In a word, stunning. After an eight-year absence, world cinema’s foremost aesthete, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, returns with a vengeance. Shu Qi, Director Hou’s leading lady of choice, stars as a 9th-century enforcer, taught to kill by the nun who raised her and later contracted to take out her former husband-to-be. Viewers …
An initial piece of foreshadowing — why the Mathers didn’t invite former babysitter Lily (Odessa Young) into their home — paid off in full. The same can’t be said about the mystery identity of the hacker responsible for exposing the sexual secrets of their small-town American burg. What begins as …
For her first film, writer-director Kitty Green finds lurking within the #MeToo movement a tightly packed monster movie that answers the horrifying question: where in the job description does it address predatory sexual behavior? Fresh out of college, Jane (Julia Garner, never out of frame) lands a dream gig as …
Seated in a packed auditorium and just seconds away from receiving a prestigious award, a Palestinian doctor operating out of Tel Aviv takes a phone call from his wife. Upon returning home, he spies her purse and phone on the counter, thinks nothing of it, and heads to bed. Open …
Recycling corn is as essential to the narrative retardation of cinema as the regurgitation of cud is to a cow’s gastrointestinal tract. Hollywood’s overall abiding commitment to a lack of originality, and the consumers who lap it up like dog water, is a subject that demands far more time than …
Thinking that it would buy them an additional five years’ worth of job security, the workers at a French auto supply house, quarterbacked with mounting fury by an indefatigable union rep (Vincent Lindon), go on strike after their plant is shut down. (How one strikes against an already shuttered manufactory …
First-time writer-director Alice Winocour obviously sees room for feminist revisionism in Augustine, a fact-based period drama that pits a 19th-century French neurologist (Vincent London), skilled in the art of hypnosis, against his star patient, a 19-year-old servant girl (Soko) sentenced to life in an asylum after a dinner-disrupting seizure leaves …
This year’s entry in the dysfunctional family holiday sweepstakes is a heaping plate of fried green magnolias. The Weston clan and company gather in Tulsa to mourn the suicide of the family patriarch and wind up wishing that their beastly, cancer-riddled mother (Meryl Streep) could trade places with him. John …
Criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey) never works with the same crew twice, but he wouldn’t think of doing a job without Baby (Ansel Elgort) behind the wheel. This raises the question of how the plucky Bambino became top whip, when all of the robberies he’s involved in end with the …
A teen cancer romance with bracingly dark comedic shadings. Anna (Essie Davis) and Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) will do anything to make their dying daughter Milla (Eliza Scanlen) happy, even if it means inviting Moses (Toby Wallace), her drug-pushing, face-tatted miscreant of a boyfriend, to come live with them. They even …
A time-lapse credit sequence opens the picture, offering a split-screen, picture-postcard parade of the four seasons as they work their magic on a vineyard in the Burgundy region in France. What begins as a more straightforward Sideways soon blossoms into a Romance of the Land drama, aided and abetted byAlexis …
What has mystery, romance, flying saucers, men on horseback, smiles, chills, folklore to spare, horizontal wipes, and just enough splatter to prevent the Comic-Conners in the audience from texting? Answer: this all-encompassing, genre-bending satire from Brazil that examines just what a government can do to a complacent townsfolk who refuse …