One of the great humanists of our (or any) time, Mike Leigh has always explored cinema's capacity to create empathy onscreen out of our unwillingness to express enough of it in our own lives. Much as his own method for crafting narrative flies in the face of traditional filmmaking, so too does Hard Truths and its entire thesis run counter to all traditional expectations of comion through character development. Sometimes, things change—for better or, more often, for worse. Nine times…

Nothing beats viewing a film adaptation of a book with someone versed in the written material. Walking into Luca Guadagnino's long-awaited adaptation of "Queer," my well-read friend turned to me and proclaimed "William S. Burroughs wrote a 150-page novella; how the hell did Guadagnino find a way to stretch that into almost two-and-a-half hours?"; when Queer was over, that same friend turned to me and said "Wow... there's a lot of context they just left on the floor." Such is…

The direct path between a Golden Bear win in Berlin and a Palme d'Or contending slot in Cannes isn't an absolute certainty, but the trend is frequent enough to note, and subsequently drum up excitement when it comes to . The latest in this illustrious group—including the recent likes of Asghar Farhadi, Nadav Lapid, Ildiko Enyedi and Mohammad Rasoulof—is none other than Spain's own Carla Simón, whose Berlin victor Alcarràs demonstrated a familial intimacy fitting for the more low-key festival;…

At 95 years of age, June Squibb has enjoyed a surprising but entirely welcome second-wind in her longstanding acting career since her Oscar nomination for Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. At 95 years of age, though, it’s difficult to ignore that virtually every role she’s gotten since then has more or less entirely revolved around the fact that she’s… well, old. The lovably snarky senior citizen is a role that Squibb inhabits quite well regardless, and I’m sure we’d be more than…

In the grand tradition of secretive, word-of-mouth marketing pushes for indie horror films, there were very few details distributor Neon was willing to disclose about Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs in the leadup to its release. In essence, the buzz around the film has so far been largely relegated to the vague early buzz of well-placed sources saying it’s a decade-defining bone-chiller. For the rest of the public, we’ve been sold on a very simple premise: Nicolas Cage as a serial killer.…