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With her creamy wardrobe of tasteful neutrals and dreamy mansion in the Paris suburbs, Léa Drucker’s Anne has created an impenetrable exterior for herself in “Last Summer.” At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. But Anne doesn’t know she’s the main character in a Catherine Breillat movie, and so she–and we–are up for […]

Has an auteur ever turned on his characters and the worldview they triumph as sharply and definitively as Lukas Moodysson? The Euro-pop feel-goodies of his debut and sophomore productions may have been, in hindsight, an aesthetic blind alley (an emotionally mature film about a ramshackle socialist co-op that miraculously manages to eschew both quirky familial

A searing drama about a European refugee crisis that resonates with similar crises in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and yes, America’s southwestern border, Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year. That judgment is due not only to the

Seven Mummies is a conceptual oddity. Though the title gives the impression that it is a modern mummy film, what we have is a variant of the Western ghost town concept that we have seen in films like Ghost Town (1988), Phantom Town (1997), and Purgatory (1999). (I have a more detailed list of Western/genre

Massacre Time (Tempo di Massacro, Il Bruto e la Bestia), a Western directed by Lucio Fulci (known for The Beyond and House By the Cemetery) opens with a scene that could fit nicely into the horror movies that Shotgun Fullback will later become infamous for. While lurking in the woods, Jason “Junior” Scott (Nino Castelnuovo,

Dialogue can lie, but faces tell the truth. Stories are told through faces. It takes enormous trust on the part of a director to allow this to happen, to let the faces do most of the heavy lifting. “Daddio”, written and directed by Christy Hall, is a film about faces, and this is pretty extraordinary

The planet Sargacia has Finders, who are intergalactic police. They’ve assigned Abraxas and Secundus to a particular case. Abraxas has been a Finder for almost ten thousand years. Relying on the Answer Box, a device that every Finder has and which works as a scanner and communicator, Abraxas is able to locate any object from

There’s no shortage of films that consider the Holocaust or Israel’s founding. But it’s rare to see the two subjects intertwined so purposely as in “June Zero.” The idea to fold it all into an anthology of interconnected short films might be unique. “June Zero” is directed by an American filmmaker, Jake Paltrow (brother of

Few could contest the fact that Oliver Reed experienced some highlights throughout his career in cinema. He acted in films directed by Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, David Cronenberg, Nicolas Roeg, and Terry Gilliam, and was once briefly considered as a potential replacement for Sean Connery as James Bond. Not a great lover of the ‘Hollywood

When does rooting for the damned stop being worthwhile or even productive? Viewers’ sympathies are worked over throughout the grim Austrian folk horror drama “The Devil’s Bath,” a dreadful period piece about a pious woman who seems doomed by her circumstances. Agnes (Anja Plaschg), an unhappily married woman who prays to God for mercy, makes