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.

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.

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

The opening credits spell it out: 800,000 sheep among 320,000 Icelanders. Living in the remote northern part of the country, two brothers, bachelor sheep farmers past middle age, live alone on side by side farms. Their family has lived in the region for generations, raising prized thoroughbred stock. Both brothers have an attentive, paternal relationship with their herds—their constant companions—yet the men haven’t said a word to each other […]

Talk about your tough sell. Critics have their work cut out for them when discussing well-made but audience-repelling films. For example, Room, centered on a mother and her five-year-old son kept captive in a shed for years on end, is one of the lowest grossing films to be nominated for the best picture Oscar. The Auschwitz-set Son of Saul has earned wide acclaim, but it […]

The found-footage horror film is the ugly stepchild in a family of ugly stepchildren. If slasher films do not get respect, found-footage movies, save for one or two, tend to elicit groans and rolling eyes. They are super cheap to make, the cinematography and sound are generally awful, and the acting worse because, for the […]

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. […]