“This land has too many love stories buried in its fields,” says the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a brief dramatized appearance at the tail end of “The Black Ball” — a fi…
The resemblance between Judith Godrèche and her daughter Tess Barthélemy — also the luminous lead of her mother’s debut feature “A Girl’s Life” — will be particularly powerful …
Typically, the Cannes Classics section is not one of the festival’s major noise-makers. Mostly comprising restorations of classic titles and new documentaries about film history, it is, fo…
Most comedies rely on a certain amount of established tropes: the obsessive best friend, the stereotyped psychotherapist, the randy 20-year-old. Besides offering comfort, this kind of famili…
The kill list in “Is God Is” is a short one: a single name, and not even a name at that. The sole target of Aleshea Harris’ incendiary revenge movie is credited only as “the Monster,…
Earlier this week, in one of her umpteen promotional interviews for “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” Meryl Streep deviated from the tried-and-true PR playbook to actually say something interes…
British actor David Jonsson is only five films into his career, but you'd already know his gaze anywhere: Even in a film as spry and bright as the 2023 romcom "Rye Lane," those crinkly, soft…
"The Garden We Dreamed" opens on a complex symphony of natural sound: layer upon layer of birdsong, insect chatter and weather-rustled foliage, all the more intensified for playing out over …
Lillian Hellman's landmark 1934 play "The Children's Hour" has twice been adapted for the big screen, both times by director William Wyler, and neither film really did right by it. The Hays …
The immigrant experience is most often discussed, and most easily understood, as one of an entire person's movement and relocation: a journey from A to B and perhaps further letters, with co…
Whether saturating entire frames or dribbling down a rare contrasting design element, there's red everywhere you look in "The Blood Countess," as you might well expect. Little of it, however…
The jazz piano of Bill Evans was characterized by grace and poise, a lightness of touch yielding a plaintive depth of feeling, that belied a life beset with chaos and tragedy. It would be ea…
There are, presumably, some well-meaning civilians who have entered politics and found the experience nothing but societally beneficial and personally character-improving " but few to none o…
On a faintly misty morning in South Africa's Kamiesberg mountain region, 79-year-old goatherd Hettie (Hettie Farmer) watches her flock as they hobble and nibble along the rough, khaki-colore…
A potentially tranquil desert island now overrun with vacationing Europeans chugging day-glo cocktails, Gran Canaria is an intrinsically funny setting for a story of familial grief, disconne…
On the face of it, for a comfortable middle-class couple in Lithuania, getting divorced has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. Why would it? But when their separation happens …
Life behind bars means death behind bars, and all the pain and frailty that often precedes it " a fate that awaits a good number of America's incarcerated millions, though one we rarely see …
For those of us who saw it when we were still in school ourselves, Alexander Payne's "Election" was a startling work, and even a perspective-shifting one " a snarlingly funny introduction to…
If there was a reason for veteran actor Edward James Olmos to resurrect his magnetic role in "Zoot Suit," it's to honor the man behind that landmark work centering the Mexican American exper…
In Chinese culture, "double happiness" refers to an ornamental design commonly found festooned across wedding ceremonies, formed by placing two copies of the Chinese character for joy next t…
Anyone who has seen her seething Oscar-nominated performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Phantom Thread" knows that Lesley Manville can be hard as nails on screen " though it's a register the…
In contemporary Brussels, married social worker Kika (Manon Clavel) dedicates herself to helping others until an affair, followed by personal tragedy, shatters her life as she has known it. …
"God Save the King" has never been the loveliest or most melodic of national anthems, and its somewhat chiding, aggressive tenor is brought to the fore early in "The Choral." Upon delivery o…
Of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the screen's most celebrated dance partners, Katharine Hepburn is famously said to have declared that he gave her class, while she gave him sex appeal. Jul…
As biopic subjects go, Franz Kafka is resistant to standard-issue treatment on a number of levels " beginning with the fact that his life, short and largely uncelebrated in its time, wasn't …