Unabashedly sporting the most inauspicious of titles, a three-hour running time and a logline that features terminally ill elders and self-destructive descendants, German feature Dying (Sterben) looks like a hard sell on paper. And yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s crisscrossing family drama manages to be exceedingly funny, often in some of …

Set in 1991, not long after it suddenly became much easier for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to visit sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-French co-production Treasure follows a father and daughter (played by Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham) making exactly this kind of voyage of remembrance. It’s adapted from the comic-tragic …

Like taxis on a rainy night, you wait for ages for a great, bittersweet film about love in late middle age with a side helping of gastronomic lusciousness — and then two come along at once. Tehran-set but internationally-produced comedy-drama My Favourite Cake premiered at the Berlin Film Festival a …

When British producer-director Matthew Vaughn’s latest had its red-carpet premiere in London in mid-January 2024, the film made local headlines for reasons probably not intended by the filmmakers and their distributor, Universal. Alongside the usual PR-driven fluff about the sparkly frocks stars Dua Lipa and Bryce Dallas Howard were wearing, …

Although Coup! has a small cast and unfolds mostly in a secluded mansion during the 1918 influenza pandemic, it packs a lot of flavor, suspense and droll comedy into its slim 97-minute running time, making it fun enough to deserve an exclamation point in its title. Peter Sarsgaard offers a …

It sometimes seems as if prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has had a go at just about every major type of film apart from light opera, shark attack stories and steampunk animé. That said, one of his most consistent, go-to genres — apart from comedy-dramas starring Steve Coogan — has …

Richard Linklater’s features since his masterwork Boyhood (2014) — Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Last Flag Flying, and Everybody Wants Some!! — have been a decidedly mixed bag, but Hit Man finds him having a blast with a sexy black comedy boasting a sly …

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new film is one precision-tooled specimen. This profoundly moving, flawlessly executed multi-strand drama, shot in stark black and white, tracks refugees from various nations in 2021 trying to cross the border from Belarus into Poland. …

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: Woody Allen hasn’t made a great film in years. Opinions vary enormously, of course, on which one was the last top-notch effort: Some would go to bat for, say Blue Jasmine (2013), while others defend Match Point (2005). Many others reckon that …

The last works by artists who have just died often acquire a strange patina of significance. Whether the deceased knew the work would be their last or not, it’s almost impossible not to read into them a foreshadowing of the maker’s imminent departure, a railing against the dying of the …

At least no one will get to the end of director David Fincher’s latest, The Killer, and feel in any way misled by the title. Or the film’s droll, on-the-nose tagline for that matter: “Execution is everything,” arguably the most Fincherian tagline ever, as a colleague pointed out. Adapted by …

As if in response to criticism that her last film, botanical horror story Little Joe, was too opaque, Austrian director Jessica Hausner has delivered with Club Zero a Cannes competitor that’s about as subtle as a sock to the nose. Effectively a modern-day retelling of that classic Middle European folk …