By fictionalizing major events in Emily Brontë’s life, ‘Emily’ frees the repressed author from the confines of patriarchy — In 1848, Emily Brontë died at age 30 of tuberculous, a year after the pseudonymous publication of Wuthering Heights. Since her passing, readers of subsequent generations have studied her now classic novel, as well as the 200 poems she wrote during her lifetime. Countless directors, as well, have tried to…

We love the Oscars when we aren’t hate-watching them. At best, this superfluous awards show can shine a spotlight on great movies that the average person otherwise wouldn’t see. For every embarrassing Best Picture win like, say, Green Book or CODA, there are some truly exceptional choices, like Moonlight or…

Lukas Dhont’s Close, like many other movies that have been nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars over the years, tries to tug on the heartstrings. A drama about a 13-year-old boy who copes with his best friend’s suicide, it plays like an elevated afterschool special, with arty filmmaking…

Black cinema is an amorphous term that defies rigid classification. For the most part, scholars define movies made by black directors as black cinema, like Menace II Society (1993) and He Got Game (1998). Occasionally, though, a white director will tackle racial injustices, like David Midell, whose terrifying thriller The…

Late in One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s warm and inviting new movie, Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux) makes a mistake at work. She is a translator who must always be present, but during one particular job, she becomes distracted and stumbles on her words. Her colleague next to her looks over…

Sarah Polley’s ‘Women Talking’ offers a blueprint for how to deal with widespread sexual assault — In Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, nine Mennonite women come together one afternoon for a tough conversation. After the men of the colony are sent to jail for sexual assault, the women must agree on a course of action. Time is limited, as the men will soon be released on bail…

About thirty minutes into Infinity Pool, Brandon Cronenberg’s bold new genre freakout, one of the characters asks another, “Is this a dream?” Viewers may well be wondering the same thing, only given the depraved scenes that preceded the question, nightmare is the more apt description. The character is Em Foster…

What should we do with all the unwanted children of the world? No director in cinema history has tackled this difficult question with as much nuance, wisdom, and deep feeling as Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda. …

Toward the end of Funny Pages, Owen Kline’s wildly inventive coming-of-age movie that follows Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), a high school dropout who aspires to be a cartoonist like Crumb, a tense confrontation results in an absurdist act of violence. Miles (Miles Emanuel), one of Robert’s amateur artist friends, is accidentally…