Tomas Hachard

In a recent report from the banlieues, the largely immigrant Parisian suburbs that have been at the heart of the city's debates about assimilation and Islam, The New Yorker's George Packer illustrates the immediately noticeable separation between these neighborhoods and central Paris as he travels in from the city. "The ...

Our understanding of politics and history often bends toward simplicity — toward using particular figures, events or, in the case of books like Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History, elements that help us grasp a movement, time period or even the grand development of human civilization.

Roberto Saviano's ZeroZeroZero follows ...

The truth and trouble of criticism is that it never really leaves behind personal opinion. At best it heightens that opinion by placing it in the framework of an argument, but no matter what, the exhibition of authority while judging art will always function somewhat as a masquerade.

Richard Schickel, ...

"I thought you wanted to loosen up," Charlotte (Judith Godrèche) asks Alex (Adam Scott) close to the end of Patrick Brice's The Overnight. "I do," Alex replies warily. "But I guess I'm just wondering what loosen up means at this point."

It's a fair question given how, at that moment ...

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is, on one level, a memoir about Nelson's pregnancy with her first child, Iggy, and her partner Harry's concurrent female-to-male "transition." (The quotation marks are borrowed from Nelson, who at one point wonders "how to explain ... that for some, 'transitioning' may mean leaving one gender ...

The fighting in Georgia can be hard to follow from afar, but it traces a theme that has been recurring ever since the Soviet Union shattered into 15 countries in 1991. Georgia was one of those lands that gained independence, but it soon degenerated into a war in the northern ...

"The play is an object," Val (Kristen Stewart) tells actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Clouds of Sils Maria while helping her rehearse for a role. "It changes depending how you look at it."

One of the many impressive elements of Olivier Assayas' rich, remarkably intelligent film is how it ...

When it came time for Chucky Taylor to propose to his girlfriend Lynn, he didn't bother with embellishments. After having spent most of their relationship an ocean apart — he in Liberia, she in Pine Hills, Florida, where they'd met — Chucky drove Lynn to a beach in Monrovia and ...

Effie Gray opens after the wedding of its eponymous protagonist (Dakota Fanning) and John Ruskin (Greg Wise) but its not long before you sense that their marriage is headed for trouble. As the two are traveling by train from Effie's Scottish hometown to John's home in London, Effie remarks that ...

From the start, Lone Scherfig's The Riot Club promises a view of Oxford that's more given to exaggeration than realism. A prologue set at the university in the 18th century introduces us to Lord Ryot just before he's killed for cavorting with another man's wife. Ryot, we're told, was a ...

Predicting year-bests in March is a recipe for eating your words, so I'll just say this: I can't imagine more than a couple of movies surpassing Lisandro Alonso's Jauja this year (it's certainly better than anything from 2014). And we'll be incredibly lucky to receive anything as visually stunning.

Jauja ...

Cults and religions exist on a continuum, not in clearly delineated categories. It's even hard to claim that the distinction between the two comes down to "knowing it when you see it." For the most vulnerable people, the victims of groups that sit nebulously on the divide between cult and ...

The terror in David Robert Mitchell's It Follows comes courtesy of a shape-shifting figure visible only to the victims it tenaciously stalks for the purpose of bloody murder. That's the end that quickly befalls Annie (Bailey Spry), a young woman who perishes at the end of the film's brief prologue. ...

Two Men in Town opens with a brutal bludgeoning as the sun rises over the desolate New Mexico desert. The man receiving the beating goes unidentified, but the man providing it with a hefty rock is William (Forest Whitaker). A couple of scenes later, we watch as he gets released ...

In Wild Canaries, Lawrence Michael Levine's breezy take on a bumbling detective story, the trouble seems to begin when Barri (Sophia Takal) discovers the dead body of her downstairs neighbor Sylvia (Marylouise Burke) and, despite doctors declaring it a heart attack, immediately suspects Sylvia's son, Anthony (Kevin Corrigan), as a ...

You probably don't need me to enumerate the pains of navigating bureaucracies. Lines and forms and hold times are the stuff of daily routine — and it's just as routine to complain about them.

Our annoyance is of little consolation to David Graeber, though. In his latest book, The Utopia ...

"So you don't have to do math?" asks a child early on in the documentary Approaching the Elephant. His teacher, Alex, has just explained one of the rules of the Teddy McArdle Free School, where this student and a dozen or so others (who, from the looks of it, range ...

After a brief prologue, Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus opens in the same Brooklyn church that was the centerpiece of his Red Hook Summer. The moment seemingly connects Sweet Blood not just to the 2012 film but also to movies further back in his career, since Red Hook ...

The news that Ava DuVernay had not received a Best Director Oscar nomination for Selma left many people reeling, perhaps because the reasons to be angry were so varied. Even as someone who wasn't one of the film's staunch supporters, it was hard to choose what hurt more: That DuVernay's ...

Earlier this month, the National Society of Film Critics selected Jean-Luc Godard's esoteric but visually groundbreaking Goodbye to Language 3D as its best film of 2014. A minor controversy ensued when some journalists who cover the awards season beat accused the organization of being "self-congratulatory," "elitist," and generally out of ...