A young woman gets caught in the midst of a married couple’s domestic drama when she’s hired to clean their apartment in Fireworks Wednesday, from writer-director Asghar Farhadi. The maid (Taraneh Alidoosti) is on the verge of being married herself, but she’d be forgiven for changing her mind at the end of this day. Used

Still ahead of its time. It isn’t only that writer-director and co-star Jean Renoir pioneered crucial cinematic techniques (he used deep focus here two years before Orson Welles employed it in Citizen Kane), it’s that the film has an attitude of empathetic enlightenment that remains a rarity. The first third of The Rules of the

The two dominant strands of post-revolution Iranian cinema – quaint neorealism and thick meta theory – come together in this wily experiment from writer-director-editor Jafar Panahi. The Mirror begins as the simple tale of Mina (Mina Mohammad Khani), a little girl whose mother is late to pick her up from school. Setting her face in

The feature debut of writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter), Shotgun Stories deals in sins of fathers, feuds of brothers and all sorts of Biblically infused, familial drama. It’s weighty stuff, yet also told with a familiar matter-of-factness that makes you feel as if you could be hearing this story as gossip while sitting on a

High concept meets indie aesthetic, to fascinating results. Writer-director Lynn Shelton takes a boozy, late night query – What if a pair of male, heterosexual best friends agreed to have sex on film for an amateur porn contest? – and turns it into a thoughtful, revealing and challenging consideration of what it means to be