Lee Gardner

If you’re Meryl Streep, you get asked to play Margaret Thatcher. If you’re one of the tens of thousands of other actresses in Hollywood, you most often get asked to play a wife, a mom, a girlfriend, a best friend, ...

Albert Nobbs knows what he’s about. He is always perfectly groomed, eminently capable, and scrupulously unobtrusive. In short, he is the perfect manservant, except that he’s not a man.

More reactionary American viewers will no doubt have a hard time with aspects of Essential Killing. Not only are a number of Americans/Westerners killed, but live Americans are typically portrayed as callous brutes fond of drugs and thudding bro metal—the ...

The Western has been dying for more than 40 years, and maybe as a result, many of the best films in the genre in that time have an elegiac quality. Spanish writer/director Mateo Gil extends the long swan song with ...

The Future is an intimate drama as well as a quirkfest. Miranda July captures the frustration of finding yourself in an ordinary life, and for all the film’s magic realism, the relationships feel real.

If you pay attention to the flood of little movies that spew forth from smaller distributors every year, sifting through the shameless exploitation, self-impressed indies, and genre rehashes, every now and then you spot something new. Not just newly released, ...

Having crafted perhaps the finest American film drama to emerge in years out of the husk of a straight-to-video premise, Nichols builds to a climax that offers both a big suspense set piece and an emotionally satisfying ending to the ...

Magic Trip manages the neat trick of offering a scrupulously coherent narrative of an unhinged time, while also visually exemplifying that deranged quality.

It would be something of a comfort to be able to dismiss A Serbian Film as exploitation trash. But like recent outrage-cinema sensations Martyrs and The Human Centipede (First Sequence) before it, it’s a bit too smart and well-crafted for ...

There’s a cry at the heart of alto saxophonist Darius Jones’ sound.