Thirty-five years after “When Harry Met Sally…” asked the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way, “Matt and Mara” rephrases it with more anxiously fraught social stakes — raising the accompanying and ever-relevant query of whether two neurotic writers should really fraternize with each other at […]

The city of Brussels already has a more vivid big-screen legacy than some (it’s the home of one Jeanne Dielman, after all) but it may have found its closest, most devoted and most expansive cinematic chronicler in director Bas Devos. Following the superb 2019 one-two of “Hellhole” and “Ghost Tropic” — respectively, a solemn reflection […]

On the face of it, Lucy does not seem like the kind of person who would go on a spiritual retreat. She’d probably agree with that herself. But she’d like to be, and so she struggles through the enforced silences and the sharing sessions, hoping to attain a kind of enlightenment she doesn’t really believe […]

Can animals act? Sensible people would say not: Our four-legged friends can’t read a script or construct a character, and if they come across charismatically on screen, that’s simply down to obeying commands, plus the deft touch of an editor. The more whimsically accommodating among us would say those last two points are true of […]

In Rusudan Glurjidze’s weathered, wintry sophomore feature “The Antique,” the title could refer to any number of withering relics: the handsome, richly patinaed items of furniture that Georgian immigrant Medea (Salome Demuria) illegally imports from her homeland to Russia to sell; the once-grand but disintegrating Saint Petersburg apartment that she buys at a reduced price, […]