Review

A broken system validates itself in “Article 20,” a Chinese New Year legal thriller that also happens to be a domestic farce and, oh yeah, the latest movie directed by mainland hitmaker Zhang Yimou. Only a filmmaker as hawkish, conflicted, and masterful as Zhang (“Hero,” “Full River Red”) could have sutured together the malformed parts […]

Society often ignores those living on its fringes. Thankfully, there are cinematic works like Henry Nelson’s sensitive and perceptive feature debut “Asleep in My Palm” to delicately give them their due visibility. Patiently paced despite running at a compact 89 minutes and full of observant details inside the off-the-grid lives of a father and daughter,

Writer-director Noora Niasari’s debut feature, “Shayda,” is a personal meta-fiction based on her own childhood, marked by a fraught parental dynamic and endless uncertainty, but also fierce, unshakeable motherly love. “Shayda”’s titular character (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi) has escaped her abusive husband in Iran and fled to safety in Melbourne with her young daughter,

The shots are unreal. We fly behind and next to a bee in the jungle. We see lust on a young bonobo’s face. We watch lions and hyenas fight over a carcass in the middle of the night. National Geographic’s “Queens” delivers the nature documentary goods, and while watching it, I couldn’t stop wondering how

There is a terrific scene late in the powerful and old-fashioned epic “Cabrini,” on the eponymous Italian Catholic missionary nun who not only founded a peerless orphanage in New York at the turn of the 20th century (and gave her name to Hudson Heights’ serene Cabrini Boulevard in Manhattan), but also resolutely built a worldwide

“The Arc of Oblivion” is a documentary about a lot of things, including the futility of its own existence. Writer-director Ian Cheney, who also narrates, presents himself as, basically, a hoarder, mainly of hard drives containing photos, video and audio of various things in his life, some of them undeniably important and others that fall

“Do you need a reason to be unhappy,” asks Carol (Sarah Gadon) in Meredith Hama-Brown’s effective character study “Seagrass,” the story of how grief often begets other repressed emotions and possibly even tragedies. There’s something fascinating in that question in that it gets at how often depression can be like a snake eating its tail

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