In Angels Only Wear White, a teenage girl walks under a statue of Marilyn Monroe in her iconic pose, bare legs, uplifted white dress.  Tourists bunch up around her legs, eager to have their photos taken, crowding these girls out. By the film’s unhapp …Read more

Recall in everyday life those three seconds of rage after something goes wrong before one decides on a response. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri occupies and amplifies that crucial moment of turbulence, what comes before and after, and how …Read more

As Carol, Todd Haynes’ period drama from 2015, proved heartbreakingly tender and adult, so Wonderstruck is a film so thoroughly lobbed at the juvenile. To call it a children’s picture though would be unfair and to overlook its immediate and cinematic …Read more

Though it premiered at Locarno, Luc Bondy’s final feature False Confessions appears to have been billed as TV movie and been broadcast on television in Europe, as opposed or prior to a theatrical release. A French television movie seems like an oxymo …Read more

Producer Judd Apatow begets yet another not-quite comedy from a comedian, derived from personal history. In this rendition of a comic in arrested development, Pakistan-born Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, most notably), plays a version of himself: a …Read more

There’s a joke I’ve read on the internet; a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that fans of standalone episodes of serialized television might seek out and, God forbid, enjoy a little something called a feature film. Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz at Dinner could p …Read more

Watching Slack Bay is like listening to a stranger’s overlong joke. Eliciting at first a mild laughter, the anecdote trails on, leaving your politely affixed smile now paining your face. Bruno Dumont’s follow-up to Li’l Quinquin runs an unhurried two …Read more

In Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary, the titular jazz titan remains elusive and out of reach as the title of the film might imply. Director John Scheinfeld starts at the beginning of  Coltrane’s life in North Carolina where his religious …Read more

“No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.” Or can they? Ines (Sandra Huller) dares guests at a party when she belts a Whitney Houston classic in a ballsy, frightfully honest and hilarious scene late in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdma …Read more

With red frosted noses, sleepy bobble eyes, and oversize, oblong heads, the stop-motion munchkins of My Life as a Zucchini are figures approached with curious affection. The trim and snug Swiss-French co-production about an orphaned boy is a moving a …Read more