For all the ways his work speaks to today’s Generation Irony, Wes Anderson is an unmistakable romantic — a man who grew up with a great love of classics, be they in the realms of cinema, literature or art. All of those things converge in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s sweeping, nostalgic, and career-topping new film, which sees him confronting history on a global scale — in his own way, of course. The movie takes place in a number of eras, most notably 1932, when, in the fictional yet familiar land of Zubrowka, wars are brewing and lives are changing […]

More than a year after winning the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlinale, Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose, a Romanian domestic drama that covers class and motherly impulses, is finally receiving a U.S. release, opening today at New York’s Film Forum and spreading to L.A. by week’s end. The latest entry in the ever-burgeoning Romanian New Wave, which has given us everything from Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills to Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas, Child’s Pose zeros in on wealthy Bucharest native Cornelia Keneres (Luminita Gheorghiu) and her family, paying particular attention to her connection to her grown son, Barbu […]

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a wanderer. The Japanese director, 51, has been known to disappear on set, leaving his cast and crew wondering where their maestro’s ventured off to. For instance, while making his 2008 masterpiece, Still Walking, Kore-eda vanished for a spell, only to discover the flowering trees that became an invaluable motif in the film. The director’s exploratory nature, which one might partly attribute to his background as a documentarian, has proven crucial in the poetic meticulousness of his exteriors. However, his visual instincts are hardly outdoor-exclusive, and his keenness for selecting ideal settings and compositions is just as […]

Every filmmaker is an anthropologist to some degree, but Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (above with The past actress Bérénice Bejo) is a rarity among the studiers. In his two most recent films alone, the Oscar-winning triumph A Separation and this year’s Cannes sensation The Past (which hits theaters today), the 41-year-old has proven himself a master chronicler of human minutiae, weaving the smallest of quotidian details into the grandest of layered, domestic drama. A filmmaker of richly palpable empathy, Farhadi can turn — as seen in A Separation — the pushing of someone out of a door into a life-destroying choice, […]

Two highly unique minds converge in Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, the latest from whimsical visionary Michel Gondry, who aptly subtitles his film, “An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky.” In the works for four years, this self-explanatory project from the artist behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, and a veritable library of music videos is a charming and markedly low-tech doc that literally illustrates the insights of Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Ever-fascinated by the depths of the human brain, and ever-faithful in dressing his films with cartoon-like touches, […]

James Toback has to be one of the most candid individuals in the movie business. Sitting down for a chat about his new genre-defying documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which borrows its title from 1964’s Pietro Germi satire, and premieres on HBO on Monday, Oct. 28, the 68-year-old filmmaker practically blows my mind with his willingness to talk about anything and everything, from late mogul David Begelman’s psychosis and Alec Baldwin’s divorce troubles to mega-producer delusions and his own personal hit list, whose names he has every intention of crossing off before he croaks. Yes, you heard right. Utterly filterless, Toback […]

Plenty of documentaries share stories worth telling, and play just fine resting on the strengths of those stories, incorporating requisite elements like talking-head interviews, news headlines, and archival footage. Filmmaker Nick Ryan’s The Summit, which meticulously explores the 2008 K2 disaster that claimed 11 lives, has all of these elements. But what it also has is a stunning abundance of visceral reenactments, which placed Ryan and his crew on an actual mountainside, where the intimate (and tragic) moments that the climbers’ own cameras missed were recreated. A veteran director of short films like The German and A Lonely Sky, for which he also served […]

Andrea Arnold is still a little jet-lagged. Meeting me at Indie Food & Wine, the restaurant inside Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center, the Oscar-winning director of the short film Wasp, and the acclaimed features Red Road, Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, has barely settled after flying into New York a day earlier. It’s four days before the start of the 51st New York Film Festival, and Arnold hasn’t even gotten a chance to look over the main slate. “All I’ve done is put a lot of food in my freezer,” the English filmmaker says. Arnold has good […]

Growing up in Saudi Arabia, writer-director Haifaa Al-Mansour didn’t have access to movie theaters (there aren’t any), but she was still raised on a Hollywood diet. She ate up all the popular cinema she could via home video, and began forging a long-term love affair with the kind of infectious traditions found in big-budget American films. Those same traditions have spilled over, somewhat, into Wadjda, Al-Mansour’s groundbreaking debut feature, which is both the first movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first feature to be helmed by a female Saudi director. An arthouse release that premiered at the Venice […]

When it comes to the hubbub, headlines, and advertising that predated the release of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, it’s best that you forget what you’ve heard, barring whatever thoughtful reviews or interviews you’ve come across. A decades-spanning epic primed and packaged for awards buzz, the film has been sold as a rather generic historical saga — the kind of “important” Oscar bait whose trailer comes with the requisite sweeping score. In short, the movie, a Weinstein Company release, has been Weinstein-ized to a fault. There’s even the title debate that put producer Harvey Weinstein at the forefront, and saw him […]