Film-Forward

Satire

I Am Not Madame Bovary

Lian (Chinese megastar Fan Bingbing) is a woman on a mission, but she’s neither Norma Rae nor Mother Courage.

The Love Witch

With every shot a saturated, gorgeous explosion of kitsch perfection, this elaborate send-up of 1960s and ’70s occult sexploitation films boils and toils over a bubblin’ cauldron of sheer spectacle.

The Lobster

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s blackly comic satire—a discombobulating rush of inventiveness and imagination that doesn’t let up.

High-Rise

Director Ben Wheatley adapts J.G. Ballard’s dystopian and predictive novel into a strikingly stylish film, heightening the tone of the book and its excesses.

My Big Night

A rollicking farce about the production of a New Year’s Eve television special—in mid-October, nonetheless—that must go on no matter what the human cost.

Ava’s Possessions

This is a sly, well-made little horror/comedy that puts a unique spin on the demonic possession genre while providing just enough chills and laughs along the way.

Hail, Caesar!

Hail, Caesar! is a big, luscious, gorgeous ode to the Golden Age of Hollywood—a certain kind of Hollywood, at any rate. It’s a work that is great and minor at the same time. It has a passable central plot while everything else around it, all of the moving parts, is wonderful and hysterically funny and often […]

The Big Short

The whiplash camera work of a faux-documentary. Actors breaking the fourth wall, staring straight into the camera with a what-the-hell bemused expression. All this plus the underlying cynicism with a smirk will immediately remind viewers of top TV fare such as the American version of The Office. As if on cue, that series’ star, Steve […]

Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema 2015

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 […]