As an NPR-style radio journalist, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) excels at asking questions that unlock people’s hopes and fears for the future. Living in the present—and for that matter confronting the past—without the mediation of a microphone is a different story. After reconnecting with his semi-estranged Read More …
CODAÂ is one of several films from the last year that show young people struggling to carve out or create a normal existence in the midst of circumstances that can and do overwhelm many of their peers and elders. The acronym stands for Children of Deaf Read More …
Joel Coen’s film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s 17th-century play retains the source material’s themes of the corruptive powers of greed, treachery, and unfaithfulness. It is a cautionary tale of the dangers that may come from seemingly promising whispers of glory – falsities that are revealed Read More …
The poet Denise Levertov proposed that the world might know peace if we reorganized priorities in favour of ‘long pauses’. She was calling for a practice of deep imagination. The final movie from master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami feels like a profound example. In it, Kiarostami Read More …
Andrew Bujalski’s affecting Support the Girls is one of the more raw, honest, and insightful cinematic depictions of the American food industry and its underlying ideologies. The story centers on a day in the life of restaurant manager Lisa (Regina Hall) as she tries to manage and Read More …
It would be difficult to overstate the weirdness of this film, but the oddity of the following sentence is some indication of what you’re in for: Adapted from the writings of the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy, Bruno Dumont’s unclassifiable theological rock musical blends theodicy Read More …
Bing Liu’s intimate documentary initially seems like little more than a celebration of the simple joys of skateboarding while being young and carefree, a family drama of two young twenty-somethings raising a child together, and the struggle to make a living in a small city, Read More …
‘I see the moon, and the moon sees me…’ The first thing we see in First Man is Neil Armstrong in the rattling interior of a test cockpit, fighting against gravity to break Earth’s atmosphere, then fighting against the push of the same atmosphere to go back Read More …
For the last decade, Hirokazu Koreeda has been world cinema’s metronome, ticking off empathetic masterpieces with virtuosity so efficiently it is perhaps too easy to take for granted. His run of eight films from 2008’s Still Walking to last year’s Shoplifters was capped with a well-deserved Palme d’Or at Read More …
Tender, empathetic, and visually rich, Chloé Zhao’s contemporary neo-Western both affirms and subverts its generic roots, deconstructing and reconstructing the masculinity, violence, and individualism of the American myth of the Cowboy. The titular rider here is Brady (Brady Jandreau), a rodeo cowboy and horse trainer Read More …