Listen. This is the first word spoken in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ latest masterpiece, a parabolic moral mystery that is at-once quite ordinary in terms of its genre conventions, yet extraordinary in its formal brilliance and ethical considerations. Listen. The speaker is Jenny (Adèle Haenel), a youthful, Read More …
Winner of last year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Salesman did not receive a wide release until this year, and it is one of Farhadi’s most powerful films yet. The imitation between art and life blurs after two married actors are forced to evacuate their Read More …
In this unflinching look into childhood below the poverty line on the streets just east of the Magic Kingdom, Sean Baker continues his provocative filmmaking tour of the invisible American classes. Though their play is scripted by their parents’ cycles of violence and addiction, six-year-old Read More …
I grieve, therefore I am: if there is a single characteristic that grounds the personal identity of Kristen Stewart’s dissociative expat Maureen, it’s the yearning she feels to reconnect with her recently deceased twin brother. It’s the mark not only of her existence, but also Read More …
“Our world has set itself afire. I must look elsewhere to quench the blaze.” James Gray’s film tells the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett’s search for an ancient civilization deep in the Amazon jungle in the years before and after the First World War. Read More …
In the best of the year’s many broken-family dramas, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) surgically probes the invasive lure of cheating and corruption—and the cost of integrity—in a crooked culture. Outwardly, Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) seems to be prospering, Read More …
An intimate portrait of the tortured soul of an artist, interspersed with several of her most famous works, Terence Davies’s unusual biopic covers the life of Emily Dickinson from her school days to her death, highlighting her tempestuous but compassionate relationships with her father, sister, Read More …
Dee Rees’s Mudbound plants itself firmly in Mississippi circa WWII, winding its way through the lives of a black family with deep, world-weary roots as they live and work as sharecroppers on the farm of a (once affluent) white family. Nakedly ambitious, Mudbound is a rural epic, chronicling the Read More …
We typically understand “Beauty and the Beast” stories as those in which a man who is cursed draws a beautiful woman into an unlikely romance that saves him from a burden of suffering and her from loveless conformity. Columbus offers us a different take: Beauty emanates from Read More …
From Garden of Eden references in π to the Tree of Life in The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s ilms have often riffed on biblical (and specifically Genesis-based) ideas, and mother!—his first film since the controversial Noah—is no exception. Like his last film, his new one is a story of Creation, Read More …