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, […]

While some may balk at the arrival of yet another indie film delving into the angst of a twentysomething New York writer who broods and self-destructs, James White, the debut from writer-director Josh Mond, takes a slightly different tack that sets it apart. It stars Christopher Abbott of Girls fame. On that TV show, he […]

Don’t be fooled by the European poster for Paolo Sorrentino’s latest amorphous film. It may be hard to pin down what type of movie this is, but it’s definitely not the spry sex comedy hinted at in the ad campaign, where stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel sit in a swimming pool staring gob-smacked at […]

Imagine you have a young friend from conservative rural Turkey. Funny that, because her modishly off-kilter beauty looks more like what you’d see in a Paris modeling studio. Your friend is flirty and flighty, but she conceals something that you’d never mess with: stone courage and a will of fine metal. Does she tell fibs? […]

The Italian countryside is no place for a teenage girl, at least not in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders. Young Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) lives with her parents and three younger sisters in a run-down farmhouse. Her German father, Wolfgang, insists they live off the grid, confining the family in joyless, hardscrabble bohemianism. Workdays on the […]

Even if you’ve read Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room or already heard about this film adaptation, there is little chance that too much foreknowledge will lessen the story’s complexity. At the recent Toronto International Film Festival, it was perhaps the most talked about selection; I couldn’t cover my ears in time before I found out […]

Oh, Little Miss Sunshine, what hast thou wrought? Due to one adorably off-color indie film, we are subjected to quirky dysfunctional families bickering their way across the land in an effort to a) save their family home b) win an absurd competition or c) in the case of the terminally dull This Is Happening, retrieve […]

If you take the word sweet, whisk away the S and move a few letters around, you end up with twee. Asia Argento’s Misunderstood veers between the two states while chronicling the travails of a preteen girl and her eccentric family in 1980s Rome. Along the way the film flirts with peril and incendiary themes, […]

The premieres of films by internationally known directors attracted most of the coverage at Cannes: consider the critical love that was bestowed upon Todd Haynes’s Carol or the thumping Gus van Sant received for The Sea of Trees. Big names were represented from all over: Asian auteurs (Jia Zhang-ke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and the big […]