The title of Mike Leigh’s latest movie, “Hard Truths,” suggests a remarkable, career-spanning consistency, tracing back to the stage and screen director’s 1971 big-screen debut, “Bleak Moments.” For more than half a century, Leigh has been bringing audiences into the lives and homes of British citizens of various backgrounds and classes, developing original projects through […]

In a rare instance of introspection, Dylan (Ben Hunter), a rowdy bro type in his 20s, beams at the possibility that another person might genuinely be offering the kind of friendship he yearns for. A shy smile crosses his face, only for the spell to be immediately broken, leaving him feeling used. It’s a brief, […]

There is a ravishing kind of beauty in Tommaso Santambrogio’s lyrical triptych of contemporary Cuban life, “Oceans Are the Real Continents.” With black and white cinematography that privileges an exacting formalism throughout, this portrait of the island works hard to defamiliarize the very sun-dappled, colorful image of Cuba that so dominates the cultural imaginary. An […]

The slow-motion footage in “Every Little Thing” of hummingbirds captured in flight, or beak deep in a flowering bud or hovering at 50 beats per second are awe-nudging. Director Sally Aitken’s nature documentary comes as a balm in a season aching for uplift. Since 2008, hummingbird sage Terry Masear has run a hotline, answering the […]

One ordinary night in a working-class neighborhood of the Algerian capital, a suspicious car drives along a street where several children play carelessly. The driver lures a young girl to the window and violently pulls her inside before driving away as the girl’s brother looks on in despair. The unsettling incident, inspired by real events, […]

Traveling through clandestine airwaves, Kurt Cobain touched down in Havana, Cuba, in the turbulent early 1990s. A time of dire economic hardship for the island nation after the fall of the Soviet Union, the “Special Period” pushed thousands of Cubans to migrate, risking their lives at sea. Those who stayed suffered through great scarcity (the […]