The strongest among the films I caught up with were mostly those about the great disconnect, as if there’s just some information missing in what’s going down between characters onscreen. There’s no great theme at work here, or maybe not consciously, since what’s on display is as much a function of what got made during...

Unmoored from a robust theatrical release schedule, the professional voyeurs we call film critics spent this third year emerging from Covid looking at character driven films more from the festival circuit, both real time and virtual, and virtually writing off studio “product.” Our film critic, HJ, spent 2022 either going to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, Telluride,...

The life span of a film is comparatively short—6 months if it’s a star performer, six weeks if it’s got some backing, down to 6 days or 6 minutes if it’s star-crossed. Writer- director Todd Field’s Tár, for which Cate Blanchett might win her third Oscar as a fiery symphony conductor, got a standing ovation in...

In a year that promised to be chock full of eagerly anticipated film titles held over from 2020 – In the Heights, West Side Story, The French Dispatch — the air went out of 2021, the way it seemed to leave the country. There was very little fresh air to go round anywhere, even off to the side in...

Like Toronto, NY and other film festivals, Sundance in the Plague Year was virtual.  It reduced its scope and crammed 73 films into six days. Nothing unspooled, it all streamed digitally, with 28 satellite drive-in sites scattered around the country. Here in the East it was freezing, and we got the snow Park City didn’t....

In some respects, Titane, or Titanium, is why I go to film festivals. Or one of the reasons. This second film by French film director Julia Ducournau (Raw) is an encounter I’d rather not have had, because it places me in a box I’d rather not be in: not particularly liking it, vs. second guessing my dislike...

Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception, which showed in the new, non-competitive Cannes Premieres section, is everything you wanted to know about Philip Roth and more. Way more. At least more than I wanted to know, even though I confess to buying The Outlaw Blake Bailey’s Roth biography, when his publisher, Norton, stepped away from it under pressure over...

Flag Day, directed by Sean Penn, concerns the Family Vogel, late 20th century Minnesotans, played by the Family Penn, Sean as John Vogel, his daughter Dylan as Jennifer Vogel and son Hopper as son Nick, both from his time with Robin Wright. The story is based on a book by Jennifer Vogel that starts in...

Red Rocket stays right inside Sean Baker’s wheelhouse — the sex industry workers, professional, amateur, haphazard, casual or casualties that inhabited Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project before. There’s just no victory or dignity in the path Red Rocket’s lead character, Mikey Saber, has taken to crawl back to Texas City, his dirtwater East Texas home town after 17 years in...

Over at the high end of the marketing continuum is Mothering Sunday. The story is set post World War I.  In service to the Nivens, (Olivia Colman and Colin Firth), is Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), who aside from front line duties like appearing with the silver breakfast tray and saying, “Your breakfast, Suh,” steals into the...