There’s a notion in the film industry that comedies don’t travel. Jokes have a regional audience, and humor gets lost in translation, the thinking goes. But director Matthew Rankin thinks more of ...

There’s a scene partway through Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language that is a triumph of visual filmmaking. One of the protagonists, Matthew (aka Matheiu), played by the director himself, is arranging ...

The quickest way I can sum up the slow-moving, weirdly touching cinematic oddity that is “Universal Language” is to ask you to imagine what it would look like if Iran were in Canada. This is not as ...