Winner of two major awards at the 2014 Venice Film Festival and India’s official entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2016 Oscars, 28-year-old Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature, Court, is not a typical courtroom drama but a devastating look at the failings of the judicial system in India. Portrayed by mostly non-professional actors, the film…
“Is an intelligent being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?” — Philip Roth, The Counterlife With Indignation, James Schamus makes his directorial debut from his own adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 book of the same name. Schamus is most well known as the screenwriting and producing partner of Ang Lee,…
There’s a lot I wanted to like about Equity, a financial thriller featuring three central female characters, including a commanding lead performance from Anna Gunn (“Breaking Bad” TV series). It’s rare to see strong female characters in a Wall Street-set film, especially those as ambitious and calculating as the trio of leads here. And the…
I already know I’m going to receive flack for this, so I’m just going to state it plainly: I have not read Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Batman: The Killing Joke.” I have also not seen any of Warner Bros. Pictures’ animated DC library, including any episodes of “Batman: The Animated Series.” I went into Batman:…
Whether or not space-time is an actual reality or simply an illusion, a convenient concept of the mind to get us through the day, is not relevant here. The Spierig Brothers (“Daybreakers”) mesmerizing film Predestination postulates that it is real, but that is only the starting point of a film that challenges us at every…
According to military historian Antony Beevor, “The subject of the Red Army’s mass rapes in Germany and elsewhere in Europe has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened.” A Soviet war correspondent has said that, “It was an army of rapists,” that Russian soldiers raped every female…
Movies often attempt to capture the breadth of a whole life fully lived, but few do so with little more than a single breath. That’s the aim of the lovely little short Bernie and Rebecca, which elliptically plays the part of a comedy at either end of its running time, while segueing sweetly into more…
