Francois Ozon’s absolutely smashing new movie, The Crime is Mine, opens in late December.
My review for Slant Magazine is here:
François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with such a bubbly optimism that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the cast broke into a choreographed number from Gold Diggers of 1933…
Here’s the trailer:
Isabelle Huppert plays a philosophy teacher whose life gets thrown for a loop in Mia Hansen-Love’s brilliant new drama.
Things to Come is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:
After taking a detour into the vagabond world of dance-music DJs with the disappointingly blah Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve returns fantastically to form with Things to Come. It’s the kind of urbane, Éric Rohmer-inflected drama that the still-young writer-director has been turning out for a few years now and hopefully will continue to make for decades to come. There are any number of filmmakers who can make stories about Parisians with matters of the world and the heart weighing them down. But few approach them with the kind of questing emotional honesty that Hansen-Løve specializes in…
Here’s the trailer:
No, sadly, Louder than Bombs isn’t a concert film or documentary about The Smiths—speaking of which, why hasn’t that happened yet? It’s a quiet but bracing character study from the underseen (so far, at least) director Joachim Trier, working with his biggest cast yet.
Louder than Bombs is opening this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
There’s probably no better sign of the West’s solipsism than the fact that after years of roiling strife in the Middle East and elsewhere, our artists and audiences seem at the moment less interested in stories about those catastrophic conflicts than stories about how they impact the Westerners who report on them. Memoirs, plays and films, from Body of an American to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, have reinvigorated the sub-genre of stories about Westerners finding meaning in exotic, faraway lands. Only now, the main character is less likely to be a do-gooder with a sense of mission than a war journalist with a long, dark streak of romantic self-destruction who is not so much reawakened by their experiences as they are traumatized and broken…
Here’s the trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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