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Our appetite for the anti-hero has always been an abiding feature of the cultural landscape. Think of Tony Soprano. Walter White. Even Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker. All characters that we root for, despite the fact that their behaviour is often morally dubious at best, and downright sociopathic at worst.

The unlikable female character onscreen, meanwhile, is still viewed with an aura of revelation. The trend of finally allowing women to join the boys club of bad behaviour has led to the modern canon of “anti-heroines”, from Killing Eve’s Villanelle, to Promising Young Woman’s Cassie to Russian Doll’s Nadia to Fleabag.

Unlike their male counterparts, who are usually more heinous perpetrators of violence or criminal activity, the label of “unlikable” is hilariously slapped on a female character for exploits that range from the innocuous (like sleeping around) to the bloodthirsty.

Another film that recently joined the emerging...

After taking a turn into genre territory with Thelma (2017) and a trip to Upstate New York in Louder Than Bombs (2015), Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier lands back on familiar ground for his latest feature, once again chronicling the joys, sorrows, love affairs and ensuing deceptions of Oslo’s bourgeois-bohemian class.

Indeed, The Worst Person in the World, as his new film is somewhat ironically titled, feels like the third part of a trilogy that began with the auteur’s New Wave-ish 2006 breakthrough Reprise and was followed up in 2011 by the darker, though still very French-influenced, Oslo, August 31st.

Both films starred Anders Danielsen Lie, who at this point could be considered Trier’s Antoine Doinel, and he returns here as a graphic novelist named Aksel whose trajectory adds a fair amount of pathos to a story that’s by turns light and gloomy, whimsical and downright depressing. More than ever, Trier...

Cunningham director Alla Kovgan on Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage: 'In a way they are timeless' Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze In the second half of my conversation with Alla Kovgan on Cunningham (read the first half here), we discussed her appreciation for the significant role Derrick Tseng played in getting the film made, Director of Choreography Jennifer Goggans and Supervising Director of Choreography Robert Swinston and Notes on Choreography, storyboarding for locations in New York and shooting in Germany with Mko Malkhasyan.

Also: The timelessness of the collaborations by Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham and the transcendence of time that Karl Ove Knausgård in My Struggle assigns to works of art as compared to science.

Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Cynthia Stone, Marilyn Wood, and Remy Charlip in Summerspace Photo: Robert Rutledge Cunningham has a flawless score by Hauschka aka Volker Bertelmann (BAFTA and Oscar-nominated...

It was an unfortunate blow for Alexander Payne when, this past October, Netflix halted production on a father-daughter road movie the director was set to helm with star Mads Mikkelsen. However, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker has finally found his first project to take on since 2017’s “Downsizing.” As originally reported by Deadline, that film will be a reimagining of Gabriel Alex’s 1987 “Babette’s Feast,” which was the first Danish film to win the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.

Payne’s version will transport the original’s 19th-century religious community setting to small-town Minnesota, where two spinster sisters take in a refugee who brings buried resentments and regrets to the surface over the course of a lavish meal. In the 1987 film written by Axel from a Karen Blixen short story, the pious Danish sisters take in a French refugee of the Franco-Prussian War. Payne’s take will be written by comedian Guy Branum,...

Perhaps the last thing one would expect, in a film that, among other things, playfully weighs the artistic expressiveness of cinema against that of literature, is for the film to come down pretty definitively on the side of the written word. But that is just one of the mischiefs that Peter Parlow’s 76-minute lower-than-lo-fi “The Plagiarists” works on us — and with such conviction that even the convention of attributing the film solely to its director feels wrong here. Filmmaker and artist James N. Kienitz Wilkins vies for authorship too, credited as co-writer of the springy, self-aware script (with Robin Schavoir), as well as Dp, producer, and editor. Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off “The Plagiarists,” and it is highly contagious.

The image is square, and striped with the low-definition buzz of old Betamax, the premise so blandly rote...

Private Life starts with what sounds like an extremely private moment: shuffling, muted grunts and sheet-rustling, playing over a black screen. The natural inclination is think the the film is about to open on a couple either in the throes of middle-aged passion, or maybe some post-coital awkwardness. We’ve seen enough character-driven dramedies to know how these things usually work. Instead we cut to Paul Giamatti preparing to jam a hypodermic needle into Kathryn Hahn’s bared hip. These fortysomething downtowners — he’s a former theater guru-turned-artisanal pickle entrepreneur...

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has today announced the fourth edition of Art of the Real, their essential showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction film, scheduled to take place April 20 – May 2. Billed as “a survey of the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking,” this year’s showcase features an eclectic, globe-spanning host of discoveries, including seven North American premieres and eight U.S. premieres.

“In our fourth year we’ve put an emphasis on placing works by first-time and emerging filmmakers alongside established names, with the aim to highlight the experimentation happening across generations, and to trace a new trajectory of documentary art that points to its promising future,” said Film Society of Lincoln Center Programmer at Large Rachael Rakes, who organized the festival with Director of Programming Dennis Lim.

The Opening Night selection is the New York premiere of Theo Anthony’s “Rat Film,” which has...