The Israeli film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is the rare work of craft that takes a single location conceit and morphs it from filmed theater to something purely cinematic. Director-writer siblings Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz are sure-handed in how they tell the story of Viviane’s Read More …
In this lush, loving adaptation of Colm Toibin’s bestselling novel, it’s the middle of the twentieth century, and thoughtful Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is sailing to America from Ireland in search of opportunities that her small, quiet, seaside hometown can’t offer to her. As she begins Read More …
Inside Out announces itself as a movie about emotions—and it is—but it’s also about the making of our minds. And the minds that made it are among the wildest imaginations making movies today. It tracks a world inside the mind of eleven-year-old Riley, who is growing Read More …
It sounds like the setup for a conventional thriller or horror movie: A man comes home and reunites with friends from his college days for a vacation in a cabin at the beach—and everything goes terribly wrong. But there’s nothing conventional about master filmmaker Asghar Read More …
What the Dardenne brothers do best is this: look at that person you’d rather not notice — the woman weeping on the subway, the guy pulling some shady deal on the corner — and take a deep dive into where she came from and where Read More …
In his most recent film, director Pawel Pawlikowski grapples with belief, loss, and religious ambiguity in 1960s Communist Poland. The story’s protagonist, a novitiate nun named Anna, is suddenly faced with a crisis of faith when she learns of her family’s dark history. Submersion in Read More …
At turns inspiring, challenging, sobering, and finally devastating, The Overnighters is an existentially probing documentary with more layers than a twisty Hollywood thriller. Partly this is due to the compelling subject matter: a Lutheran pastor in a booming North Dakota oil town committed to showing Read More …
“Would you like a drink?” What might you say to the man who killed your three children? What could you imagine him saying in reply? The second of two films on our list about grieving parents, Blake Robbins’s The Sublime and Beautiful takes a premise Read More …
The festering of grief and the frightening ways such grief manifests itself is at the heart of The Babadook, director Jennifer Kent’s horror film about the relationship between a mother and her son. Amelia (Essie Davis) has never really accepted her husband’s death, which occurred Read More …
The Lego Movie took critics and audiences by surprise not only by elevating itself beyond a massive commercial but by the thematic depths it plumbed and its ability to blend humor with serious strands of thought through the centuries. The film navigates the nuances of Read More …