For 50 years, Agnès Varda lived on Paris’ Rue Daguerre, a quiet street of merchants not far from Montparnasse. She saw the men and women (mostly husbands and wives) who ran the shops, cut the hair, baked the bread and carved the meat. What are their stories? Varda wondered, and with her trusty camera, she took to the street, photographed their faces and hands, asked for their tales, and preserved these perfectly ordinary Parisians for future historians, sociologists and archeologists.…

She lives in Astoria, but she works in the City. That means the company car picks her up long before the sun has a chance to crack the horizon. And like most administration assistants, she’s the first in, last out, day after day. Her job: Print the day’s schedule, hand out the lunches, mix up her bosses’ protein shakes and scrub out those unsightly stains on his couch. Written and directed by Kitty Green, The Assistant is about Harvey Weinstein.…

Remember those old movies? The ones where a couple drives down the road, only they aren’t driving, they’re sitting in a car on some studio lot. And that’s not a road behind them; it’s a rear projection of road. Looks fake doesn’t it?

Did this fakery bother audiences back then? Not in the slightest. Back in the 1920s, ’30s and even into the ’40s, movies were about beautiful people living in fabulous mid-city apartments, dressing glamorously, saying the right thing…