Joan Didion’s oft-quoted quote about how we tell ourselves stories for a living presupposes that you can and will use the tools to tell yourself that very story. But what happens when language fails you? What happens when fractures risk preventing you from speaking what could help you live? Writer-director Anna Baumgarten’s film Fluency addresses … Read more
Imagine a sour love child miraculously conceived by All About Eve’s Addison DeWitt and Laura’s Waldo Lydecker, with John Simon acting as midwife, and you’ll be prepared for Jamie Erskine, the fiercely intelligent, ruthlessly demanding main character played with an absolutely delicious glow by Ian McKellen In the movie “The Critic”. Directed by Anand Tucker … Read more
The action is hot but the dramatic temperature is different in “The Prosecutor,” a flashy mix of Hong Kong crime story and legal drama starring and directed by Donnie Yen (“Ip Man,” “John Wick: Chapter 4”) series. The veteran action star makes a convincing and engaging appearance as a cop who leaves his post to … Read more
Thirty-five years after When Harry Met Sally… asked the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way, Matt and Mara reframes the question with even more fraught social stakes — which heightens the accompaniment And more than ever – a pertinent query about whether two neurotic writers … Read more
Tunisia submitted relatively few submissions for the International Academy Award, but thanks to director Kaouther Ben Hania, the country recently received a nomination for The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020) and a place on the shortlist for Four Girls. (2023). This year’s submission, Take My Breath, comes from another director, Nada Mazni Hafeez, but … Read more
What is a place if it is not on the map? What are people if they are not recognized? Felipe Holguin Caro’s La Suprema asks these questions in an intimate drama set in a remote Caribbean town in Colombia. La Suprema is not on any map and its Afro-Colombian population feels similarly erased. Modest in … Read more
Stories about survivors in a post-apocalyptic world continue to fascinate viewers in streaming series like “Fallout” and “The Last of Us,” but “Homestead” likely marks the first time such a scenario has been used in a faith-based film. . This is certainly the first time that a theatrical film of this type has been designed … Read more
Traveling through the underground airwaves, Kurt Cobain landed in Havana, Cuba, in the turbulent early 1990s. During the island nation’s period of severe economic hardship after the fall of the Soviet Union, the “Special Period” prompted thousands of Cubans to emigrate, risking their lives at sea. Those who remained suffered from great scarcity (the American … Read more
In Bangladesh, sports Polly horses – or the game of wrestling – is a methodical and precise affair, a tone that Iqbal Chaudhry reinvented in his first film, “The Wrestler.” Stretching the line between observational and indirect, the film seems designed to dazzle and frustrate in equal measure, gesturing toward masculine boundaries in an often … Read more
The shattering of a childhood dream is a symbol of the cruel fate of the Messi Baghdad nation. Belgian-Kurdish director Sahim Omar Khalifa has expanded his highly acclaimed 2012 short film into a poignant social drama that unfolds amid violence and fear in Iraq in 2009, during the Second Gulf War. Messi Baghdad, about a … Read more