Movies

When it comes to dogs in movies, cinema has developed its own series of informal rules with regard to what is and is not allowed to happen to the little blighters. Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor expertly subverts expectations when it comes to these rules in her absorbing and unsentimental new work La Perra, in which…

Clarissa (Sophie Okonado) seems on edge the morning of her party. She’s frustrated when her maid fetches the wrong plates out of storage, and even more irritated when the handyman leaves a large mosaic leaning up against her sofa instead of hanging it on the wall. Her teenage daughter doesn’t even want to attend the soirée,…

William Greaves shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, probably his best-known film, in Central Park, where he had a rotating cast act out a melodramatic overheard-in-New York scenario for his camera. He himself was also filmed by a second crew, capturing his interactions with curious bystanders and truculent actors, while a third crew filming whatever they wanted, including arguments with a mutinous production…

Boots Riley is one of the few American filmmakers who are most visibly invested in conversations about class, capitalism, and aesthetics in their works. He pushes each subject to the point of breaking in absurdist works whose visual ambition and thematic audacity can often feel as knowingly chaotic as our contemporary world. With “Sorry to…

This year’s Ebert Fellows attended the True/False Film Festival, one of the most essential non-fiction cinema events of the year. Here are their reports: PAIGE TERNADO “To really make a film like this, you have to ignore every commercial model that we’re sold.” Filmmaker Patrick Bresnan, whose documentary “First They Came for My College” tells…

Maybe it’s a product of being a father of three myself, but I often find that my assignments at film festivals tend to stories of teenagers. It could also be that the coming-of-age drama is a standard of the indie movement, no matter its country of origin. Three films from this year’s Cannes are distinct…

Other films instead approach the subject with more ambiguity, even perverse fascination. Films like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) insinuate near-universal teenage experience of social alienation helps to explain some of the animating forces behind such grisly actions. In Elephant, Van Sant deploys his signature thematic palate of wayward youth and unsentimental realism as the film’s teenagers ride bikes…

Four years ago, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer went from the high of a Cannes Film Festival full of rave reviews of her period drama Corsage to the depths of desperation at learning that one of the film’s stars – Florian Teichtmeister – had been accused and subsequently charged with possession and production of child pornography. Teichtmeister’s…

The afternoon of the day he was killed in 1980, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, sat for a radio interview at their apartment in the Dakota in New York. The ostensible subject was their new album, Double Fantasy, but the conversation was expansive. It included reflections on how they met, their artistic temperaments,…