• Tribeca 2018 was truly the year for female filmmakers. With “Egg,” actress and director Marianne Palka (“Glow”) proves that she’s just as talented behind the camera as she is in front of it. Fresh off the success of writing and directing her dark comedy “Bitch" (2017) Palka takes on a more dialogue-driven relationship story. In “Egg,” two art school friends and their husbands meet for an afternoon in New York. While discussing

  • The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”

  • Those of us film lovers lucky enough to have known the cornucopia of the seventies and eighties remember that in the midst of films by great auteurs (who, for some, had started their career way earlier) Pasolini, Fellini, Scola, Bergman, Herzog, Wender, Fassbinder, Resnais, Rivette, Von Trotta, Wajda and so many others in an undending list of quasi geniuses, anything by the Taviani brothers was the promise of a miracle.

  • The Czech-born director Milos Forman, who twice won the Academy Award for Best Director for his films “One flew over the cuckoo's nest” (1975) and “Amadeus” (1984) died on Friday at his home in the United States at 86 after a protracted battle with illness. His widow, Martina, told the Czech news agency CTK, "he died peacefully, surrounded by his family and loved ones.” Forman was a politically-committed filmmaker

  • It'll be hard to deny it: the Cannes Festival doth Iranian cinema love. Asghar Farhadi's "Everybody knows," which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, will open this 71st edition, in a long tradition of showing deference to Iranian cinema. Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Tehran by order of Iran's judicial courts (he won the top prize at Berlinale for his "Tehran Taxi" in 2015), has a horse in this race, too: his film is called "Three faces."

  • As the countdown to the seventy-first Cannes Festival begins, the official poster was released today. This year’s poster (see full image at the end of this article) was taken from 1965’s “Pierrot Le Fou.” Everyone at the Festival next month will see it, here, there, and everywhere. It’ll adorn the many sides of the Palais, the streets nearby, lampposts, ice-cream parlors and souvenir shops. A lively visual leitmotiv

  • Asghar Farhadi's eighth film was shot entirely on location in Spain. Laura (Penelope Cruz) lives with her husband (played by Javier Bardem) and their children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family event, the trip gets derailed after unexpected events bring secrets out into the open. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them are all leitmotifs of Farhadi's films and figure front and center in the script.