Taxi is the third unauthorized (and fascinating) film Jafar Panahi has completed (and smuggled out of Iran) since late 2010, when its government handed down a 20-year ban on him directing any movies, writing screenplays, or giving any media interviews. Like This Is Not a Film (2011) and Closed Curtain (2013), this is not […]
England is famous for a long tradition of eccentrics and a tolerance of their idiosyncrasies. The Lady in the Van celebrates and humanizes the continuation of this quaint pattern through the last quarter of the 20th century, as embodied by the indomitable Dame Maggie Smith.
Her Miss Shepherd is based on the real woman who playwright/screenwriter […]
Those who have protested against how Sicario portrayed Mexico as overrun with brutally violent drug cartels, corrupt law enforcement, and distrusted politicians may not be any happier with Kingdom of Shadows.
Bernardo Ruiz’s documentary includes all those familiar elements through news montages and sound bites, as well as coverage of the missing and presumed murdered. (Juarez […]
Brooklyn hipsters living in their narcissistic bubble in gentrifying neighborhoods are a timely target for satire. Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva now lives in such a changing community, and his Nasty Baby is pitch-perfect at capturing his and his ilk’s worst pettiness, condescension, and isolation from those who came before them into their brave new politically […]
Described as “the father of African cinema,” Ousmane Sembène receives a mostly conventional biodocumentary in Sembene!, but it is enlivened by biographer Samba Gadjigo’s personal perspectives and an impressive array of contextual footage, personal photographs, rare archival footage, interviews with intimates, and clips of Sembène’s films that are only now being preserved.
Sembène had much in […]
Local public radio station WNYC frequently intones a quote attributed to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia: “This is New York, a city of opportunity where nearly eight million people live in peace and harmony and enjoy the benefits of democracy.” Frederick Wiseman’s 40th feature documentary, In Jackson Heights, visually demonstrates this theme through the microcosm of […]
Vergangenheitsbewältigung: to come to terms with the past, as postwar Germany has consistently done regarding the Third Reich. True, right? Since the Nuremberg Trials, the country has cultivated an image of a contrite nation that accepted with alacrity its responsibility for genocide and that has conscientiously required historical education so future generations would learn from […]
Steve Jobs, the movie, is more admirable as a meticulously constructed piece of theater that uses real-life figures like billiard balls than for its emotional catharsis or insight into the evolution of a man many perceived as a larger-than-life genius. At the New York Film Festival press conference, scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin insisted he did not […]
Like MetLife and its commercial use of Snoopy, Laurie Anderson deploys her cute canine as an entry point to mull a subject people usually avoid thinking about: death. The depiction of the life and 2011 death of her rat terrier, Lolabelle, at first seems like those endless photos of and commentary on beloved pets posted […]
