Melissa Anderson

The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.” However simple, the phrase hypnotically evokes the sinister, insoluble mysteries that have been at the core of many of his ten features and especially in Twin......

“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this......

For a film that often features bodies in extreme physical proximity — embracing, fucking, fighting — The Lovers also pays close attention to the spatial (and emotional) chasms separating its constellation of couple....

A light and cheery appraisal of a somber subject, Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit focuses on the writers and editors assigned to the necrology desk of The New York Times....

Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing......

Both the poet's body and soul are made ineradicable in Davies' lovely film....

The drunken antics of Anne Hathaway’s Gloria have calamitous effects on the citizens of Seoul, terrorized by a behemoth beast that, we soon learn, is the boozer’s avatar....

L.P. Hartley’s famous proverb that “the past is a foreign country: They do things differently there” is literalized in Karl Marx City, a noir-inflected autobiographical essay film about growing up in East Germany — a nation that dissolved, along with its sinister state security apparatus, the Stasi, in 1990. Filmmakers......

The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and......

In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be." When one goes to......