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Everybody lies. Whether with malice, for self-preservation, or to spare another’s heart, fabrications lubricate or erode social interactions. But it’s in the liminal space between the idea of absolute certainty an unattainable utopia and the most outlandish of falsehoods where what matters most resides: how an event makes us feel overpowers the importance of facts […]

Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba, who co-directed “They Shot the Piano Player,” first encountered the work of the film’s subject, Brazilian keyboardist Francisco Tenorio Júnior, in a record store twenty years ago. Trueba was so enraptured by the music that he looked Tenorio up online to see what else he’d done, and was horrified to learn

There is a singular image that beautifully sums up the theme of Nenad Cicin-Sain’s “Kiss the Future” as well as the siege in Sarajevo itself. I have seen this image many times: as a CD cover, a poster, a heavily filtered image in a music video, on a giant screen in a stadium during a

Lily Sullivan, who broke through with an impressively physical performance in last year’s “Evil Dead Rise,” gives a remarkable one-woman show in Matt Vesely’s effective “Monolith,” a sci-fi thriller that somehow finds a way to make podcasting cinematic (mostly). It does so by mining what feels like that current of rising anxiety in the international

Although Vadim Perelman’s “Persian Lessons” is credited as an adaptation of the short story Erfindung Einer Sprache by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, the film begins with titles that read “Inspired by true events,” a nod to the film’s Holocaust setting. Though millions of Jewish people were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps during this time, this misguided

A small-town period piece set between World War I and the mid-1930s, “Scarlet” is a French fable by an Italian director. Although its style couldn’t be more different, its conception evokes Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” which was less a portrait of any era’s “real France” than a world-traveling cinephile’s love letter to French movies

Ocean waves crash in slow motion. Solar panels sprawl as far as the eye can see. A port worker stacking multicolored shipping containers. A little boy staring blankly at a screen. These striking images and so many more comprise the poetic documentary “Users.” The latest from Natalia Almada, which earned her the documentary directing award

Although it’s being sold as a LeBron James biopic, “Shooting Stars” ends before James has even begun his records-shattering career as an NBA player. Nearly all of its two-hour running time focuses on the relationships between young James (played by acting newcomer Mookie Cook, a small forward for Compass Prep in Jefferson, Oregon); his three

The bittersweet Korean drama “Aloners” works best when it’s a character study about an isolated thirtysomething’s behavior instead of whatever her creators think should be done about it. Call center ace Jina (Gong Seung-Yeon) doesn’t get completely pigeonholed by her age or stereotypically millennial intolerances until her story wraps up, at which point her problems

The fawning docuseries “Arnold” repackages Arnold Schwarzenegger’s already well-spun and streamlined biography. In three hour-long episodes devoted to his three major careers (bodybuilder, movie actor, and politician), Schwarzenegger provides negligible on-camera and voiceover-narrated commentary for movie clips, old and new talking head interviews, and self-congratulatory pep-talk commentary about his life, whose selectively remembered setbacks all