Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour is a movie of unorthodox sweep and diffuse grace. In following the fanciful story of two lovers journeying separately through East and Southeast Asia in the…

Late 20th-century Vietnamese history casts a trancelike spell across Truong Minh Quy‘s “Viet and Nam,” a thickly shadowed exploration – or should that be excavation? — of national trauma and…

One could be forgiven for mistaking the opening scenes of Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire for the start of a horror movie. The film begins with a long, looong shot…

Rungano Nyoni is the Zambian-Welsh film-maker who in 2017 had an arthouse smash with her debut, the witty and distinctive misogyny fable I Am Not a Witch. Her new film…

Some filmmakers like to go easy on you with pacifying stories, appealing characters and reassuring worldviews. Mike Leigh is having none of that. For the past half century, this formidable,…

To make a movie like The Brutalist requires such a superhuman level of self-confidence that it might as well be accompanied by other preternatural powers. The Brutalist spans 33 years…

Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a…

The ubiquity of smartphones capable of filming anything, anywhere, has been a blessing and a curse to autocratic governments. On the one hand, protests and nascent revolutions can be filmed…

There are soft but noticeable limits to what can and can’t be expressed in “Youth (Homecoming),” the third of Chinese director Wang Bing’s three slice-of-life portraits of young textile workers…

World War II is almost certainly the big screen’s most immortalized conflict, and for good reason. It broke just as cinema was beginning to mature as a form of entertainment,…