Three adult siblings reunite for a final visit with their mother, and then to manage her estate once she’s passed away, in Summer Hours, a superior family drama that, despite its apparent dissimilarities from his recent work, finds French director Olivier Assayas once again charting the effects of globalization on human consciousness and relationships. Frédéric…

For all its grimy aesthetic beauty and stylishly horrifying images of bodily abuse and decay, the most powerful impression made by Hunger is a stationary 20-minute single-take conversation between imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) seated at a table in west Belfast’s infamous Maze prison in 1981. A doomed…

Bullet in the Head’s sound design is comprised of diegetic environmental noises and two words of spoken dialogue. It’s a daringly uncompromising strategy employed by director Jaime Rosales, who takes a voyeur-at-a-distance POV on his nominal protagonist, a man seen for the film’s first two-thirds engaged in everyday activities like talking in a coffee shop,…

Facile comparisons to Margot at the Wedding may inevitably follow Rachel Getting Married, yet unlike Noah Baumbach’s aggressively unpleasant portrait of sibling dysfunction, Jonathan Demme’s tale of a junkie who exits rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister is – despite a sometimes grating, troubled protagonist – big-hearted, generous and hopeful. After nine…

Night and Day’s title evokes a sense of duality that permeates director Hong Sang-soo’s (Tale of Cinema,Woman on the Beach) latest, achingly affecting portrait of confused modern masculinity. In Paris to avoid arrest for smoking pot with an American exchange student, artist Sung-nam (Kim Youngho) finds himself just as adrift as the story implies he…

Internet videos and parental neglect spark deadly disassociation in Afterschool, a film whose long takes, languid pacing, and impersonal portrait of adolescence reveal a deep debt to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. High-schooler Rob (Ezra Miller) likes to watch web clips of giggling tykes, cats playing the piano, students fighting, and violent porn, all in order…

The Headless Woman is a scrupulously crafted, thematically sound social critique masquerading as a character study that, to put it bluntly, is so affected and emotionally inaccessible as to be borderline intolerable. Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s (The Holy Girl) film is marked by fastidious technical dexterity, her fragmented framing, pressing close-ups, and focus shifts helping…

Mike Leigh’s kitchen-sink realism usually comes in a grim shade, so it’s a relief to discover that the title of his newest, Happy-Go-Lucky, isn’t meant ironically. Rather, it’s a perfect summation of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a 30-year-old single Londoner who lives with best friend Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), teaches grade school, and coasts along on a…

Fixating again on thorny economic, race and age-related power dynamics, Laurent Cantet peeks inside an urban French public school classroom and finds ubiquitous tension in The Class. Asked what his favorite part of the school year was, a French student discusses learning about shifting tectonic plates, an apt remark for a film deeply engrossed with…