Film-Forward

Top Picks

The Lobster

By May 12, 2016

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

Love & Friendship

By May 11, 2016

Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, a posthumously published novella about a devious widow who goes husband-hunting for both herself and her daughter. It has intrigue, musings on marriage, and a fascinating female lead.

Dheepan

By May 6, 2016

Jacques Audiard’s moody heartbreaker, the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or last year, daringly places a rough-and-ready, documentary-ish shooting style alongside confident, startling artistry.

Bridgend

By

Director Jeppe Ronde uses a real-life event as the basis for a haunting, ethereal film, a sort of inverted Rebel Without a Cause. These teens don’t lash out so much as cave in.

Fireworks Wednesday

By May 1, 2016

Asghar Farhadi reminds us of how, ultimately, there are countless external factors that determine and alter our lives that we have no control over.

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.