Eric Hynes

Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within...

It’s no secret that some documentary films are either partly or largely staged. Think of Errol Morris’s re-enactments; think of the fake archival footage in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell; think of documentary granddad Robert Flaherty casting and concocting scenarios for Nanook of the North. That these strategies can also...

Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders whether it's too far away from where he's sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up...

Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism — quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house — his new film, Tabu, was shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, for starters...

In Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and brown-patterned tie, and cradles a white bunny in his arms. This is precisely what we've come to expect of a Tom Waits entrance. Waits has long been one of Hollywood's favorite sight...