Pixar welcomes us back into the realm of lighter fare with Up, the esteemed animation studio’s tenth film, and, at an agreeable 90 minutes,…
When Japanese director Yōjirō Takita’s Departures won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, upsetting perceived front runners from Israel (Waltz with Bashir)…
Emotional revelations are a common motif throughout Bent Hamer’s filmography, whether it be discovering the significance of family in Eggs, the necessity of friendship…
Terminator Salvation is not not half bad. For those of you confused by the double negative, that means… it’s half bad. Which is a…
It’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m waiting in a theater sparsely populated with a dozen other strangers. Suddenly the lights dim, the…
Until now, the critically acclaimed filmmaker Joe Wright has had an impressive career. In 2005, Wright moved from made-for-television productions like Charles II: The…
If the classic science fiction films of the 1950s largely mirrored the paranoia and fear of an America in the grips of a cold…
Hypnotic, elliptically opaque, and dreamlike, The Limits of Control may test the limits of Jarmusch fans calling themselves card-carrying Jarmusch fans. If Broken Flowers…
Given the market’s desire for escapist films and an audience’s need to placate a media-induced fear of Mexico, the high profile Mexican film Rudo…
The opening salvo in 2009’s summer movie season, and in the battle for our expendable income, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is both straightforward and efficient.…
There’s likely to be no better opening sequence in a film this year than the one found in Austrian director Gotz Spielmann’s fifth feature,…
State of Play has everything one would expect from a great political thriller: an all star cast, one of Hollywood’s hottest writers doing some…
Sacha Gervasi’s tremendously funny, yet achingly painful, documentary chronicles the attempted resurgence of the titular ’80s metal also-rans. Anvil! The Story of Anvil is…
If you could live your life all over again, would you do anything differently? Is there a crucial, life-altering moment in your past that…
Ramin Bahrani’s first two films, 2006’s Man Push Cart and 2008’s Chop Shop, wear the Iranian-American director’s neorealist influences proudly, and their release marked…
It’s a pain to review omnibus films. To do so is to review (in this case at least) three separate features, weighing the hits…
The Band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” plays during the opening sequence of Jody Hill’s new black comedy, Observe and…
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre bests its Disneyfied cousin Slumdog Millionaire in nearly every way. Whereas Danny Boyle’s film is frenetically shot, frantically paced,…