On paper, a contemporary feminist spin on “Emmanuelle” sounds like a zesty idea. An ostensible portrait of liberated female sexuality firmly ossified in patriarchal politics, Just Jaeckin’s 1974 softcore smash is the kind of cultural touchstone so emblematic of its era that the very act of remaking it qualifies as a symbolic statement of sorts. […]

Argentina’s 1976 military coup d’état, along with the sustained period of violence and forced disappearances that it ushered in, isn’t an obvious historical backdrop for a heartwarming tale of human-animal bonding. But that’s how the timing worked out for Tom Michell, an English teacher stationed at an elite Buenos Aires private school, at the time […]

As late-life dates go, for octogenarian widow Ruth, it seems like a good one. The guy is younger, quite personable, and has an interesting job in sustainable architecture, even if she’s embarrassed to initially admit that she’s forgotten his name. She prepares them her favourite brunch — salmon and cream cheese on toast, assembled with […]

We live in a transitional era regarding relationship politics, as more people carve romantic and sexual lives for themselves outside the prescribed trajectory of love, marriage, procreation and nuclear family. The emergence of LGBT identities into the mainstream has had much to do with this, of course, but our collective understanding of opposite-sex partnerships —  […]

At first it seems a premise shamelessly lifted from Michael Haneke’s “Caché”: A couple is disconcerted to receive an unmarked DVD in their mailbox, playing it to find footage of themselves being unwittingly filmed as they go about their day. But just as Haneke’s film took what seemed like a starting point for an effective […]

Nobody talks much about the age 19. It doesn’t come with the exciting avalanche of adult rights that come with turning 18, or the milestone symbolism of 21. You’re technically still a teenager but don’t feel like one; nonetheless, the looming onset of your twenties is daunting, as if a chapter of your youth is […]

It’s been nine years since Athina Rachel Tsangari’s last film “Chevalier,” a mordant contemporary satire of toxic male ego and destructive dick-measuring contests. Much has changed in the Greek writer-director’s third feature “Harvest” — her first English-language work, her first literary adaptation and by some measure her most ornate and expensive production to date, set […]

Five years ago, French writer-director Claude Lelouch returned, for the second time, to the site of his greatest career success with “The Best Years of a Life,” an autumnal sequel to his trend-setting 1966 romance “A Man and a Woman” that felt elegiac in multiple senses — not least since it turned out to be […]

Time, space and mortality work to no earthly schedule in the half-lit, hand-made twilight world of “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” — so it’s appropriate that this vertiginous stop-motion vision seems to operate by temporal laws of its own. The first feature film in nearly 20 years from cult animators the Quay Brothers […]

Considerate, cultured, polite, patient, a good listener, easy on the eye: Matthias is the kind of man almost anyone would be glad to have as company. In turn, he’s glad to be company to almost anyone: a middle-aged singleton seeking a date to a classical concert, an elderly married woman who can’t talk to her […]

French writer Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt — France’s highest-profile literary award — for his 2018 novel “And Their Children After Them,” a working-class Bildungsroman set against a backdrop of severe deindustrialization, for which he stated his disparate influences to include John Steinbeck, Émile Zola, Bruce Springsteen and the 2012 Jeff Nichols film “Mud.” […]

“Any couple in love should remember that love might not last,” says someone midway through “Three Friends,” shrugging off a rebuffed kiss with impressively unruffled Gallic poise. If everyone were so sanguine about such matters, most varieties of love story wouldn’t have reason to exist. Certainly a film like Emmanuel Mouret’s chablis-dry romantic comedy, in […]