Lolo
Slapstick meets The Bad Seed in Julie Delpy’s fitfully charming tale, marked by contradictory impulses and abrupt, bewildering shifts in tone.
Film-Forward
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 […]
What Happened, Miss Simone?
This year brought filmgoers three top-notch biographical films on troubled women pop stars: Amy, Janis: Little Girl Blue; and What Happened, Miss Simone? Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin took too many drugs and flamed out early. Nina Simone, though, soldiered against high odds on into old age, battling the twin tormentors of mental illness and […]
Janis: Little Girl Blue
Onstage, Janis Joplin wailed the blues, drank whiskey, and drove the crowds wild. Offstage, she drank whiskey, slept around, and died shooting smack in 1971. But Joplin believed in music, worshipped it, seized its power to communicate and transport. Her love of music was the purest thing in her life, and Janis: Little Girl Blue […]