Film-Forward

Top Picks

Elvis & Nixon

By April 21, 2016

A fictionalized meeting that is very funny at times and boasts actors fully committed to communicating the bizarreness of a particular time and place in American history.

Tale of Tales

By

Based on 17th-century stories by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, who inspired the Brothers Grimm, one tale ends with a sting, another ends in triumph, and the third concludes somewhere in the middle. All of them linger.

Green Room

By April 14, 2016

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier reminds one of a young Steven Spielberg. Not the family-friendly Spielberg but the mean, young, hungry Spielberg who had a taste for genre filmmaking.

Everybody Wants Some!!

By April 4, 2016

The entire tone of Richard Linklater’s new, low-key film is infectious in a positive, sweet way. The characters are fun, vibrant, a little wild, and off-kilter, lacking in a cynicism often found in college comedies.

Standing Tall

By March 31, 2016

Emmanuelle Bercot’s empathetic and clear-eyed film presents a pungent portrait of a young adult. Its lead actor won the César Award, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for most promising actor.

Sweet Bean

By March 22, 2016

In this intensely moving movie, long, lovingly shot sequences of the titular food fits perfectly in the genre of culinary-based films in which food has metaphorical, cultural, and even spiritual significance.

A War

By March 17, 2016

Director Tobias Lindholm, employing a realistic, almost documentarylike style, explores the moral consequences of the choices men make. He has, with A War, made his finest film to date.

Barney Thomson

By March 11, 2016

The best way to describe actor Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is a black comedy or, more to the point, a bleak comedy. Emma Thompson costars as an epically self-centered harridan: loud, vulgar, frequently drunk, and with a complete lack of social inhibition.

$zoom_icon_css = 'display:inline-block;';