Film-Forward

Foreign

Marguerite

Meryl Streep has recently undertaken to play Florence Foster Jenkins in a film by Stephen Frears that will come out later this year. French writer/director Xavier Giannoli, though, has beaten that production to the punch with his deluxe variation of Jenkins’s biography.

Lolo

Slapstick meets The Bad Seed in Julie Delpy’s fitfully charming tale, marked by contradictory impulses and abrupt, bewildering shifts in tone.

More Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016

Within 11 days’ time, New Yorkers can see a significant slice of current French films that have won acclaim at Cannes and earned praise back home.

The Wave

There is room for big, loud, dumb expensive movies in the world, but Michael Bay, you just got schooled on how to make a disaster flick by the Norwegian upstarts behind The Wave, which is a hell of a fun ride.

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.

Embrace of the Serpent

Peter Matthiessen’s 1978 novel The Snow Leopard recounts his journey through the Himalayas with a team of Sherpas as guides. Among them was Tukten, for whom Matthiessen felt a particular reverence, often referring to him as a “shaman” for an unnamable, soulful quality, despite a tendency toward unreliability and pesky behavior. Tukten teaches one of […]

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, […]

Overlooked Gems of 2015

Early on in the year may be as good a time as any to look back at 2015, before the number of films begins to snowball and as the awards season slowly winds down. What has been overlooked? What made the festival rounds but is conspicuously missing from this year’s lineup, having perhaps gotten lost […]