Lorna's Silence (2008)

Arta Dobroshi, left, plays an Albanian immigrant in Belgium, and Jérémie Renier a drug addict, in “Lorna’s Silence,” the new film by the Dardenne brothers.
July 31, 2009
In an Industrial Belgian City, an Immigrant’s Brutal Dilemma
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 31, 2009

“Lorna’s Silence” is the new film written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers whose highly recognizable, frequently imitated style has won them recognition nearly everywhere in the world. A predictable but unfortunate exception is the United States, where the audience for challenging movies from other countries seems to shrink by the month. Mention of the Dardennes, which elsewhere might elicit a nod of the head, is here more likely to be met with furrowed brows. More

Thirst (2009)

July 31, 2009
Man of the Cloth, With a Sudden Craving for Blood and Sex
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 31, 2009

Sang-hyun, the hero of Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst,” is many different things: a Roman Catholic priest; a selfless volunteer in a dangerous medical experiment; a reluctant faith healer with a cult following; a vampire. And “Thirst” itself, which won the Jury Prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Park has long been a favorite, is equally protean. It is a bloodstained horror movie, a dark comedy, a noirish psychodrama of crime and punishment, a melodrama of mad love, a freehanded literary adaptation (of Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin”) and, of course, a vampire movie. More

You, the Living (2007) NYT Critics' Pick

Bjorn Englund in the Swedish film “You, the Living,” in which much of the dialogue is spoken directly into the camera.
July 29, 2009
Life: Perplexing, Painful, Precious
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 29, 2009

Life is a puzzle without a solution, a series of bleak, frustrating moments shadowed by the guaranteed absurdity of death. This, more or less, is the lesson — or perhaps the premise — of “You, the Living,” the new film by the Swedish director Roy Andersson. The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny. More

Adam (2009)

Rose Byrne and Hugh Dancy are neighbors in a scene from Max Mayer’s “Adam,” a romantic comedy set in New York City.
July 29, 2009
Desire and Disability: An Engineer’s Inner Battle
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: July 29, 2009

Playing a character who is mentally disabled can be a fast track to Oscar or to oblivion, and rare is the actor who can resist the statuette-winning, Hanks-Hoffman strategy of mannered tics and mechanical talk. And when you consider that not even Sean Penn could pull it off without making our eyeballs cringe, the performance of Hugh Dancy in the charming romantic comedy “Adam” is all the more impressive. More

Health Care Realities

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 30, 2009

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.” More