The town of Roubaix in France, located near the Belgian border, is rather like the Detroit of France. Yesterday’s city of industry has become a broken shell of a town. In the film's opening as local police chief Inspector Daoud (Roschdy Zem) cruises by a burning car he calls it in, the fire foreshadowing tragedy.Daoud is a fictional character who was added in by director Arnaud Desplechin. His new film is based on a novel

Matthias and Maxime have been friends since childhood. Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas, in his second role for the big screen) tries to gain a foothold in the business world while Maxime makes a living as bartender, caring for his mother, a recovering addict.The two young men give off slight reticence, an awkwardness, it becomes clear very quickly in the film that these two aren’t just in a friendship. The tight-knit group of friends

This year, there was a before- and an after-Tarantino Cannes Festival. Quentin Tarantino's new film “Once upon a time in Hollywood” was the marker. And it was also the most anticipated film of the 2019 festival. What a party! There is no other American auteur who can command the kinds of huge crowds like the ones seen yesterday in Cannes, when he and the cast walked the red carpet. The Croisette was on fire! (and the day after

Bong Joon-Ho has directed "Parasite," a comedy about an elaborate con that glistens with irony. The material ambitions of the poor are pitted against the dull indulgence of the wealthy in a manichean fight for supremacy. Will the world one day see an all-out war between the classes? Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement, were those harbingers? They’ve all come and gone but what’s next? Will there be something else

An exotic locale in beautiful Portugal, an unaffected and powerful performance by a star actress and existential worriment. This is what you can expect from “Frankie,” an ensemble film directed by Ira Sachs that’s asthmatic and lacks energy but fascinated me, nevertheless, because of its main actress Isabelle Huppert and her incredible on-screen presence.Huppert is one of France’s biggest names.

It’d be understandable to interpret the new Dardenne Brothers movie as finger pointing at the insidious and virulent strain of religiosity that’s going around the world right now, that is, Islamism. But enslavement, of the mind, a boxing in, seems more like the point of this pleasurable new opus by the directors of “Kid with the bike.” Enslavement to someone else’s viewpoint, a submission to a code of beliefs that’s toxic

Terrence Malick has directed “A Hidden Life,” a very enjoyable contemplation on World War II, on freedom, on good and evil, and on God. His film asks, where was God during WWII?Radegund, a beautiful village in the Austrian Alps . Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis or to pledge allegiance to them. Franz has a farm in these beautiful mountains that he tends to with his wife, Franziska

The year is 1770. Marianne (Noémie Merlant), the daughter of a renowned painter and a painter herself travels to an island off the coast of Brittany, tasked wit painting the portrait of a noblewoman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse has recently left the convent where she led a life of seclusion because of a family tragedy: Her sister has met a tragic end on the verge of marrying a Milanese gentleman. Her mother (Valeria

A gang leader on the lam in search of redemption. A prostitute eager to gain her freedom back. Together they will decide to play one last gamble with their fate, the proverbial last big hit. Within this narrative proposition, a discrete romantic plot that will come to fit within the film’s dramatic structure. This is “Wild Goose Lake,” by Chinese director Yi'nan Diao, a film that’s inferior to his previous ones. It’s convoluted

Despite its non-chronological narrative and slightly-convoluted plot Corneliu Porumboiu’s new film “La Gomera” is a winner. It’s a film noir with a femme fatale, murders and a morally-questionable hero. “Gomera” references “The Maltese Falcon,” and has one scene that looks like a first take from “Psycho.” Add to this a mattress full of cash, a pious mother and scenes from the Singapore's Garden Rhapsody show and lots of waltzes