Not many films are made in Serbia. Fewer still get past its border. Fortunately for fans of world cinema, one of them, entitled The Load, gained international recognition at the 2018 Cannes film festival, and went on to win multiple nominations and awards around the globe. And now, it’s available on multiple streaming platforms. […]

  Despite a career that has spanned half a century, U.K. director Ken Loach is an auteur that casual filmgoers on this side of the Atlantic might not be very familiar with. That’s a shame, because even though Loach’s films are uniquely British, his themes of social inequality are more relevant than ever. The title […]

  Memorable big-screen personas are a trademark of Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. Mark Wahlberg as porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, Daniel Day-Lewis as the sociopathic oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, and Joaquin Phoenix as the pot-smoking gumshoe “Doc” Sportello in Inherent Vice are just a few of P.T. Anderson’s creations […]

  Ethan Hawke described the 2014 film Boyhood, in which he co-starred, as “human time-lapse photography.” He was being reductive, if not entirely inaccurate. As most everyone probably knows by now, Boyhood was shot over a twelve-year period using the same cast. At the heart of this impressive achievement is Ellar Coltrane, who plays the […]

  Charlie Kaufman is one of the most original scriptwriters to emerge in the last thirty years. He’s probably best known for 1999’s Being John Malkovich, 2002’s Adaptation, and 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, earning screenplay Oscar nominations for the first two and an Oscar win for the third. He transitioned from writer […]

  When one thinks of Francis Ford Coppola, three of his masterpieces typically spring to mind: The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now. Less mentioned, but more relevant to our post-9/11 privacy-challenged world, is 1974’s The Conversation. The Conversation earned Coppola two Oscar nominations: Best Screenplay and, because he was also the producer, […]

  When the classic film Viridiana was first released in 1961, it was promptly denounced by the Vatican and banned in Spain. Today it’s widely regarded as a surrealistic masterpiece made by one of the great artists of the 20th century, Luis Buñuel. Renowned Mexican actress Silvia Pinal stars as the titular character, a nun […]

  A young woman named Ada is in love with a man named Souleiman, even though she’s facing an arranged marriage to someone else. Unlike Ada’s betrothed, Souleiman is poor and struggling with money problems. That’s the deceptively simple premise of Atlantics, a fascinating film from 2019 with a genre-bending story that’s equal parts romance, […]

  In 2003, the New York Times reported that 40 military officers and civilian experts were invited to the Pentagon for a private screening of the 1966 Italian classic, The Battle of Algiers. In the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its purpose was to learn about the inherent moral and strategic problems associated […]

  It’s difficult to convey with mere words why the Swedish film, You, the Living, is so amusing, especially since so much of its humor is visual. A funhouse mirror’s reflection of humanity, You, the Living has no real plot per se, just a series of vignettes featuring various eccentrics coping with the absurdities of […]