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. […]

“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 […]

Horribly, terrorism and assassinations seem more common now than when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down while he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995. Writer/director Amos Gitai’s frighteningly relevant and insightful re-creation of the days leading up to that murder is a sophisticated analysis of the ways […]

Censorship always adds the allure of the forbidden to material, and that notoriety seems to be the case with Censored Voices. With rare archival footage, director Mor Loushy illustrates this collection of audio interviews with Israeli veterans of the 1967 Six Day War that were taped almost immediately after Israel captured the West Bank, East […]

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 […]

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 just […]

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, comedian Russell Brand and filmmaker Michael Winterbottom join forces to explore the origins and impact of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the growing disparity in wealth distribution. Polymath Brand is a flamboyant and controversial figure, equally as famous for his short-lived marriage to Katy Perry and overcoming drug addiction […]

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 […]

There’s no intelligible dialogue in this animated odyssey about a nameless boy who leaves his home in the countryside in search of his father, but it still manages to speak to the heart. The father has left for the city to find work, and his lonely son undertakes a dreamlike pursuit. Growing in sinister stature […]