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…
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,…
Following 2006’s Half Nelson, a convincing depiction of friendship between a 13-year-old and her crack-addict teacher (a role which Ryan Gosling won an Academy…
In 12, director Nikita Mikhalkov brings to fruition a project ten years in the making. The film is something of a re-imagining of Sidney…
There was a time when Vin Diesel was pegged as an up-and-coming actor in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg famously wrote a new character into Saving…
Many of cinema’s most divisive filmmakers are accused of betraying the story they’re trying to tell by utilizing various stylistic affectations. Of course, this…
Amy Adams is quite an actress. Excluding her forgettable role as the middle-nun in Doubt last year, Adams has turned in consistently compelling and…
Julia Roberts hasn’t been the centerpiece of a film since the moderate success Mona Lisa Smile six years ago. Distracted by kids, a new…
“Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled,” so says John Milton (Comus I. 589), whose words resonate…
Here comes another remake of a Disney classic. In the 1970s Witch Mountain series, which included a couple of theatrical releases and some made-for-TV…
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, Turkey’s measured and quietly devastating 2009 Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, is a work in which every…
Everlasting it may not be, but, at 131 minutes, Jan Troell’s new Swedish melodrama isn’t exactly short. It plods, and it does so while…
The International, the new thriller from director Tom Tykwer, could have been dismissed as an easy knee-jerk reaction to our current economic crisis, but…