You don’t need to know a single thing about hockey to find Red Army fascinating, and that is a wondrous achievement on its own. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the documentary chronicles the story of the Soviet Union’s hockey team, which achieved internatio …Read more
Debra Granik has become known for her interest in making films about a parallel America, one where people aren’t falling in love after meet-cutes in coffee shops, or running amok as their cities are destroyed by intergalactic monsters and tidal waves …Read more
In the most astonishing scene in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, we see Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) accidentally kill the fisherman Amadou, who in an earlier scene speared Kidane’s most precious cow. The aftermath of the killing is shown in the widest sh …Read more
In The Act of Killing, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer chronicled the brutal Indonesian genocide of 1965, during which almost one million so-called “communists” were murdered by Suharto’s army. While that film focused on the film-loving gangsters who le …Read more
How do you make a film about Yves Saint Laurent completely lacking in style? That seems to be the raison d’être behind Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, a film that eschews “typical” biopic conventions to explore the life of a very troubled man. As p …Read more
Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja opens in the middle of the Patagonian desert where we meet Danish Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) and his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) who are traveling towards a destination unknown to us. Ingeborg has …Read more
Never one to shy away from some controversy, Abel Ferrara made a film about the last twenty four hours in the life of Italian renaissance man Pier Paolo Pasolini. His murder in 1975 remains one of the most mysterious in all of the twentieth century, …Read more
Valentine (Kristen Stewart) balances herself inside a noisy train car as she holds her phone, she rolls her eyes, sighs and offers monotonous responses to the person on the other end and we understand this is but one of many similar calls she’s had t …Read more
Philip Lewis Friedman is an asshole. Quite simply, he might be one of the most obnoxious characters to appear in any film, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip doesn’t shy away from letting the man be who he is, even if his behavior can be rather m …Read more
“There are no two words in the English language that are more harmful than ‘good job’” explains music professor Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) as a justification for the violent, extreme didactic methods he uses with his students at a conservatory touted as …Read more
