Night after night, young Kenyan scholars sweat blood writing academic essays — on practically any given subject, often to gruelingly tight deadlines — for paying college students in far-away countries to pass off as their own work. The credit is non-existent, the pay pitiful given the expertise involved. But many of these tireless ghost writers […]

Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz’s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film […]

The fall of communism in Bulgaria wasn’t a clean break, exactly: With the country’s Communist Party having relinquished its political monopoly in 1989 to make way for a parliamentary democracy, it still won the country’s first free elections the following year. The panic brought on by unfamiliar liberties spirals to chaotic effect in “Triumph,” a […]

Paddington, the duffel-coated bear with a penchant for marmalade and mishaps, was already a cultural institution of nearly 60 years’ standing by the time he headlined his first feature film a decade ago. The success of Paul King’s “Paddington” and “Paddington 2,” however, promoted the diminutive children’s-book hero to the status of national treasure: a […]

The prize catch of the title isn’t exactly who you might expect in “A Nice Indian Boy,” a romantic comedy that brings a welcome queer angle to that substantial subgenre of love stories tangled up in Indian social mores and cross-generational family politics. In many such films, Naveen (Karan Soni) would be the most desirable […]