Nobody knows bland, affluent white people quite like writer-director Bart Freundlich, a filmmaker who has made a career out of chronicling the interior struggles…
Shot on gorgeous 35mm, and in director Laszlo Nemes’s preferred close-up style (ported in from his debut feature, Son of Saul), and employing what…
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…
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…
There’s a moment near the end of the second act of Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature Whiplash that threatens to completely derail the narrative: a…
It probably wasn’t a difficult decision to have Nigel Cole direct Made in Dagenham, given that he was an ambassador of female solidarity just…
Think about these: Annie Hall, Sleeper, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan, and Purple Rose of Cairo. Are you smiling? Are you…
When Zhang Yimou announced he was to remake the Coen Brothers’ 1984 seminal noir Blood Simple, one couldn’t help but wonder what he was…
Even at the ripe old age of 88, Alain Resnais’s filmmaking engine seems to have an endless supply of creative fuel left. Like clockwork,…
The films of writer/director Nicole Holofcener are trim and personal, lit with the light of real life and warmed by the friction of relationships…
Set in the gray, drab atmosphere of post-war England, An Education opens with a montage of academia: English schoolgirls being taught to graduate, work,…
The weakest of Pedro Almodóvar’s four films this decade, the oddly muted melodrama Broken Embraces is also something no other work from the Spanish master…
A VH1 programmer’s (wet) dream come true, It Might Get Loud assembles three generations of guitar gods under one roof, where they’ll talk shop,…
With his late-career peak, 1992’s Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen explored the rocky slope of marriage in all its complex infidelities and regrets. Since…
Emotional revelations are a common motif throughout Bent Hamer’s filmography, whether it be discovering the significance of family in Eggs, the necessity of friendship…
Given the market’s desire for escapist films and an audience’s need to placate a media-induced fear of Mexico, the high profile Mexican film Rudo…
Following 2006’s Half Nelson, a convincing depiction of friendship between a 13-year-old and her crack-addict teacher (a role which Ryan Gosling won an Academy…