The Criterion Collection
May 21, 2017 — “Neo-realism isn’t necessarily a genre built for star turns,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety, “but director Jonas Carpignano happened upon one anyway in his debut Mediterranea: Then-preteen Pio Amato wasn’t the lead in that accomplished, affecting refugee drama, but his...
May 21, 2017 — “In Sicilian Ghost Story, co-directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s superb follow-up to 2013’s Critics’ Week prizewinner Salvo, the duo evocatively interweave the richness of fairy tales with the obscenity of Mafia control,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety. “Based on...
May 20, 2017 — “Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute [BPM (Beats Per Minute)] is a passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s, the confrontational direct-action movement which demanded immediate, large-scale research into AIDS,” begins the Guardian’s Peter...
The Daily
May 20, 2017 — “If he hadn’t already laid claim to the title of king of the cringe-inducing confrontation and nabob of the nervous laugh with the withering Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund truly anoints himself with The Square, an excoriating razor-burn of a movie...
The Daily
May 20, 2017 — “To fans of the mononymous Barbara—the delicate-voiced, emotionally acute French chanteuse adored by everyone from Jacques Brel to François Mitterand—Mathieu Amalric’s mega-meta, dreamily blurred biopic-within-a-film may seem a bemusing tribute to a national icon,” writes Guy Lodge at the top...
The Daily
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...
The Daily
May 19, 2017 — Let’s open today’s round of interviews with one from the archives, a conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni that originally ran in Corriere della Sera in 1982 but evidently took place during the final stages of shooting Blow-Up (1966). It’s been translated...
May 19, 2017 — “Although the word ‘overkill’ can be used to describe practically any of Takashi Miike’s films,” begins Maggie Lee in Variety, “in some ways, the director’s brutal, 2½-hour sword-fight fantasy Blade of the Immortal takes the notion to another level. For...
May 18, 2017 — “Like a Judd Apatow thriller or a Michael Haneke kids flick, the concept of a Claire Denis comedy at first sounds like a contradiction in terms,” begins Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “After all, the 71-year-old French auteur, whose...
The Daily
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...