HE'S BAAAACK! Lars Von Trier's "The House that Jack Built" will be shown at the Cannes Festival this year, helping to deliver a shot in the arm, a mixture of adrenaline and steroids, to the official selection. Seven years ago, Von Trier was ejected from the Cannes Festival after fumbling his way, with devil-may-care indecency, through a Q&A with the press following the screening of his film "Melancholia." I hadn't attended

The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”

Asghar Farhadi's eighth film was shot entirely on location in Spain. Laura (Penelope Cruz) lives with her husband (played by Javier Bardem) and their children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family event, the trip gets derailed after unexpected events bring secrets out into the open. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them are all leitmotifs of Farhadi's films and figure front and center in the script.

Such is Spielberg’s draw that even film lovers with little interest in dystopia or sci-fi hesitate only a couple of days before dutifully making their way to the nearest movie theater. So, does it deserve the praise? Not really. Special CGI-enhanced effects, spectacular as they are, pall after a while and become repetitive although to the end there are lovely surprising images such as the disco scene with the dancing couples floating in an endless colorful vortex.

More than thirty years after his first Oscar nomination, James Ivory has finally been honored with his first win at the Oscars on Sunday, that of Best Adapted Screenplay, for "Call Me by Your Name." In his acceptance speech, Ivory called the film, about first love, “a story familiar to most of us, whether we’re straight or gay or somewhere in between.” In "Call Me By Your Name," adapted from André Aciman’s namesake

Intimacy and sex are essential elements to finding happiness in life, a theme found in this year's winning film. "Touch Me Not,” by Adina Pintilie, has won the Golden Bear prize at this year's Berlinale. The festival opened on February 15th and closed today and included around 400 films. Of those, nineteen were competing for the top Golden Bear prize. Romanian director Adina Pintilie said she had not expected to win the award for her film

In “Darkest hour,” what Gary Oldman’s Churchill has to contend with in a time of war reminded me of what a newspaper editor does: tense negotiations, the reworking of sentences, an overarching need to get the message out, loudly and clearly. The real context of the story, the history, is, evidently, a very different one from this. In the early forties European countries were falling like dominoes as Hitler’s panzer division closed in

Growing up, one remembers longing for our cinema to become more realistic, or at the very least a little less ridiculous. At one stage, virtually every film made was a lost-and-found potboiler that featured more or less the same dialogues. We have got our wish to a certain extent. The films of today try harder to tell a single story, populate them with characters that go beyond Kishan and Bishan, two friends who became enemies for a while until one

By now, film adaptations based on the oeuvre of the two most prolific British writers of crime fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, form a respectable body. Of the latter, probably the best-known work remains “Murder on the Orient Express.” Today comes a new version by the, himself now almost venerable, Brit actor, Kenneth Branagh. From the get-go in this iteration, the actor/director makes no attempt to shake the

Do sleeping dogs lie forever? The question can be asked about Peter Landesman’s biopic of Mark Felt, the FBI agent who leaked drop after drop of damning information regarding the Watergate burglary to Bod Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, until they turned into a flood that drowned Nixon and acolytes in 1974. If one relies on the story as it is told here the dogs will indeed not wake. Mark Felt