Foreign

Watching, this more than watchable film, percolating throughout, director Justine Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari’s (Triet’s husband) premise is the disparity in a relationship, a marriage, a partnership that over a period, success favors one party over the other; “A Star is Born” with a myriad of redundant remakes, echoes the demise of the male protagonist disintegrating with his partner’s …

Director Jonathan Glazer has accomplished the remarkable in his adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel of the same title (which bears little resemblance to Amis’s script).  The film resonates, pierces the psyche, transcends the scenario, adept performances, it sears redolently with the SOUND of the unimaginable; eyes shut, the soundtrack bleats with symphonic chords of horror, annihilation, ethnic elimination; Mica Levi’s …

Director Sonia Herman Dolz with painstaking research, hands on acuity, blesses viewers with an extravagant, monumental tour de force; it is a love story of achievement, devotion, bordering on adulation, of the “world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility”; a glimmering, gorgeous space where the impossible, inconceivable is majestically realized. It is a wonder masterfully created by visionary architect, Winy …

Director Kitty Green gifts viewers one of the most innovative, surprising films of the year. Two young Canadians “Hannah” (Julia Garner) and “Liv” (Jessica Henwick) find themselves running out of funds while experiencing the sights, seductiveness of the only country in the world that covers an entire continent, Australia; the daunting vastness minimizes its inhabitants especially in the parched outback …

“THE ORIGIN OF EVIL”  FRENCH: ENGLISH SUBTITLES   (IN THEATRES & SOON NETFLIX) There is nothing as satisfying as a supreme whodunit, and the French excel at titillation and obfuscation. Actor Laure Calamy, “Stephanie”, in a transformative performance seeks to reunite with her estranged, wealthy father “Serge” (virtuoso role by Jacques Weber); from the onset surprises await at every turn; director …

Here’s a film that achieves a level of titillation, a dissection of authorship, scholarship, and an analysis of intelligence gone awry, to a satisfying, surprisingly astounding conclusion, enhanced by applaudable performances. Director Alice Troughton and writer Alex MacKeith dare viewers to define their perceptions of a writer’s acuity: “average writers attempt originality, they fail. Good writers borrow from their betters. …

Experiencing this elegiacally exquisite film knowing that no one could have written it without having lived it; religiosity reverberates throughout; “Past Lives” is a hymn, a devoted prayer to bygone loves; remembered souls whose sincerity episodically, flowed in and out of one’s life; the “if only’s” “what if’s” are ubiquitously echoed throughout “Past Lives”, stirring memories, mostly ignored, but awakened …

Penelope Cruz tips the scales in skill and virtuosity in Italian director Emanuele Crialese’s, “L’immensita” (immensity); shadowing his own struggle with gender identity in the 1970’s. It is a film metaphorically nuanced, reminiscent of today’s gender divisive world. “Clara” (Cruz) a dazzling housewife with three children, the oldest “Adriana/Adri” (prodigiously astounding Luana Giuliani) at twelve comfortable in his male identity, …

The name is the same, but not Georges Bizet’s (1838-1875) renowned Opera that premiered in 1875; instead, Benjamin Millepied (“The Black Swan”), dancer, choreographer, now director, presents his version of a woman who clandestinely steals into the United States from Mexico; Melissa Barrera (“Carmen”) is the heroine with a stricken past, captured by border patroller “Aidan” (Paul Mescal), suffering from …

The dashing, dimpled dandy with insouciant, uninhibited charm (Tomer Sisley) masking Shakespearian hubris, behind raffish, rascally wit; one dead wife who perpetually, deliciously, ghostly gives consul, another, a maniacal murderer, the mother of his baby daughter; his forensic genius, laced with aplomb, operates at the sharpest measure, with the aid of the murdered victims (whose dignification he champions) continuously titillating …