Movies

There’s a rot in the foundation of the American Dream in James Gray’s very good “Paper Tiger,” a return to familiar territory that echoes his early films like “The Yards” and “We Own the Night” but with an even stronger current of doomed melancholy. The waters that flow through this section of 1986 New York…

Sarah Leavitt (Abbi Jacobsen) is caught between two worlds. On the west coast of the United States, there’s the life she’s built for herself in San Francisco, defined by self-expression and freedom she never quite felt growing up on the east coast. She’s politically engaged, has a group of like-minded friends and works for a queer magazine…

Valentina Maurel’s testing drama about a pair of estranged sister who reunite under difficult circumstances sadly falls back on repetitive riffs. Questions on the nature of family bonds simmer beneath the surface in Valentina Maurel’s queasy drama, which she shot in the same Costa Rican neighbourhood where she grew up. These questions include: What do…

Bad parents is the theme of this Cannes dispatch, which features three films in competition. Each work is also from an accomplished director, which makes a couple of the misses in this write-up all the more incomprehensible because on paper, these should’ve been fairly strong titles. Instead, the competition at Cannes appears to be getting…

“Capitalism,” the writer Rayne Fisher-Quann recently semi-joked, ​“makes women of us all.” That is, subsumes our own agency, expropriates our labor, and turns us into passive receptacles for someone else’s desire. Radu Jude, with typical extravagance, extends the metaphor: Capitalism makes Romanian women of us all. His films are invariably fronted by women who are exploited and…

In the post-Romero era of zombie horror filmmaking, there are only a handful of titles that truly stand out, and one that deserves to be considered among not just the best zombie movies but greatest horror movies of this century is Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan. The high-speed masterpiece of ravenous zombie apocalypse taking place on a train…

French filmmaker Judith Godrèche sadly has unique insight when it comes to the lifelong trauma of sexual violence and your body being used against you. She has been the victim of alleged assaults from three prominent men in the movie industry, one being Harvey Weinstein, who she alleged attacked her at the Cannes Film Festival…

In 2012, just under a year after the end of the Second Gulf War, New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins wrote an article entitled ​‘Atonement After Iraq’ about a former US marine and the family whose lives were forever changed when three of their number were shot dead during a misunderstanding at a Baghdad intersection. In the blink of…

When Uncle Gary (Adam Driver) arrives at his brother’s family home in Queens, it’s in a shiny black Mercedes with a fleet of chefs from Peter Luger in tow. He performs card tricks at the dinner table and plays piano on request; his starry-eyed nephews Scotty and Ben pester him in hushed voices to see the gun…

In the year 2001, the Argentinean filmmaker Lisandro Alonso kinda created a blueprint for a new form of hybrid cinema with his film La Libertad which combined the aesthetics and ad hoc naturalism of documentary with the dramatic manipulations and carefully staged cinematography that comes from fiction filmmaking. He also created an iconic sequence within the annals…