Two motifs predominate in Ross McElwee’s 25-plus years of autobiographical filmmaking: the search for identity in the face of handed-down ideas about family, love, and work; and the undertaking of journeys fueled by desire, curiosity, and varying…
Lawless-ness and brutality rule the frontier worlds of Australian director John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (05) and The Road (09). This time out, Hillcoat makes a foray into Virginia’s Prohibition-era moonshine country, locating a kindred sensibility in…
To call this “the latest” film from Leos Carax is slightly misleading since that would imply some degree of regularity. (The director has made three features in the last 21 years.) To call it a “love…
At a scant 77 minutes, there’s much more that Girl Model could have said about race, exploitation, and warped cultural standards of beauty. Instead, it shows what happens when people who have very little are offered…
For the uninitiated, Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, published by MTV Books in 1999, wholeheartedly engages in the teenage impulse towards pretentiousness. Routinely compared to Catcher in the Rye, the book has…
“Why do you steal?” an angry chef demands of Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), the 12-year-old boy he finds stashing pilfered ski equipment in the restaurant’s storeroom. Disquietingly unfazed, Simon shrugs: “I don’t know. To buy things.”…
For his third feature as director, French hotshot multi-hyphenate Guillaume Canet has a go at the sadly sparse subgenre of the friendship comedy-drama, à la The Big Chill. But because his cast of characters is composed…
Picture this: Chiara Mastroianni catches Milos Forman and Catherine Deneuve in flagrante delicto. Yes, indeed, a bit of selfreflexive playfulness is afoot. Mastroianni’s real-life mother (Deneuve) is playing her onscreen counterpart, while the Czech-born Forman plays…
Second only to Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the most widely read (or at least assigned) autobiographical graphic novel of all time. But as Art Spiegelman—or anyone who has been cursed with such success—can attest, generating…
