Men of Deeds
A couple of years ago, I saw a very funny little film from Romania called Two Lottery Tickets that takes place in a little backwater inhabited by odd characters. That film's…
Amanda
Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) is 25. She has no friends and doesn't really have much of a life. She lives alone in a tiny, dingy room. Refuses to work in the…
L’immensità
Set in 1970s Rome, L'immensità is a semi-autobiographical look at one summer in director Emanuele Crialese's youth. In the film, the eldest child in the family is a teenage Adri…
The Worst Ones (Les pires)
Set in Picasso, a gritty, working class town in the north of France, The Worst Ones is a film-within-a-film. Belgian director Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) comes to the town to shoot…
Review: Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
A couple of weeks before I saw this film, I read filmmaker Werner Herzog’s first novel "The Twilight World,” which draws on his meeting 25 years ago with Hiroo Onoda,…
Reviews: She Said and Women Talking
I saw these two films just days apart and they seemed to speak to one another. Both take on sexual predation, but from very different viewpoints. She Said is a…
Review: TÁR
I am quite late with this review (the film is out in theaters) because I'm still trying to figure out how best to give it a fair shake. I was…
Review: Happening
Talk about a film arriving at just the right moment! This gripping French drama about a young woman in the early 1960s who gets pregnant and has to go through…
Review: Hit the Road
This wonderful road trip drama traverses the Iranian landscape with a family and their dog. Along for the ride are a mother (Pantea Panahiha) and father (Hasan Majuni) and their…
Review: Topside
This is a really gritty and entirely engaging little film. It's about Nikki (co-director Celine Held) and her 5-year-old daughter Little (Zhaila Farmer) who're living on the edge underground in…
Review: Licorice Pizza
This quirky coming-of-age rom-com was one of my favorite films of the year. The leads, Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, are unknowns, but there are some fabulous cameos from A-listers,…
Review: Drive My Car
Adapted from a short story by Haruki Murikami, one of my favorite authors, Drive My Car is a haunting drama about love and grief and reckoning. It centers on two…
Review: The Power of the Dog
Set in the gorgeous wide open expanses of 1925 Wyoming, The Power of the Dog from Oscar-winning director Jane Campion (The Piano, Angel at My Table) is downright suffocating a lot of…
Review: CODA
CODA doesn’t have the dramatic heft of Children of a Lesser God (for which deaf actress Marlee Matlin won an Academy Award), or the grittier themes of Oscar nominee Sound…
Review: Materna
The four women in Materna whose stories collide in a New York subway could not be more different. But they are connected by narratives exploring the theme of "mother", what…