How to make a talking-head documentary when the subject’s actual head is the one element that the director cannot film?
Magalie Pichon in Bas-fonds is a force of nature.
In contemporary Shanghai, Jia has located a nexus of past and future and, predictably, he’s more interested in the rubble than the glamour.
It’s fitting that Even the Rain should be dedicated to Howard Zinn.
In director Craig Teper’s hands, Vidal Sassoon comes mightily close to becoming a saint.
If you haven’t got anything new to say, at least find an interesting way to say it.
Kiran Rao’s film is animated by its inquiry into the not always mutually beneficial symbiosis between artist and subject.
Throughout, director Werner Boote aims to make up in breadth what he sacrifices in depth.
It evinces enough hatred of mankind to make Todd Solondz look like a dedicated humanist.
For a film that purports to show the triumph of man over nature, this crew seems an unlikely and markedly uninteresting lot.
In Alien Girl, gangsterism stands as the ultimate expression of the post-Soviet profit motive.
As the film goes on and George Hickenlooper struggles to balance all his narrative threads, the talking points come more and more to the fore.
Bartek Konopka aims to defamiliarize a well-known historical event through ironic distance and thus to render absurd the atrocities of the past.
“You can’t re-do Lubitsch.” As they say, truer words.
Notably uneven, All Good Things’s early scenes suggest an intriguing look at the power structures of 1970s New York.
To be sure, we need these stories, but there’s little virtue in telling them if we don’t peel away the surface layers and get at something deeper.
Frederic Lilien’s film is the product not only of awed bird worship, but diligent gruntwork.
Today’s Special too often gets bogged down in its intergenerational culture clash.
Will Made in Dagenham finally win Sally Hawkins the Oscar nod denied her two years ago for Happy-Go-Lucky?
The dialogue is surprisingly devoid of intellectual frisson or much in the way of interest to anyone except the characters themselves.