Paul Schrader’s 1999 adaptation of novelist Russell Banks’ Affliction, led by scorching performances from Nick Nolte and James Coburn, was an unsettlingly bleak meeting of two writers who share a fascination with conflicted morality and complicated relationships pushed to dark extremes. But Schrader’s return to the late author’s work, this …

The character in Megalopolis played by Adam Driver with idealistic passion, Cesar Catilina, is a visionary genius intent on saving New York City by building a utopian future, dislodging the elite ruling class in the process. In many ways, Cesar’s mission, both noble and egomaniacal, seems a direct reflection of …

Hate to be a grouch when legions of social media film bros are breathlessly worshipping at the altar of The Demi-God of Cinema, George Miller, but Furiosa is a big step down from Mad Max: Fury Road. Whereas the 2015 instant action classic had grit, gravitas and turbo-charged propulsion that …

The 77th Cannes Film Festival is poised to serve up a feast for film lovers, including new movies from celebrated directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Paolo Sorrentino, as well as living legends like Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and George Miller. Lanthimos will bring Poor Things follow-up Kinds of Kindness to the Cannes competition. The Greek auteur’s …

With 2023’s compelling Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle, The Covenant, Guy Ritchie took a more serious dramatic turn, away from the flashy action, glib humor and the mashup of period settings with contemporary attitude that had characterized many of his biggest commercial successes. With its typically Ritchie-esque ensemble of quippy rascals, The …

A haunting lead performance from Marco Pigossi, steeped in melancholy and raw pain but also in moments of openness, optimism and even joy, helps make High Tide an affecting portrait of untethered gay men seeking meaningful connections. Writer-director Marco Calvani’s sensitively observed first feature draws parallels between the isolation of …

After showing his serious side with Green Book, the most derided Best Picture Oscar winner since Crash, then taking a critical drubbing with the Zac Efron vehicle The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Peter Farrelly returns to the kind of unapologetically silly comedy he and his brother Bobby parlayed into box …

Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala seemingly never met a remote woodland setting that didn’t feel like the right place to strand a traumatized woman. Following Goodnight Mommy (the chilling 2014 original, not the limp American remake) and their English language debut The Lodge, they inch away from …

When Pablo Escobar was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Colombian special forces in 1993, the “Cocaine King” left behind a private menagerie that included four hippopotami. By 2007, the herd had grown to 16 hippos that lived free and continued to multiply in the Magdalena River and surrounding …

Had your fill of punishing investigations into toxic masculinity? Then the thoughtful questioning, sensitivity, low-key humor and refreshing candor of Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex might be your antidote. Turning the male character study on its head with a gentle subversiveness that recalls what The Worst Person in the …

With her mesmerizing 2019 debut feature, the lyrical Senegalese ghost story Atlantics, as well as the nonfiction project that preceded it, A Thousand Suns, Mati Diop jumped to the forefront of diasporic Black European directors reclaiming their ancestral African roots. The director’s own path as a cultural revenant continues to …

No two words can strike fear into the heart of a critic quite like “COVID movie,” and yet with a director as accomplished as Olivier Assayas it seemed reasonable to hold out hope of something more than the low-key cringe humor of a neurotic germaphobe obsessing about masks and social …