The Bronze
Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch), a bitter gymnast who once won an Olympic bronze medal for the U.S. team, is now wasting her life away in the sticks.
Film-Forward
My Golden Days
Arnaud Desplechin's latest film encompasses many lives in one. Like all our parallel lives, some make more sense than others in this rich, thought-provoking, and overstuffed film.
A Decent Man | Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
For brutal emotional impact, there is nothing like this film out now, It's a highlight at this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016
The annual festival offers up a wide range of moods, styles, and responses to the shifting times we inhabit. This year’s offerings draw on nostalgia, gazing back at feminism’s 1970s heyday.
Glassland
Framed by a doorway, a young man in darkness seems to hold back from moving forward into the next room—he’s so still I wondered if the film had stalled. The lead character in Gerard Barrett’s Glassland often hesitates to move onward, with good reason. His mother is an incorrigible alcoholic on a slow-motion death train, […]
Bleak Street
Bleak Street makes Blue Velvet look like The Sound of Music. Mexican director Arturo Ripstein shares key artistic touches with David Lynch: surreal longueurs, a sense of claustrophobia, settings that feel tawdrily contemporary and enigmatically retro at the same time. But Bleak Street trawls through a far deeper level of brutal desperation than Blue Velvet. […]
Aferim!
“Kiss the hand you cannot bite.” Cynical and bitter, this helpful hint happens to be the title of a book about Romania’s late, hated dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. But it’s also a key to understanding Romania itself. Authoritarianism and its craven twin, flattery, richly water the country’s roots. First, a feudal satrapy held Roma slaves for […]
45 Years
Retirees Geoff and Kate Mercer live in the English countryside under gray, silent clouds. A certain discreet formality overlays their routine of dog walking and shared meals. They make occasional trips into the touristy nearby town to plan a postponed anniversary party, but they mostly stay within the confines of their home, outfitted in tasteful […]