Tomas Hachard

The Duke of Burgundy takes place in a town without any male presence. Where the men have gone, writer-director Peter Strickland won't say. The absence is never mentioned, it only helps accentuate the otherworldliness of wherever the film is set: some facsimile of Earth that first seems right out of ...

The B-Side, Ben Yagoda's cultural history of Tin Pan Alley and the American Songbook, begins near the end of its story. In 1954, Arthur Schwartz, the co-writer of standards like "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan," is at the Columbia Records building in Manhattan, waiting to present Mitch ...

Human Capital, Paolo Virzì's circuitous film about two interconnected Italian families, opens on a winter's night, when a waiter riding his bicycle home after working at a high school gala gets run off the road by an SUV that promptly flees the scene of the crime. The car belongs to ...

The title of Mark Peranson and Raya Martin's La última película means "the last movie" in Spanish, which is also the title of the 1971 Dennis Hopper film that Peranson and Martin are riffing on with their playful sort-of-mock-documentary. Hopper's fragmented, much-lambasted film was about a stunt coordinator in Peru ...

J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year opens to the tune of Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)." The song plays as Abel (Oscar Isaac) takes a morning run and the trucks at the heart of his ascendant heating oil business begin making deliveries across New York. "This ...

Sophie Fillières' uneven relationship drama If You Don't, I Will opens with a scene of biting dialogue between Pierre (Mathieu Almaric) and Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos), whose marriage is seemingly on its last legs.

At once discomfiting in its cruelty and laughable in its absurdity, the scene begins with Pierre impatiently ...

On Christmas, a slew of Oscar hopefuls will hit theaters, taking on the kind of important topics you might expect from such prestige pictures: corruption in contemporary Russia, the psychological aftereffects of war, the struggles of the civil rights movement. In their company, the eccentricities of Alexandre Rockwell's Little Feet, ...

Paul Thomas Anderson probably wouldn't take kindly to being called a period filmmaker. And it's true that one of our finest pulse-takers of the American predicament is so much more than that. Anderson's movies track warped obsessives who come to define the particular times and places from which they get ...

Curfew, Shawn Christensen's 2012 Oscar-winning live-action short, tells a simple, affecting story about Richie (Christensen), a depressed man who is about to commit suicide when he receives an emergency call from his estranged sister (Kim Allen) asking him to babysit his preteen niece Sophia (Fatima Ptacek) for the night.

Ptacek ...

When Dallas restaurant critic Leslie Brenner sat down at the new Proof + Pantry restaurant, she was not prepared for what she was about to be served.

It wasn’t the food. The meal went well. But we she asked for the check, nothing ever came.

The restaurant’s owners decided they ...

It's been a rough few weeks for Dylan Thomas. If Christopher Nolan's repeated use of "Do not go gentle into that good night" to portentously hammer home the significance of Interstellar wasn't lamentable enough, now comes Dying of the Light, which, title aside, takes a somewhat subtler approach in its ...

In a recent essay for Wired about Pulp Fiction, Ana Lily Amirpour put forward an outsider's dichotomy for judging films. "Movies trying to be popular, those aren't the real heroes," she wrote. "The real heroes are the odd, off-the-beaten-path weirdos."

Certainly you can garner Amirpour's taste for the strange ...

Meghan Daum's The Unspeakable is nominally a collection of essays about the conversations we all want to partake in but hold back from; the thoughts we all have but refuse to admit out loud.

And, in several respects, the book fits the bill. "Matricide," the collection's opening essay, recounts Daum's ...

A bill in the Senate to bypass a State Department review and approve the controversial project failed to gather enough support Tuesday night. Pipeline backers fell one vote short of the 60 needed.

Young Woman in a Garden brings together 24 previously published short stories by the fantasy fabulist Delia Sherman. Reviewer Jason Heller says it's full of dazzle and heart, with a dark edge.

There's undoubtedly a farcical element to the true story told in Rosewater that makes it seem like the ideal directorial debut for Jon Stewart.

The film is about Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal), who was jailed in 2009 in Tehran while covering the Iranian elections that would eventually ...

The Great Invisible, Margaret Brown's soft-spoken documentary about the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, recognizes that disasters — from shootings to extreme weather events — often beget entrenchment. Tragedies tend to drive us to our most defensive ideological corners, from which we can see little beyond more ...

The Heart Machine is Zachary Wigon's debut feature — a point worth mentioning up top, because the film exhibits the kind of patience, good judgment and restraint that normally requires careful cultivation.

Case in point: When Wigon introduces us to Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil) through ...

Alex Ross Perry has a knack for writing male characters with deep reservoirs of literary arrogance, and he has taken his talent to a new level with his intricately crafted film, Listen Up Philip.

In his 2011 sophomore feature The Color Wheel, Perry played Colin, who was a pathetic and ...

Whiplash is, in many ways, a companion film to The Social Network. The similarities only begin with the film's protagonist Andrew (Miles Teller), a first-year jazz drummer at the highly competitive Schaffer music conservatory, who shares both the compulsive drive and the unpolished social skills of Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg.

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