Tomas Hachard

From the start of The Blue Room, with its shots of wrinkled sheets in a recently vacated hotel room, it's evident that Mathieu Amalric's film will focus not strictly on the illicit affair between Julien (Amalric) and Esther (Stéphanie Cléau) but on the aftereffects of unfaithfulness and center not on ...

Adapted from a Patricia Highsmith novel, The Two Faces of January is, like Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, a tale of deceptive identities. When we meet Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst) in 1960s Greece, they seem like a rich, elegant American couple casually touring Europe. It's not long, ...

With each new story we hear about PTSD, about the lasting price paid by those fortunate enough to have returned from war, our notion of a soldier's sacrifice expands: There are those who sacrifice their lives, those who sacrifice parts of their bodies, and those who — forever anguished by ...

Given that Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem first screened at the Venice Film Festival last year, it's absolutely coincidental that it's getting a theatrical release in the same season as the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything. Nevertheless, the confluence works well. Both are films about searches for a ...

Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs caps off with two shots, each over ten minutes long, though I doubt that will make the movie any easier to sell, even in a culture obsessed with long takes. The episode-capping tracking shot in True Detective or the opening 17 minutes of Gravity — those ...

About halfway through Kelly & Cal, a question arises about why women mature faster than men. The premise is hardly debated, but Kelly (Juliette Lewis), who is struggling with growing up herself after moving to the suburbs and having a son, Jackson, with her husband Josh (Josh Hopkins), is not ...

The most interesting but remarkably understated aspect of The Congress, a half-live-action, half-animated trip of a film from Israeli director Ari Folman, is the increasing power accrued by the fake movie studio in its story, Miramount. When the film opens, Miramount is but a moviemaking venture, as you'd expect; by ...

Before Charlie McDowell's fantastical debut feature The One I Love descends completely down the rabbit hole, it begins with a more everyday kind of dream. Ethan (Mark Duplass), trying to rekindle the romance in his failing marriage to Sophie (Elisabeth Moss), hopes that one magic night might do the trick. ...

Today's episode of World Cafe's Latin Roots is an unusual one, in which writer and radio personality Catalina Maria Johnson explores what she calls "Mystical South America."

Johnson says she first heard the music through visual arts, and describes it as an "ecological, Indian, spiritual, organic movement" that has excited ...

There are a number of reasons why you shouldn't cast Michael Fassbender in your movie and have him wear a giant, papier-mâché head throughout, but most central is that he has a wonderfully emotive face (stern in Shame, wild-eyed in 12 Years a Slave, creepy in Prometheus), one that's central ...

Nostalgia is a hard-hitting drug, its alchemical powers well known, but can it turn a child's entire school experience into sentimental gold? Some kids love school, and many, in retrospect, realize that what seemed like misery at the time was actually relative joy compared to what came after. But to ...

The new take on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is competent enough, but it lacks some of the goofy fun that it had back when the sewers were responsible for making all the trouble.

Building a submersible that can travel to the ocean's deepest point is a budget buster, even for the guy who made Titanic and Avatar. So it makes sense that the Deepsea Challenger, James Cameron's depth-taunting craft, would be designed for just a single passenger. Still, viewers of Deepsea Challenge may ...

"You're an amazing woman who has decided to go into war zones and take pictures. You're a bit crazy to want to do that, and I think now you're too crazy to stop."

That's what Albert (Ben Kingsley) tells photojournalist Lee (Catherine Keener) in War Story, and much of the ...

Reckless immaturity in young people is generally diagnosed across generations, most often by parents worried about their supposedly underachieving kids. That makes the premise of Joe Swanberg's Happy Christmas relatively refreshing, even as it covers well-known ground.

The film opens with Jeff (Swanberg) and Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) preparing for the ...

About halfway through Mood Indigo, a film of inexhaustible creativity directed by Michel Gondry, the apartment that Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) call home begins to change dramatically — the ceiling starts closing in, and a thick layer of cobweb starts covering the walls and windows. "My place ...

There's a beautifully revealed detail early in Aarón Fernández's The Empty Hours. It comes soon after the film's protagonist, 17-year-old Sebastián (Kristyan Ferrer), arrives in Veracruz, Mexico, to look after his uncle Gerry's motel for a few weeks. Gerry (Fermín Martínez), who has to leave town for a series of ...

In his five decades as a director, Bernardo Bertolucci has tended toward grand political filmmaking. His movies have generally been set in turbulent times: the rise of fascism in Italy in The Conformist and 1900; the leftist youth movements of the 1960s in Partner and Before the Revolution; the years ...

Tore (Julius Feldmeier), Nothing Bad Can Happen's young, born-again Christian protagonist, wears his faith like a security blanket. "Your belief is based on fear," says Benno (Sascha Alexander Gersak), his surrogate father later turned tormentor, and Tore certainly uses his Christianity — which he preaches to the world through his ...

For someone who clings desperately to absolutes, Fabian (Sid Lucero), one of three central characters in the Filipino film Norte, the End of History, is remarkably prone to getting stuck in the moral murk. "If we really want to clean up society," Fabian proposes at one point, "the solution is ...