Asians, a film that made $238 million and was praised…
“Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” That is the command Orlando (Tilda Swinton) first receives from Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp),…
A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic and electrifying…