The Inbetweeners Movie
Teen-Sex Comedies Without Borders could be an NGO, for there is something perversely hopeful in how Ben Palmer's The Inbetweeners Movie slips across b...
View ArticleHello I Must Be Going
We knew from Heavenly Creatures that Kate Winslet had a bright career ahead, but in that film, Melanie Lynskey was the one to watch. Is it possible th...
View ArticleThe Waiting Room
The mandate at Oakland's Highland Hospital, as one doctor says during Pete Nicks's attentive vérité portrait of the place, is to admit p...
View ArticleThe Paperboy
Precious director Lee Daniels’s Southern Gothic noir pulp presents itself with the doubtful come-hither hospitality of a gator-filled swamp. Moi...
View ArticleNow, Forager: A Film About Love and Fungi
Sulky indie drama might not have been the best path through a story of mushroomers in a troubled marriage; that cheeky and possibly misleading title e...
View ArticleThe Thieves
Easier to like than it is to follow, Choi Dong-hoon's glossy caper boasts all the pomp and cajolery of the true international blockbuster. It's like s...
View ArticleTai Chi Zero
Give some points to a genre flick whose style mash-up reflects uneasy relations between Asia and the West just as its fracas-intensive plot tries to d...
View ArticleYogawoman
It'd be churlish to describe a documentary about yoga and female fortitude as agitprop, so what then? Tranquiprop? Anyway, Yogawoman clearly is a fan ...
View ArticleThe Opposite of Vanishing: 'Documentaries by Shôhei Imamura'
The late Japanese New Wave mainstay Shôhei Imamura said he liked his movies messy, and usually that meant seeing through civilized falsities to ...
View ArticleGottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
When the powers behind the 2010 Tel Aviv production of Hanoch Levin's Holocaust opera The Child Dreams sought a designer, it seemed like plain sailing...
View ArticleOutside Satan: How Much Grace Can You Take?
"I can't take anymore" is the first thing anyone says in Outside Satan, about 10 mum and mystifying minutes in. Viewers who feel no generosity toward ...
View ArticleAs Luck Would Have It: By the Numbers
Calming down some from his 2010 gonzo freak-out The Last Circus, Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia teams up with scribe Randy Feldman for a p...
View ArticleWelcome to Pine Hill: Is This Real Life?
The story goes that Brooklyn filmmaker Keith Miller took his newly adopted dog for a walk one night and wound up arguing with a stranger, Shannon Har...
View ArticleVanishing Waves Pushes Less Plot, More Sex
For those who found Inception too plotty and sexless, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte's sleek sci-fi reverie is hereby advised. One day, a mild-...
View ArticleThe Reluctant Fundamentalist Follows A Bright Young Man from Princeton to...
In the same way novels can be better and worse than journalism at processing history, so can movies be better and worse than novels: too unreal, yet ...
View ArticleAllan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios at MOMA
It's been more than half a century since he last made a movie, and still we keep coming back to Allan Dwan. Fifty years was also the span of his work...
View ArticleGeorges Simenon's Crimes, at the Anthology
What will people think when they see you reading the New York Review Books reprint of Georges Simenon's novel The Engagement on the subway? That cove...
View ArticleParis Proves It's Good for a Rom-Com or Tragedy in Le Week-End
The great insight in director Roger Michell's fourth collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi is its vision of Paris as an arena equally amenable to r...
View ArticleIn Hide Your Smiling Faces, a Dreamlike Drift Over Narrative
Solemnity and restrained naturalism seem like indie-movie affectations now, so the challenge for writer-director Daniel Patrick Carbone's feature debu...
View ArticleThe Unknown Known: Errol Morris Can't Penetrate the Man Behind Iraq
As its subtitle suggests, one reason Errol Morris's 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so res...
View ArticleThe M Word, an Unstructured Gabfest Makes a Mess of Midlife Upheaval
A pluralistic personal account of menopause seems like a fine idea for a movie, but was Henry Jaglom the right person to make it? In The M Word, Ja...
View ArticleThe Warmhearted Supermensch Explores How One Manager Made People Famous
Legend has it that after not cutting it as a probation officer, Shep Gordon dropped some acid and stumbled into Hollywood, whereupon Janis Joplin punc...
View ArticleA Summer's Tale Feels Like a Great Beach Read of a Movie
The late New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer equated his films to novels — that's what auteur means, after all — and A Summer's Tale feels like a ...
View ArticleDrama Still Life at Least Captures the Misery of Funerals, Bureaucracy, and...
The sad irony of Still Life, with the great English character actor Eddie Marsan as a quiet crusader on behalf of those who die alone, isn't the movie...
View ArticleSee the Urban Alienation of 1992's Rebels of the Neon God, Now in HD
At the end of Tsai Ming-liang's modestly confident 1992 debut, seen from arm's length and from above, a clutch of sad little phone-dating cubicles loo...
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