‘I’m So Excited’
Pedro Almodovar’s “I’m So Excited!” is, alas, nothing to get excited about. More to the point, this comedy about mid-air sexual and drug-taking hijinks aboard a possibly doomed airliner is nothing to...
View Article‘Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction’
Wouldn’t you know it took a Swiss director to make a movie about the iconic American character actor and sometimes musician Harry Dean Stanton. Thank you, Sophie Huber. Watching “Harry Dean Stanton:...
View Article‘Byzantium’
That Neil Jordan sympathizes with outsiders and social outcasts has been clear for years. Whether this means revolutionaries (“Michael Collins”) or transsexuals (“The Crying Game”) or more fictional...
View Article‘The Artist and the Model’
In the post-censorship era in America, nudity in filmed entertainment or on stage is a tough thing to control. By this I mean the naked body, especially in non-sexual situations, can become more of a...
View Article‘I Give It a Year’
“I Give It a Year,” a British anti-rom-com by first-time director but veteran writer Dan Mazer, shows what can happen when you hang around too long with Sasha Baron Cohen. Mazer has worked with the...
View Article‘The Grandmaster’
Wong Kar Wai’s highly anticipated “The Grandmaster” comprises many things for many people, ranging from earnest fans and martial-art film fanatics to art-house aficionados and anyone interested in...
View Article‘Closed Circuit’
It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned conspiracy thriller reeking with paranoia. After Watergate, such films arrived with alarming frequency. But today with N.S.A. leaker Edward...
View Article‘About Time’
Richard Curtis is arguably Britain’s top writer of transatlantic screen comedies, most of which trend toward romance and a certain rumpled charm. All of which means the bar moves higher for him with...
View Article‘The Wind Rises’
“The Wind Rises,” from Hayao Miyazaki, one of the world’s greatest animators, is breathtaking in its artistry and its dramatic upheaval of animation conventions. This is a story of Japan between the...
View Article‘The Great Beauty’
Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” (“La Grande Bellezza”) soars into that rarified atmosphere where art, entertainment, travelogue and circus all collide in a great, beautiful mash-up of ideas and...
View Article‘The Past’
If you didn’t know better, you might assume Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past” is based on a successful play. For this intimate drama takes place within confined spaces on the outskirts of Paris where the...
View Article‘The Lunchbox’
In movies, the epistolary story has taken many forms from an exchange of finely wrought letters in “84 Charing Cross Road” to the online correspondence between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “You’ve Got...
View Article‘Nymphomaniac Volume 1′
Consider this a half-time report. As the art-house world is aware, sensation-seeking auteur Lars von Trier is bringing forth a two-part, four-hour sexual epic about a young woman’s joyless trek through...
View Article‘The Raid 2′
The thrill is gone in “The Raid 2.” Welsh-born writer-director Gareth Evans’ original Indonesian martial-arts flick, “The Raid: Redemption” (2011), had preposterous fight sequences and body counts but...
View Article‘Nymphomaniac Volume 2′
After seeing “Nymphomaniac Volume 2,” the second and final film in Lars von Trier’s four-hour epic journey into degrading sex by a female addict, one is tempted toward flippancy. Like saying this kind...
View Article‘We Love You, You Bastard’
Let’s begin with an astonishing fact: “We Love You, You Bastard” (“Salaud on t’aime”) is Claude Lelouch’s 57th film! Yes, he catches hell from Cahiers du cinéma critics and many others for his...
View Article‘Venus in Fur’
With tongue buried deep within his cheek and no doubt a certain glee in exploring the treacherous director-actor relationship that has naturally been the cornerstone of his long and storied career,...
View Article‘Mood Indigo’
“Mood Indigo” is a bittersweet love story set in a surrealistic Paris of an indeterminate 20th-century era. It derives from the combined imaginations of veteran video/feature film director Michel...
View Article‘Siddharth’
The detective story is a classic staple of contemporary western literature and cinema. The hero, whether an official detective or not, goes in quest of a solution to a mystery — a murder perhaps or a...
View Article‘Calvary’
If every parish priest had a congregation as entertaining as Father James’ in “Calvary,” the Catholic Church would not be experiencing its current shortage of priests. As Father James (Brendan Gleeson)...
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