Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is the first film in the British director’s career to investigate historical subject matter. Typically drawn to portraits of contemporary working-class people surviving in a m...

The unyielding cheeriness of Poppy, the central figure of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, played by an effervescent Sally Hawkins, could be mistaken as false or naiveté. The world’s supply of optimism is...

Among the sharpest of all satires, Being There, released in 1979, would be the last great film made by director Hal Ashby, who had the most extraordinary track record of any filmmaker of the 1970s. Th...

The cinema of Claire Denis cuts into the essential core of its subject matter with unflinching reality. An example of this occurs in White Material, as the camera regards Isabelle Huppert in a morning...

Polish lawmakers sought to pass a bill in 2018 that would make it a criminal offense to suggest the country’s complicity in the crimes committed by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. This included ...

Edward Yang’s Terrorizers (Kongbu Fenzi, 1986) explores the inherent danger of reality and fiction becoming indistinguishable. Using a postmodernist’s formal control and deceptive narrative stru...

Gosford Park is bursting with savory moments and textured social critiques of a class system spatially divided by floors. Among its many acerbic and funny scenes, Robert Altman makes the quickest work...

Told in a series of pondering dreams that manifest into horrible realities, circular patterns of behavior, and violence this side of a Looney Tune, Raising Arizona is a film that questions the desire ...

Lucrecia Martel’s Zama opens with an image that evokes wonder and contemplation. Don Diego de Zama, a Corregidor in the Spanish Empire, stands on the coast of the backwater Argentinian colony where he...