Despair

Sep 3, 2017 — We begin with Jessica Kiang at the Playlist: “The book that will someday be written detailing the evolution of the cinematic head-stomp will be divided, rather like the most unfortunate victim of Bone Tomahawk, into two halves: before S. Craig...

Sep 1, 2017 — “British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) hits the American highway for this touching, if slightly underwhelming, tale of a troubled boy who strikes up a rapport with an ailing racehorse called Lean on Pete,” begins Time Out’s Dave Calhoun....

Aug 30, 2017 — Paul Schrader’s First Reformed premieres in Competition in Venice before screening in the Masters program in Toronto, and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds it to be “a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema...

Aug 18, 2017 — In this unsparing drama, Mike Leigh captures the grim mood of Thatcher’s England through the frustrations of a working-class London family.

Aug 8, 2017 — In Jan Speckenbach’s “intriguing, sincere, if somewhat overreaching sophomore feature,” Freedom, “Nora (Johanna Wokalek) wanders past Breugel’s Tower of Babel painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while in Berlin, unaware of her whereabouts, her lawyer husband Philip (a sympathetic...

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

Jul 25, 2017 — Venice Days, “modeled on the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Festival and promoted by the associations of Italian film directors and authors (Anac and 100autori),” has announced the lineup for its fourteenth edition, running from August 30 through September...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” reports Anita Gates...

Jul 12, 2017 — La telenovela errante, a film Raúl Ruiz shot in 1990 (image above) and now fully realized by his widow and editor, Valeria Sarmiento, is one of the highlights of the lineup for this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The seventieth edition...

Jul 11, 2017 — A forged note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches in Robert Bresson’s devastating final film.