There’s a certain kind of charm that comes from the kind of potentially mob-affiliated working class that you find in pockets of neighborhoods at the heart of t...
Considering the heights he’s reached in the past, Graduation constitutes a disappointing step backwards for erstwhile Romanian New Wave front-runner Cristian Mu...
Excessively schematic plotting is a recurring weakness of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s work. Films like About Elly and The Past suffered from contrived narr...
It takes all of zero seconds for the first rape to occur in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The film opens on a black screen and to the sounds of breaking glass and stif...
There are few conversational taboos more likely to cause arguments than sex offenders. For some, the mere mention of their existence is enough to make blood bo...
Can our children pick and choose the personality traits they inherit, or are they doomed to obtain our lesser qualities? These are the hard questions being medi...
Laura Poitras’ greatest strength as a documentarian is winning the trust of high-profile individuals and getting them to appear in front of her camera. In her r...
There is a moment in Sean Penn’s new film -- for some reason screening this week in competition in Cannes -- when, having navigated the safe passage of a group ...
The problem in trying to critically assess Nicolas Winding Refn’s putrid atrocity of a film The Neon Demon is that regardless how much outrage is thrown at it, ...
If there is one blemish in Jim Jarmusch’s exceptional filmography, it’s his first foray into documentary: 1997’s little-seen Year of the Horse, a surprisingly i...
