Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits,…
Same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013, one of many countries to enshrine this right as law in the 2010s as the marriage…
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…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black…
The conceit of Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited brings to mind plays by the likes of Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter: a wealthy Los Angeles…
It’s not exactly a novel idea that many young queer people idealize pop divas to the point of over-identification, and it’s equally well-established culturally…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism,…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous…
Director Craig Johnson has worked with alums of Saturday Night Live before: His 2014 film The Skeleton Twins featured nuanced leading performances from Kristen…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug)…
A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently…
Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death,…
The first shot of Julian Chou’s film Blind Love is both jarring and literal: a closeup of a doctor draining a cyst under a…
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…
David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his…
The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of…
The existence of Mufasa: The Lion King, the Barry Jenkins-directed prequel to Jon Favreau’s 2019 photorealistic remake of The Lion King, raises an interesting…