foreign language film
North Korea tried to puppeteer this documentary
The first indication that we’re being lied to comes from a little girl in an immaculate Pyongyang classroom: Her school is so cold that she has put her coat over...
Nuns are victims of the horrors of war in 'The Innocents'
A sweeping, well-wrought melodrama of the old school, director Anne Fontaine’s film is set in and around a Polish convent in December 1945. A young French doctor with the Red...
French film 'Cosmos' is a loopy and absurd comedy
This loopy absurdist comedy is the final work of Andrzej Zulawski, the famed Polish filmmaker who died in February. Based on a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, it has no summarizable...
'Bang Gang' explores the world of teen orgies
If it’s possible to make a morally old-fashioned film about teen orgies, writer-director Eva Husson has done so with “Bang Gang,” a quietly chilling look at the sex lives of...
'From Afar' is a thriller sans thrills
Solitary middle-aged man Armando (Alfredo Castro, “No”) embarks on a fraught association with a young local hoodlum called Elder (Luis Silva) in Lorenzo Vigas’ Venezuelan sort-of thriller. Carefully composed, shot...
Liberal climate-change doc 'Time To Choose' is full of ridiculous claims
The climate-change documentary “Time To Choose” makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint. Charles Ferguson’s alarmist manifesto, narrated by Oscar Isaac,...
Poetic 'Kaili Blues' is a beautiful film about a Chinese doctor
In a mountainous, subtropical part of rural China, middle-aged doctor Chen (Yongzhong Chen) has become fond of his mistreated nephew Wei Wei (Feiyang Luo). When Wei Wei’s father offloads (or...
Pharmaceutical industry plays villain in 'A Monster with a Thousand Heads'
For years pharmaceuticals have polled high on lists of industries that Americans loathe, and Uruguayan-Mexican director Rodrigo Plá’s thriller shows Mexicans must feel the same way. Sonia (a powerful Jana...
'Dheepan' is an intimate portrait of refugees in Paris
Director Jacques Audiard’s story of three unrelated refugees posing as a family in order to enter France won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan)...
Sculptor Eva Hesse gets a well-meant, weird documentary
The postminimalist sculptor Eva Hesse produced strange and beautiful work in unusual materials — rope, latex, discarded metal parts — and died young, in 1970, of a brain tumor, as...
Flat characters plague boring 'Tale of Tales'
An English-language film from Italy, “Tale of Tales” toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and...
Shallow 'An Eye for Beauty' is a vapid adultery drama
"An Eye for Beauty” star Éric Bruneau proves to be a haircut in search of a man, which makes him ideal for this vapid adultery drama that delivers the character depth...
Finally, a movie for people who hate their jobs
Thierry Taugourdeau (Vincent Lindon) has been laid off from his factory job, and he has a wife and a disabled son to support. But steady, stolid Thierry doesn’t turn to...
'Viva Activa' is a vital intro course to philosopher Hannah Arendt
Documentarians Ada Ushpiz and Ina Fichman provide an immersive intro course in Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish philosopher who wrote “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The film works to rescue Arendt and her...
'Francofonia' is an obvious musing on war and museums
Beware the film billed as a “meditation” on anything. In Alexsandr Sokurov’s latest, we’re supposed to meditate on Paris’ Louvre museum during World War II, and by extension the role...
Moving 'Fireworks Wednesday' depicts a troubled marriage
Director Asghar Farhadi’s early film, made in Iran in 2006, is another tale of class divisions, fractured families and lies that spider outward like cracks in a windshield. The title refers...
'The Clan' is a gripping thriller about an Argentine crime family
Swift, confident, and exceptionally nasty, this Argentine film bears roughly the same relationship to the Martin Scorsese of “Goodfellas” that Brian De Palma does to, well, all of Hitchcock. Restless...
'My Golden Days' livens up the coming-of-age genre
Director Arnaud Desplechin (“A Christmas Tale’’) channels François Truffaut for this intoxicating sequel to Desplechin’s 1996 comedy “My Sex Life, or How I Got Into an Argument,’’ in which the...
'Marguerite' is a sweet movie about sour notes
When the title character of Xavier Giannoli’s movie, an amateur soprano, lets rip with a big aria from “The Magic Flute,” the notes are not even in the same ZIP...
Triple-threat Julie Delpy will make you LOL at 'Lolo'
The latest from director/writer/actress Julie Delpy is a comic cautionary tale about maternal overattachment in which a woman’s teenage son wages war on her new boyfriend. Delpy’s ace screenwriting shines...