Lance, who’s as pretty as a girl, isn’t what he seems. This hotel janitor is really a prostitute who is being pimped by his supervisor, who counsels him to be non-close so that “guests” don’t get emotionally involved. Although discouraged by Lance, the hotel laundry room girl, Lisa, is obsessed with him, renting videos of […]

This affecting chronicle of a Siberian village schoolteacher nearly begins and ends with a dance. Varvara Vasilievna—“Varenka”—is herself young at the film’s first ball in Tsarist St. Petersburg, poised to begin her adult life. In 1941 there is another dance, of her own students, as she watches, both moved by the present and haunted by […]