It's a sad fact of life that not every worthy film you see at a film festival finds a distributor. Indeed, only a small percentage do. As John Sayles...
I was bemused when Dan Kois wrote his "aw shucks" piece in the New York Times in April about how, sometimes, he just can't get with the program when i...
As a feature-film director, John Carpenter is about a .333 hitter - which is fine in major-league baseball but no great shakes in Hollywood. Yet his ...
When it comes to stories that bear transposition to varying eras and settings, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) seems a prime example of a plot t...
Movies are show. Theater is tell. But The Ledge, opening in limited release tomorrow (7/8/11) and currently available on VOD, is essentially a two-h...
"It was the '70s," one of the participants says at one point in the documentary Project Nim, about an experiment involving a chimpanzee and human lang...
One of the few authors who wrote primarily in Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem became the most famous literary figure of that language. His fame as a writer grew only after his death, spurred in part by the popularity of Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem's writing.
Most viewers will get some laughs from Horrible Bosses -- and they may not think it's horrible. But saying it's not horrible is another way of saying that this movie is consistently disappointing.
So - if the movie year had ended June 30 and we had to choose the best films of 2011 from the releases that hit American screens since Jan. 1, which o...
We have now come to the end of a decade-long magical adventure that may constitute the most ambitious feat of both literary and cinematic story-telling in memory, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.
As the 30th anniversary of the start of the AIDS epidemic arrives, it's instructive to note that, even today, there are still those benighted places -...
It's always energizing to see an actor give a breakthrough performance -- which is something that you get from Ari Graynor in Lucky, opening in limited release Friday.
There's no point devoting much time to thinking about what went wrong with Salvation Boulevard. The answer is simple: everything. Satire, particularl...
"Sarah's Key" is a wrenching film told on two levels about one woman's desperate story. Even as it indicts the French for their complicity in the extermination of the Jews, it examines the reverberations of that era that continue today.
There's a difference between thinking big thoughts and telling a profound story, a difference that has escaped writer-director William Cahill with his film, Another Earth.
Not quite as much fun as Thor, not nearly as bad as Green Lantern, Captain America: The First Avenger feels less like an exciting comic-book-hero movie than required reading for a course called The Avengers, arriving in theaters next summer.
A Little Help could have been one of those minor black-comedy indy gems. Instead, it's just OK, a set of interesting ideas wrapped in a less-interesting package, tied together by the evocative central performance of Jenna Fischer.
Yes, "American Graffiti" was an influence on his movie, "The Myth of the American Sleepover," David Robert Mitchell says. But that wasn't the movie he wanted to make. And he hasn't.
Denial, Aidan Quinn says, is a persistent force that's hard to fight. That's true whether it's one man looking at his own life - or the government of...
In a summer full of overdone blockbusters (hello, Captain America?) and wan, airless independent films (The Future - urrgh), it's nice to find an old-...
The cinema-verite approach to documentary making has its pitfalls -- particularly if the subject is as close-mouthed as Ferran Adria, the focus of Gereon Wetzel's El Bulli - Cooking in Progress.
No doubt, Life in a Day will be shorthanded as "the YouTube movie," which is not a bad thing, actually. Directed (assembled, to be more accurate) by ...
Chilling, thrilling and hard to take at times, The Devil's Double offers one of the great performances of this or any year -- or is it two performances?
Crazy, Stupid, Love is the summer's most enjoyably surprising film: a comedy that knows how to pay more attention to the feelings it explores than to creating a conveyor belt for punchlines. It earns its laughs -- and then some.
