Kelly Reichardt makes movies that focus on the ordinary, telling stories of people navigating their unglamorous day-to-day lives, often as loners or outsiders. That might not sound interesting on the face of it, but it turns out there’s a strange kind of beauty in these lives that usually escape our notice. Sometimes Reichardt has bumped up against genres like the thriller, the period film, or the western, peeking at the reality underneath the form, while casually kicking the genres aside, like so much artistic collateral damage. This is once more the case in her new film, sarcastically titled The Mastermind,…

The story of an African immigrant in Paris, working under the radar while trying to obtain refugee status. The plight of the migrant, and the refugee, is a central story of our century. Now in a recent film called Souleymane’s Story, we witness three days in the struggle of one young man to win the right to asylum in France, where he wants to live and work. Souleymane, an immigrant from Guinea, played by Abou Sangaré, has an appointment in a couple days to be interviewed by the Office for Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. He is employed doing…

A film about the leader of The Shakers, an 18th century religious group, uses songs and dancing to portray the fervent spiritual forces at work in the nonconformist Christian movement. We don’t see many film dramas about devoutly religious people—partly, I think, because the main action takes place inside a character, and this is hard to depict on screen. Mona Fastvold faces that challenge head-on in her new film portraying the life of the leading figure in the history of the Shakers: The Testament of Ann Lee. Amanda Seyfried plays the title role of Ann Lee, a young woman in…

A loner who thinks he’s been cheated by a mortgage firm takes the president of the company hostage, in a story based on actual events in 1977. The 1970s have, for quite awhile now, become a common time frame for American period films. That decade saw the youth counterculture emerge into the mainstream in clothing, lingo, long hair, and a tendency towards the weird and marginal, with multiple challenges to the status quo. It’s a fertile setting for satiric commentary on America. Moreover, the ‘70s were a period when filmmaking broke through the old studio taboos, resulting in an amazing…

Jim Jarmusch presents three stories about parents and their grown up children. Jim Jarmusch started out as kind of an eccentric indie filmmaker, but over a career spanning 45 years, he’s become a legendary eccentric indie filmmaker. His latest movie is called Father Mother Sister Brother. It’s an anthology film, three short stories on a similar theme, put together to make one movie. This is a work of a mature artist—it’s about adult children and their parents. It’s composed largely of talking, but most of the humor and significance lie in what is not said. “Father,” the first story, begins…

Chris Dashiell celebrates his favorite films from last year. At the end of a year, film critics start putting out “Top 10” lists or “Top 20,” or whatever. They’re fun to do—going over all the movies you saw in a year and making a list of your favorites is fun. And for people really into films, they’re fun to read as well. But it still gets taken the wrong way, especially since the lists are often framed as “The Best Films of the Year.” Even a very busy movie reviewer can’t see everything, so the claim that a list is…

Jia Jhangke uses footage spanning twenty years to present this portrait of the incredible changes that have taken place in China. Jia Jhangke is, to my mind, the greatest living director in mainland China. His latest work, Caught by the Tides, actually seems to be a completely new kind of creation. We begin in 2001, with candid footage of mostly middle aged women nostalgically sharing and singing traditional songs with each other, including some from Shanxi opera, in a large and plain-looking room. They are former opera singers having a twenty year reunion. The use of songs as a way…

A man seeking refuge in a coastal city of 1977 Brazil doesn’t know that two men have been hired to kill him, in this brilliant portrait of life under dictatorship. The Secret Agent is the name of a new film by Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Right from the start with the title, we have ambiguity. It’s not a spy movie—no one is engaged in espionage. Rather, it’s presenting the experience that is prompted by the idea of a secret agent: always be on your guard, danger lurks around the corner, conceal who you are. In historical terms,…

Considered a failure upon its release in 1984, David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s novel already displays the bold absurdism that the director would take further in his later films. I told someone the other day that I had seen all of the films by David Lynch. But later I realized that I’d forgotten Dune, from 1984, the one widely considered a failure. The completist in me decided I had to watch it. I’ve grown to like Lynch’s work, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I enjoyed Dune as well—but somehow it was. Lynch took his chance to…

Grigoriy Kozintsev’s epic version of Hamlet presents the tragedy through stark visual means. Many Russian artists have loved and celebrated Shakespeare. Grigoriy Kozintsev, one of the great directors of Soviet cinema, was among them. I had seen his King Lear, from 1971, and was impressed. But I recently watched his masterwork from 1964, seven years earlier: Hamlet. This time I’m more than just impressed. I think it’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films. The first thing that struck me about this epic treatment of Hamlet was the castle, a massive, awe-inspiring medieval hulk looming over the story like a dark…