The Theme

May 27, 2017 — The Un Certain Regard jury of the 70th Cannes Film Festival—Uma Thurman (president), Mohamed Diab, Reda Kateb, Joachim Lafosse, and Karel Och—have announced the winners of this year’s awards.Un Certain Regard Prize: Mohammad Rasoulof’s A Man of Integrity. At the...

May 24, 2017 — A piercing and perceptive film about the contemporary refugee experience in France, Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’Or winner Dheepan depicts the difficulties of living as a stranger in a strange land. In the film, a Tamil Tiger soldier (Antonythasan Jesuthasan)...

May 22, 2017 — “Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a...

May 20, 2017 — “Custody of a white horse is one of several bones of contention between Bulgarian locals and visiting German laborers in Valeska Grisebach’s Western, a dispute that takes on the most classic symbolic dimension of the traditional oater,” begins Guy Lodge...

May 18, 2017 — “Todd Haynes’s films, intellectually rigorous and often profoundly moving, are fractured stories in which alienated, beautiful characters try to find love (or a certain likeness) in the delicate folds of real life,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “All of this...

Mar 24, 2017 — Capturing the cultural anxieties of the 1970s, Hal Ashby’s comedic parable explores the pitfalls of innocence and credulity in American politics.

Jan 30, 2017 — Film scholar Shonni Enelow reveals the methods of the Mamet style of acting in this examination of Crouse’s subtly feminist lead performance.

Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.