It’s rare that I can recommend a Park Chan-Wook film, but Decision to Leave is a masterful exercise in suspense devoid of the director’s characteristic graphicness. As a detective story, Park’s latest film is a tribute to Vertigo, which inspired him to become a filmmaker. The same obsession Read More …
There was a glorious moment in The Banshees of Inisherin when Pádraic (Colin Farrel) tells Colm (Brendan Gleason) why he refuses to be shunned by his former friend despite the latter’s threats of self-mutilation. At that moment, I thought perhaps he was acting as an Read More …
Can you remember a time in your teenage years when you feared pleasure and joy? Can you remember someone pitching faith as a kind of sanctifying anxiety—a conditional relationship with God, contingent upon your constant worry about it? Many of us can. Many of those Read More …
Spotlight is pervaded by incredulity, pain, and anger, laced with sadness and guilt. Working with a script co-written by Josh Singer, director Tom McCarthy brings precision and persuasive detail to a portrait of a specific time, place, and perspective: Boston, seen through the eyes of The Globe‘s Read More …
A companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer’s previous documentary about the bloody history of genocide in Indonesia The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence takes a more intimate and contemplative approach. Where the previous film featured bombastic murderers and gangsters giving elaborate reenactments of their brutal killings, this Read More …
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 …