Arts & Culture

A dry — rubbed lark from the often harrowing ultra — realist territories of the Romanian New Wave, The Treasure is about almost nothing — a shaggy — dog daydream as flyaway as its protagonists’ thoughts of instant wealth. Director Corneliu Porumboiu, whose 2006 12:08 East of Bucharest may still…

Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…

It’s hard to imagine a more unsettling setting for a horror movie than Aokigahara, the famed “suicide forest” of Japan to which scores of pilgrims travel every year to end their lives. At the edge of the woods — which, per Japanese mythology, are rife with demons — is a…

The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…

What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of the computers, and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself rather…

They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock — Hitchcock/Truffaut — is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips:…

As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic…

One of our most enduring cinematic genres, horror is also among the most difficult to do right. This may sound obvious — countless attempts are made to scare moviegoers every year, whether in theaters or, increasingly, streaming online — but it’s brought into focus by the few that actually make…

Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. It so happens that the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…

Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…

Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight — his intimate, suspenseful western splatter-horror comedy — has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70 mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t…

Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting schlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…

In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…

Life is hard for the extravagantly wealthy lounging about in one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest might seem easy to mock — here, after all, are Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, playing a composer and a film director, moping in a Swiss spa about old age…

The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sex-reassignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped…