"Based on a true story" ("D'après une histoire vraie" in the French original) is the latest film by Roman Polanski, and a late addition to this year's Cannes program. The film was adapted from the namesake novel by author Delphine de Vigan. In it, a writer (played by French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real-life wife) living in Paris publishes an autobiographical novel, and it does not go over well with her relatives who now

The Tribeca Film Festival ended on Sunday and, once again, proves what a great outlet for women-made films it is. “The Boy Downstairs,” by newcomer Sophie Brooks, was one of those entertaining and smart films. I had the pleasure of speaking with Brooks about her Tribeca, and feature film debut, as both writer and director.

Brooks is a graduate of the NYU Tisch

The premise of Nacho Vigalondo’s "Colossal," a Godzilla monster comedy starring Anne Hathaway, is such a creative burst that the movie earned a decent review just by getting to paper. A drink-til-you-drop party girl gets dumped by her boyfriend, moves home to a small town, takes a job as a waitress, and tries to sober up. Meanwhile across the world, a giant lizard creature appears and disappears each night to attack Seoul, Korea. When she scratches her

The footage is muddy, but we see it clearly enough: a pink dolphin—one of many endangered species populating the Brazilian Amazon—is harpooned to death by a group of fishermen, to be used as bait for the pirapitinga, a breed of scavenger catfish. This is just the beginning of Mark Grieco’s wrenching documentary “The River Below,” currently showing at Tribeca. Filmed over two difficult years

This afternoon the Cannes Festival, still ensconced in their rue Amélie offices in central Paris, announced that Uma Thurman will preside over this year's Un Certain Regard jury. The Un Certain Regard ("a certain perspective") program offers a mishmash of diverse films by known and unknown filmmakers. Past jury presidents have included Isabella Rossellini and Pablo Trapero.

One of the films to appear out of competition this year at the Cannes Festival is Takeshi Miike's adaptation of the manga opus "Blade of the immortal" ("Mugen no Junin" in the romaji original). The film combines magic with swordsmen, valor, many good sword fights, and the need for revenge. Manji's (played by Japanese actor Takuya Kimura) younger sister is killed in front of him. He goes on a quest to avenge her. A mysterious

Gentlemen, start your engines!

The filmmakers, their movies, all of these, and more, were announced during a well-attended press conference at a grand movie theater on the Champs Elysées this morning.

Two notable comebacks this year are Fatih Akin, with “Aus Dem Nichts” (“In the Fade”) and John Cameron Mitchell, who was last in

Syria's white helmets are the country's first responders. They're there when bombs go off, when buildings collapse, when bodies need to be recovered and the wounded hospitalized. "Last Men in Aleppo," a documentary directed by Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad in collaboration with the Aleppo Media Center, follows two men from the White Helmets who navigate the war-torn city of Aleppo in various search-and-rescue missions.

Several viewings of the trailer for “Hidden Figures” before my usual cinema-going routine failed to convince me that it was a film worth seeing. On the strength of those two minutes, I quickly pegged it as yet another moral, inspirational tale about disadvantaged people overcoming great odds. Talk about disadvantage. The three main characters in question are women--not easy today and even less easier in 1961--and black

The mood is melancholy, the road ahead unclear. Which may explain the slew of biographical and autobiographical novels and films in a meandering Proustian fashion that go for the past. And, just like Proust’s oeuvre, never boring but intriguing and beguiling at the same time. After the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir, “My Struggle,” the gorgeous Mike Mills film, “20th Century Women.” I hadn’t seen “Beginners”