There are so many movies about the Holocaust that it can be tempting to develop a fatigue around the subject matter. But the enormity of the atrocity remains so incomprehensible that even another seven decades of stories couldn’t fill out...
Rodrigo Plá’s A Monster with a Thousand Heads is a very angry movie. Given that it’s about the insurance industry – which it would seem operates in Mexico much like it does here – rage is an exceedingly appropriate response,...
Only a handful of reviews written in English exist of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang at this point but, already, a comparison to The Virgin Suicides is beginning to feel like a perfunctory component. The association is an appropriate one but...
People keep secrets from one another. You can know someone for decades – say, forty-five years, give or take – and still you won’t know everything. Some things are small, simple matters of differing perceptions which go unacknowledged and which generally...
Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa began its life as a minimalist 2005 stage production starring David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan. Not the sort of thing one might first think to adapt into a stop-motion animated film,...
Modern culture encourages greed and envy. This is not merely an “American” or even a “Western” phenomenon. This is global to the civilized world, and deeply embedded. So let’s say you’re working a menial job as a nurse at a...
I’ve always been grateful that AFI FEST comes when it does. Though any number of top-flight “dramas for adults” come out in October, November, and December, the uniformity of their style, content, and aims can become dulling to the senses....