A wild horse is captured, transported to a prison facility where he will be “broken,” or trained, in a program that doubles as a form of therapy for the inmates inside. A broken man is released from solitary confinement into the main population, where his ability to banish his anger is dependent on the relationship he forges with that horse, a brilliant brown mustang. The Mustang, the first feature from Paris-born, LA-based filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is an artfully restrained, quietly moving film built around the most elemental of oppositions: freedom vs. imprisonment, man vs. animal, violence vs. self-control. And […]

No one expected Claire Denis to soften with age. At 72, the French auteur has been a daring and unpredictable force in cinema for three decades now. After delivering last year’s talky romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In, which offered the unexpected sight of Gérard Depardieu as a lovesick psychic, Denis has returned with a certified leap into the unknown.  High Life is the filmmaker’s first English-language film, her first science fiction foray, and her first featuring eye-popping CGI. Boasting an international cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth and André Benjamin, and set to be released by […]

After his road movie Kaili Blues became an international success, writer and director Bi Gan turned to the film noir genre for his follow up, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The layered, dreamlike plot follows Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) as he returns to his hometown, looking into the past for clues about what happened to Wildcat (Lee Hong), a lost love he last saw more than a decade ago.  Set in the bars, alleys and seedy hotels of Gan’s home province, the film is divided into two parts. Elliptical scenes and a fractured timeline give the first half […]

The latest film from writer and director Jia Zhangke adds new insights to his previous titles like Still Life and A Touch of Sin. Again starring his wife Zhao Tao, Ash Is Purest White follows two outsiders for some twenty years as their fortunes flow and ebb in China’s new economy. Set partly in a gritty coal-mining town and partly on the Yangtze River at the moment when the then-under-contruction Three Gorges Dam was about to forever change the landscape, the film resembles the structure of Mountains May Depart in its use of three time periods and chapters. But, as Jia explains, what starts […]

As in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (2009), a woman’s disappearance in Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben—this is Farhadi’s first film in Spanish) is the inciting incident. This time it is Irene, the daughter of Laura (Penelope Cruz), swept from her bed on the night of her aunt’s wedding—either by her own anarchic free spirit, or a kidnapper, stranger, or kin. Irene’s absence turns up dormant family secrets and suspicions that, perhaps, they all already knew. Bare and exposed, the festered family wounds must be dealt with until new ones emerge to be cast aside. Everybody Knows is another social realist thriller in […]

“My life is not what one would term heroic.”  The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]

Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]

Men touch each other tenderly in Mazen Khaled’s formally eclectic second feature Martyr, about the death of a young adult whose self-perpetuated despair drowns him on the shores of the Mediterranean. In this ethereal Lebanese mood piece, the religious interpretation of martyrdom is counteracted with tangible flesh. Rather than glorifying the loss of life as a divine honor, Khaled subtly revels in the presence of desire and the body as constant reminders that being alive is precious. Unemployed and adrift, Hassane (Hamza Mekdad) only finds respite from his restless mind when tanning by the water with his cherished friends, brothers […]

Writer-director Barry Jenkins solidifies his position as one of the current cinema’s most empathetic and visually (and aurally) expressive filmmakers with his third feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. Adapted from a 1974 novel by James Baldwin, the film tells the story of Tish and Fonny, a young couple whose dreams are cut short by Fonny’s wrongful imprisonment; moving back and forth between the early days of their love story and the brutal reality of their present, Jenkins crafts a masterpiece that is simultaneously achingly, hopefully romantic and unblinking in its portrait of social injustice. While Moonlight drew upon cinematic […]

Wobble Palace is a reverse romantic comedy set in relationship hell tinged by the toxicity of Tinder hookups and Trump’s political rise. “One of the early ideas was to make a movie about a happy break up,” explains director Eugene Kotlyarenko. “The formula for a rom com is whatever happens for the first 90 minutes, by the end, the couple gets together.” Flipping this arc, the film climaxes (spoiler alert!) in the couple splitting up instead. “In a relationship that’s really toxic, staying together is really horrible and breaking up is really liberating,” Kotlyarenko continues. The film follows a millennial […]