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 […]
The World of Kanako is not a film that produces a lukewarm reaction. It’s pretty much a love or hate kind of situation. Of course, you can do both. Connections to films can be like relationships, and this is one you can absolutely despise loving. In fact, it’s a response the movie practically demands. There […]
The festival Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema, screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from December 2-8, is celebrating its 10th edition, and is using this milestone as an occasion to look back on the Romanian New Wave, which, of course by now, is not so new. Besides its usual focus on recent films—which […]
Three Asian films at the DOC NYC festival reveal spaces we rarely see and people we are unlikely to meet, even in a globalized, connected world. These outwardly calm works contain unpredictable emotions, immense risks, and power games sometimes unseen, sometimes thrust into the open. “We had to destroy the village in order to save […]
As I took my seat to watch Brooklyn at the New York Film Festival, the middle-aged man to my left flashed me a dirty look. Clearly the gentleman did not want company next to him, and so he made sure to throw me the kind of pitch-black shade that lets you know you’ve invaded a […]
Only a few films could pack a 2,300-seat theater at a 12:30 Thursday morning screening as did Gaspar Noé’s 3-D orgiastic opus Love when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Sight unseen, it had already gained notoriety for the director’s declared intention to add emotion to explicit sex within a love story. Well, in […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s been eight years since Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s last feature, the Paris-set Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), and the idea for his latest film, The Assassin, had been gestating in his mind for a quarter of a century. But now, Hou’s unique and idiosyncratic take on the wuxia (martial arts films) has finally […]