Simpsley

Sep 18, 2017 — The wide-open vistas of Montana are the backdrop for three interlocking stories about women confronting the disappointments of small-town life.

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It,” declares Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Clio Barnard is the fiercely intelligent, visually inventive and innovative film-maker who gave us the brilliant docu-hybrid The Arbor and then The Selfish Giant, an inspired interpretation of Oscar Wilde set in Bradford,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Her third...

Sep 17, 2017 — While we’re still reeling from the loss of Harry Dean Stanton, there are others who’ve left us this past week or so we’ll want to remember.“Frank Vincent, whose tough-guy looks brought him steady work as a character actor in film...

Sep 11, 2017 — “On paper, what could be more sordid than an interview-portrait with Issei Sagawa, the infamous cannibal who became a tabloid sensation in the early 80s after he murdered and ate part of a Dutch woman in Paris?” asks Dan Sullivan...

Sep 11, 2017 — This first of two, possibly three, parts was slammed hard on Twitter the moment it premiered in competition in Venice, but, surveying the first wave of reviews, we find that it’s not going to be so easily dismissed outright. Let’s...

Sep 10, 2017 — “Hirokazu Kore-eda is best known for intimate family dramas that overseas critics often compare to the work of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63), the genre’s unquestioned master,” writes Mark Schilling, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Japan Times. “Kore-eda rejects...

Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...

Sep 8, 2017 — “Argentinian first-timer Natalia Garagiola’s Hunting Season, a father-son drama set in the wilds of Patagonia, is the winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week prize,” announces Variety’s Nick Vivarelli. The prize, chosen by the festival audience, goes to a...