Characters in Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies seem moved by strange spirits and unknown motivations. From the beginning of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” questions come up: what is the relationship of Dr. Steven Murphy, an established surgeon, to Martin (Barry Keoghan), a teenager who has no connection to the doctor or his family? Why is Martin so weird, anyway? Martin’s father died on the operating table a couple years earlier.

Two men at an Andre Balasz properties hotel step inside […]

Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann traveled to North Korea three times in […]

In his latest film "Le Redoutable" Michel Hazanavicius looks at Jean-Luc Godard’s life at the peak of his career, a period that coincides with a time of great upheaval in France. The backlash from the Vietnam war could be felt from afar, the French had their Mai 68 and many a filmmaker, including Godard, led the rebellion against symbols of power, whether it was the state, the big corporations or even a certain kind of cinema. The times were a-changing and Godard

The name Taylor Sheridan will have a familiar ring to fans of “Sons of Anarchy” [FX] who will remember him for his role as police officer David Hale. There was a lot to the Hale character, an indication of Sheridan’s level as an actor and his ability as keen observer of people, how they function. Sheridan, who directed "Wind River," got his break as screenwriter when he was given writing duties for “Sicario,” directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Who is Billy Moore? He's a British citizen who was caught heroin while in Thailand and sent to jail, only to emerge a boxing champion. A white male, who gets thrown in jail while sojourning in a completely foreign country and walks out of there a boxing champion makes for the kind of extraordinary, by-the-bootstraps survival story that screenwriters are hardly able to generate. As it were, "A Prayer Before Dawn" is adapted from a book that Moore

Ruben Östlund's "The Square" raised the level of this still-young Cannes Festival last night. Definitely my favorite film so far. Will Yorgos Lanthimos’s film "The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” which later in the festival, knock “The Square” off its pole position? Perhaps. But for now let us bask in the euphoric weirdness of "The Square,” Östlund’s comeback film to Cannes after his “Force Majeure from a couple years ago, equally as strange

"Lerd" is a portrait of a man whose sense of self-worth and integrity gets trampled.

Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad) is a goldfish farmer living outside a village in northern Iran with his wife and young son. The land on which they live is very valuable to a local company. That company launches a campaign of intimidation against Reza, with the town council backing them, to try and wrest

Bong Joon Ho’s “Okja” makes me wish I was ten years-old again, and I don’t say this with irony. This movie is good entertaining fun, sure, but it would likely be thoroughly enjoyed by someone who’s very young, in spite of several adult-size questions the film raises, in passing. In preparing to offer him the role of Johnny Wilcox (a white, flamboyant version of Brian Fellow from SNL’s “Safari Planet") Bong Joon Ho

When actress Robin Wright arrived on the set of Kering’s Women in Motion on Thursday, the shadow of Claire Underwood, the wife of the U.S. president in "House of Cards," floated in, too. One has become hardly dissociable from the other, and so it was this role of the powerful woman she invented with David Fincher that drove her for the first time behind a camera. Elegantly dressed in a black suit, she came to the 70th