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Interview: Sebastian Silva
“There are two types of people,” Sebastian Silva said following the Sundance premiere of Nasty Baby. “People who care about spoilers and people who don’t. I don’t give a shit. This movie should work...
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Human Rights Watch FF: In Their Own Words
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs from June 12-20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. NO LAND’S SONG In the West, discussions of women in Iran often dwell on the requirement that they wear...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Kim Jee-Woon
The Quiet Family This week heralds the Blu-ray release of Arrow Video’s fully loaded edition of Takashi Miike’s murderous musical from 2002, Happiness of the Katakuris (full disclosure: I wrote an...
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João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata
Since 2011, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata have built upon their long-time collaboration as writer-director and art director, respectively, with a series of projects exploring the...
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Interview: Laurent Bécue-Renard
Politicians may debate about ending this or that war, but for the veterans grappling with PTSD in Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, no such finality exists. These men live in the long shadow of...
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Film of the Week: Eden
“Living at night isn’t helping my complexion,” lamented Pere Ubu back in 1976. But whatever other ill effects the life nocturnal might have on the characters in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, their...
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Deep Focus: Manglehorn
Manglehorn When an actor in his early prime rights himself from a tailspin, tastemakers are quick to embrace him as a comeback kid and then “brand” the phenomenon. Ben Affleck suddenly became “a...
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Interview: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe signals an achievement of cinema in the purest sense of the word: unfolding entirely in sign language, the movie dispenses with subtitles, but the strength of its...
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Bombast: Now That’s What I Call the Nineties
Jurassic Park: The Lost World In “Walkin’ on the Sun,” the first of a string of charting singles of almost unprecedented awfulness, Steve Harwell, front man of the soon-to-be-Shrek-soundtracking pop...
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Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve
Mia Hansen-Løve sets her latest feature in the world of French house music, in which her brother, Sven, achieved ephemeral recognition in the 1990s and early 2000s as part of the group Cheers. Again...
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Festivals: Oberhausen
A train arriving at a station—it’s a famous image from early cinema with which we’re all familiar, but for this screening at the 61st Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, we are all asked to...
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Interview: Patrick Wang
A few years ago, Patrick Wang made one of the most promising indie debuts in a while with the audacious domestic drama In the Family. His follow-up, The Grief of Others, is a stirring and formally...
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Deep Focus: Ted 2
On the big screen and in his own skin, Seth MacFarlane looks as dead-eyed and immobile as the characters in the old Clutch Cargo series, which pasted filmed human mouths on still cartoons. But as an...
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Festivals: NYAFF
City on Fire Nearing its 15-year anniversary, the New York Asian Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center has established itself as a cultural subverter. Eschewing the art-house fare that...
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Film of the Week: The Princess of France
The English word “rehearsal” doesn’t have the same ambivalent connotations as the French répétition. In English, you hone a dramatic text to work toward a definitive performance, while the French...
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Interview: Penelope Spheeris
While most abridged biographies of modern filmmakers tend toward a logical careerist progression, Penelope Spheeris’s is genuinely eccentric and unpredictable. She was born into a New Orleans circus...
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Interview: Matías Piñeiro
Matías Piñeiro’s ongoing series of idiosyncratic Shakespeare adaptations continues with The Princess of France, one of the shortest yet most slippery and complex features in the main slate of this...
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Wonderful World of Welles: Harry Lime Lives!
The Third Man A titan of the airwaves, Orson Welles would reprise one of his most famous screen roles, Harry Lime of The Third Man, on radio. His grinning villain was the star of The Adventures of...
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Festivals: True/False
The biggest event in Missouri during the week of the True/False Film Fest in March was not the True/False Film Fest. The day before the first batch of screenings, the U.S. Department of Justice...
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Interview: Piotr Szulkin
One of the most enigmatic and unclassifiable living Polish filmmakers, Piotr Szulkin appears to have bid farewell to cinema, for good. The zenith of Szulkin’s career coincided with the escalation of...
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