'The Pale Door': Film Review

The three children of a poor Portuguese couple (Lucia Moniz and Ruben Garcia) living in London are forcibly removed from their home by social services, raising questions about responsible parenting and duty of care in director Ana Rocha de Sousa's emotive feature debut Listen. Although the script by Rocha de Sousa, Paula Vaccaro and Aaron Brookner tries to be at least a little bit balanced, the rules-obsessed authorities don’t come out of it well.

Taking Soviet films from the past as its model, Russian veteran Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! (Dorogie Tovarischi!) pinpoints a moment inhistory when people’s unquestioning belief in the high-minded principles of the Communist party wavered as evidence to the contrary mounted and personally impacted their lives. Although at first sight this dramatization of a 1962 strike at a factory in the U.S.S.R.

Jessica Kiang How do you commemorate a shameful history long suppressed? One way is to render it in black and white images so stark there’s nowhere for the shame to hide, a feat achieved with stunning clarity by Andrei Konchalovsky’s perversely beautiful and coldly furious “Dear Comrades!” (exclamation point ironic).

Gia Coppola’s first feature Palo Alto chronicled teenagers stumbling toward adulthood way back in distant 2013; her new Mainstream, bowing in Venice’s Horizons section, features a trio of 20-somethings plundering the Internet culture of their time, bartering their values for big cash and followers on social media but still, of course, looking for love. It's a messy, childish scrawl of a film, but it is high on energy.

Take away the title and a few characters' names, and you'd have to be pretty well versed in the Bard to recognize Paul Ireland's Melbourne-set Measure for Measure as a modern interpretation of that play. Central relationships and plots are so changed —a man's sister is turned into his girlfriend, for one thing —that it would be safer to say the film was "suggested by" its predecessor, with more than a dash of Romeo and Juliet thrown in, and give it a different name.

Inspired by personal experience with a loved one, husband-and-wife screenwriting partners Inon and Natalie Shampanier take a straightforward and empathetic approach to their story of one woman's persecutory delusional disorder, or what's sometimes referred to in lay terms as paranoia.

nasty piece of work, as a pejorative. Hell, maybe I didn’t even mean it to be pejorative.Also Read: Maisie Williams Says 'Game of Thrones' Fame Led Her to Be Consumed by Social Media ScrutinyBased on the French comic book “Une nuit de pleine lune” and directed by Julius Berg, “The Owners” is tense, uneasy and brutal, escalating from the creepy to the ludicrous over the course of 92 deliberately unpleasant minutes.

In the year of coronavirus, the Venice Film Festival opened on a low-key note with a local Italian drama that, though finely crafted by director Daniele Luchetti, pushed no envelope and made no splash. It also included a new credit at the end, which we’re likely to see for some time to come: “cast medical exams,” followed by a doctor’s name.

Yorgos Lanthimos' dark absurdist comedy Dogtooth in 2009 ushered in the so-called Greek Weird Wave, which blossomed at least partly out of national chaos triggered by the country's financial crisis that same year. Christos Nikou, whose background includes working as an assistant director on that film, establishes himself as an exciting new voice in the movement with his assured feature debut, Apples.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“Women Make Film.” The title of Irish film savant Mark Cousins’ sprawling 14-hour follow-up to “The Story of Film” serves both as a statement of fact and, if punctuated slightly differently, a call to action: “Women, Make Film!”Where the earlier documentary was a monumental survey of the medium, attempting to cram its entire history into a single project, Cousins allows this latest labor of love to be more discursive and idiosyncratic — “a new road movie through

The news of Robin Williams' 2014 death at his own hands was emotionally devastating. Not just because it was the tragic loss of a great talent, but also because it seemed unfathomable that such a brilliant entertainer, one who had brought so much joy to millions, could have felt such despair.

When the Japanese Imperial Army laid siege to an innocuous warehouse in 1937’s Battle of Shanghai, the skirmish ultimately became a flashpoint that galvanized a nation. China lost that battle but won the war, and the resistance of the Eight Hundred Heroes earned the legendary status it retains to this day.

Three years after the runaway success of Get Out, directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz have followed in Jordan Peele’s footsteps with another allegorical social thriller about the state of race relations in America. Much like the earlier film, Antebellum is a feature directorial debut that takes a big swing.

Also Read: Janelle Monae Horror Film 'Antebellum' Moves to On-Demand ReleaseFor the film’s lengthy opening stretch, Janelle Monáe plays a young slave named Eden in Louisiana during the Civil War (a time period that technically means the movie is post-antebellum, if you want to be picky).

any film is worth the risk inherent in venturing to a movie theater. I won’t presume to answer that question on anyone else’s behalf, but suffice to say that “New Mutants” isn’t exactly a groundbreaking cinematic experience.

Also Read: Why Armando Iannucci Didn't Go 'Mega-Futuristic' With New HBO Series 'Avenue 5'Just as Dickens’ original work was a blend of reality and fiction, Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell play around with the idea of Copperfield the character as a writer who is himself writing his story as he goes along.

They saved the world by writing the perfect song, but it didn't take. (Maybe somebody actually listened to the song: "God gave rock & roll to you," really?) Imagining the return of the time-traveling Messrs.

Two male standouts from the riotous femme-forward Booksmart take another crack at high-school debauchery in Jeremy Garelick's The Binge, a Hulu teen comedy that seriously raises the stakes on the old "this one big party will make us legends!" routine: In a playful riff on the Purge movies, it imagines an America where there's only one night a year on which booze and drugs are even available —and they're legal for everyone above the age of 18.

smartest of heroes, of course, but they know what works for them: As Ted says at one point in this movie, “Maybe we should always not know what we’re doing!”But “Bill & Ted Face the Music” does know what it’s doing, which is to preserve the essence of the characters played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves even as it dumps a most unpleasant midlife crisis and an even more heinous threat to reality as we know on their still-shaggy heads.Written by original “Bill & Ted” creators Chris Matheson and