Guru

Reviewer: Tamara Lees
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Stanley Donen's Two for the Road was fashioned stylistically in a way after the French New Wave films of the 50s. It's an elegant, openhearted and heartbreaking a portrait of a marriage from many angles and moods, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney both lovely as a couple wondering "When did it all go wrong?" (and where did it also go right). The stars have great chemistry together and Donen manages to keep things breezing along even with the purposely fractured narrative and chronology. The director provides an insightful commentary on the DVD, too.

Reviewer: Tamara Lees
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Like Night Moves and Cutter's Way, Cisco Pike is a low-key Seventies character study once derided as a failure but now in crying need of a new audience. It also boasts a superb film debut from Kris Kristofferson (who'd been glimpsed in the previous year's The Last Movie, if you want to pick nits), at the time better known as a musician. Here he plays the titular character, also a musician and former idol who has hit the skids. He ends up dealing drugs to make money, and is blackmailed by a crooked cop (played by Gene Hackman - in perfect form, both natural and poignant) to unload pounds of weed in less than three days or he's screwed. Harry Dean Stanton plays a long lost pal and bandmate of Pike's who is now, unfortunately, a total junkie; Stanton is mesmerizingly good here, although he wouldn't be fully appreciated until years later.

Kristofferson also contributes several terrific songs to the soundtrack, while director Bill Norton (also making his debut) does a nice job creating an appropriately boozy atmosphere. Like those other films mentioned above, Cisco Pike captures the aimlessness and disillusionment after the promise the spirt of the 60s once held for many. But while some aspects of the film may appear ready for a time capsule, it still holds up surprisingly well - and cynicism never goes out of style.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

In Somersault, first-time director Cate Shortland carves out a quietly insightful film about the messiness of adolescent sexuality, growing up poor and generational warfare with a sparing touch that keeps characters from suffocating under the weight of some of the more melodramatic moments. The performance of twenty-four year old Abbie Cornish cannot go without mention. In Heidi she embodies the guile and wonder of youth without veering into narcissistic petulism as wayward teenagers tend to be presented. Already this year Cornish has films coming out with Russell Crowe, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett and Kimberly Peirce (writer/director of Boys Don't Cry).

Reviewer: Alex Brinkman
Rating (out of 5): ****

Tim Blake Nelson, better known for his hilarious role as Delmar in O Brother Where Art Thou, made his directorial debut in 1997 with the fine independent film Eye of God. A man gets out of prison and marries his correspondence sweetheart; the rash decision to get married turns out to be a bad call(that's not the surprising part of this imminent train-wreck film). Martha Plimpton plays a young wife surprised by the more possessive and violent nature displayed by her recently born-again, ex-convict husband. Meanwhile, an already troubled young man (played by Nick Stahl of Carnivale and Sin City) witnesses a terrible murder. A jumpy chronology arcs this dual story in a mix of flashbacks and seemingly random scenes all brought together by the kind of tragedy that leads to anger, regret and a sense of hopelessness. In Eye of God redemption comes and goes fleetingly reflecting in a naturalistic manner the true tragedy of life, death and humanity's darker side. As an examination of evil, the film succeeds with a frightening accuracy, granting humanity to a murderer, indicting all of us along with him. Eye of God rises above political issues to express its view of a human condition that can only be heard as a song of lament; longing for something better, an expression made all the more hauntingly beautiful by its asymmetry.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Keane stars Damian Lewis, most famous here previously for his portrayal of the earnest American captain in the WWII series Band of Brothers (he's actually British). Lewis gives an absolutely brilliant, wrenching performance as a man desperately searching for his missing daughter - or does she exist at all? Director Lodge Kerrigan, who also explored madness in his first feature, the memorable Clean, Shaven (just out on DVD from Criterion), and the filmmaker is in full command of his craft here, using a single camera for street-level, first person immediacy. And because of this, be forewarned: it's a challenge to at first stick with it through Keane's disturbed babblings while he wanders through New York. But as the film unfolds, and Keane befriends a similiarly down-and-out mother (played by The Wire's Amy Ryan) and daughter, it slyly works its way in surprisingly heartrending fashion, while never failing to keep things emotionally true. Cassavetes would be proud. Textbook stuff, in more ways than one.

Would make a good double-feature with the new doc Unknown White Male and especially, of course, Clean, Shaven.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

There's something about Kelly Reichardt's minimalist film Old Joy that puts one at ease, as if reminding us that there are places we can go - mentally as well as physically - to take some comfort in a world that's essentially gone insane.

Old Joy's plot is hardly enough to hang one's hat on - two old friends connect for an overnight camping trip and a search for a hidden hot springs - but needless to say, the plot is not the thing here. Actor-musician Will Oldham (whose unique, haunting singing voice has garnered him global recognition) plays Kurt, a drifter who drifts back to Portland, Oregon, and looks up his friend Mark (the willowy Daniel London). While Mark is on the precipice of a more domestic life - his wife is pregnant - Kurt is clearly more frail, child-like, but both men are grappling with their roles in an increasingly alienating world. It's to the film's great credit that both characters feel immediate, like people we know - or maybe even are - even if the actors are not completely polished. Their conversations together as they wander around the Cascade Mountains serve as the spine of the film. With the confines of the story comes an intimacy rarely achieved; even rarer, for American films at least, to see that intimacy expressed between two men. While it's of that uniquely American genre, the road movie, Old Joy is more European in sensibility.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

How odd to discover Tickets the same day that Terence Rafferty's interesting piece on "auteur-itis" appeared in The New York Times (as referenced on Greencine Daily). Rafferty tells us of the war between the director (Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu) and the screenwriter (Guillermo Arriaga) of Babel and 21 Grams over the question of who's really the auteur. Perhaps this tiresome twosome can muster the intelligence and humility to watch Tickets, an auteur-less inspiration that makes use of three different directors (Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach), three different writers (Olmi, Kiarostami and Paul Laverty) and three different cinematographers (Olmi, Mahmoud Kalari and Chris Menges) to create a surprisingly seamless film that parcels out four stories amongst these nine world-class moviemakers (including the writers and cinematographers here).

Two of us who review for this blog with some regularity have both taken a look at John Sayles' last film, Silver City, and, while I found more fault with it than did James, we both agree it's been unfairly maligned in some circles, and worth a watch in particular this week - with the election coming right up.

My look at Silver City

James Van Maanen's review of Silver City, as seen on GreenCine (see "Talltale").

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Fixing Frank: Rating (out of 5): ***½
Hard Pill: Rating (out of 5): ***½

Gay film has come such a distance from the days of not being able to utter its own name (see or read The Celluloid Closet) to the likes of award-winning mainstream movies from Philadelphia to Brokeback Mountain that gay/bi moviegoers, interested women and the very few straight men fearless enough to venture into this realm of entertainment can be forgiven for not always being able to keep abreast of what's happening in this growing genre. Yes, there's a lot of mindless schlock making its way onto movie and TV screens, and sitting through even a few hours of this can be enough to turn off intelligent filmgoers indefinitely. Consequently, I want to call attention to two smart little straight-to-video films - Fixing Frank and Hard Pill - that deserve a look from savvy genre buffs. Neither is a fun-and-frolic camp fest nor a brainless soft-core turn-on. Both address the possibility of changing one's sexual identity from gay to straight, the idea of which is certain to drive heavily politicized gay men to frenzy. Yet, because both movies deal with this subject intelligently - addressing morality (I mean right and wrong, not gay and straight); the importance of filling emotional, as well as sexual, needs; and the desire for inclusiveness (and being included) that haunts all of us - each provides a surprisingly rigorous and thoughtful experience.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

War is not a subtle subject nor is Joyeux Noel ("Merry Christmas" to us non-Frenchies) a particularly subtle film. But it's a beautiful one: intelligent, heartfelt and perhaps as pure as a relatively mainstream movie on this subject can manage. Writer/director Christian Carion (The Girl from Paris) begins with a shock: nothing bloody, mind you, but something I have not previously encountered in a film. This sets us up nicely for what follows: a worthy addition to the canon of films that are anti-war, anti-government and anti-organized religion. This story of an impromptu "truce" that occurred between battling armies (Germans, French and Scots) on a Christmas Eve during World War I is full of joy, beauty, sadness, irony - and only a little carnage (but what's there does indeed make its point).

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Australian filmmaker Sarah Watt has heretofore made only short films, most of these animated. To call her full-length, live-action debut Look Both Ways auspicious is an understatement. This ensemble "dramedy" about how we come to terms with death is ever so light on its feet: witty, elliptical and full of odd charms. Especially odd and charming are its fast and funny animated moments, often given to ruminations about one's own death as a kind of awful -- though humorous -- fantasy of ghastly things that could happen but won't because we've first imagined them and thus staved off their arrival. Watt's heroine Meryl (winningly played by Justine Clarke) is a talented artist, and her hero is a photographer (brought to fine life by William McInnes) who also does thoughtful, professional work. Both brush up against the Grim Reaper, as do their friends, co-workers and family, and we viewers follow gladly along.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Sleeper pick of the week:

Once in awhile you encounter a small movie to which the adjective "dear" is applicable, and Dreamland is one of this increasingly rare breed. An ensemble piece heavy on character and short on plot, it is beautifully directed by first timer Jason Matzner. Screenwriter Tom Willett's dialog is real, funny and moving, while the location -- a trailer park in the American southwest -- seems just offbeat enough to entice. The filmmakers treat these quirky individuals as worthy of our time and attention, rather than as the film trailer-trash we so often encounter.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Red Doors, Georgia Lee's undeservedly obscure independent film about an Asian American family looks even better after seeing the coming attraction for another Asian family-themed drama previewed on the DVD, Close Call, which looks entirely overwrought and muddled.

The story, such as it is, centers on three sisters in a Chinese American family, the parents being first generation immigrants, with the oldest daughter (Jacqueline Kim) in an emotionally distant relationship with a white man but soon to be married to him, and the youngest, teenage Katie, a completely American-cultured riot girl (Kathy Shao-lin Lee, wearing homemade tshirts and multicolored hair) participates in a flirty battle of pranks with a boy in her class (an amusing running story though it begins to overstay its welcome). Believably, the middle daughter, a winning Elaine Kao, is caught in between everyone's needs and neuroses. She attempts to please her parents - getting a medical degree and going out on blah dates with Asian men, while secretly discovering she may lean another way sexually. The father (Tzi Ma, a familiar face to American TV-watchers, and The General in The Ladykillers remake), depressed middle aged Ed, only finds happiness in the culture and place he misses dearly, in nostalgia for the past. He contemplates suicide, only to be interrupted each time by the nonchalant Katie. Ed's attempts to find some meaning in his life, rooted in his culture's traditions, form the main spine of the story, though part of the problem with the film - or charm, depending on your attention span - is its episodic structure, with all the family members' stories getting nearly equal weight.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Set in a lakeside campground in the hot, still air of summer, Wild Camp was supposedly based on a true story, for what that's worth, and if the film's plot - an odd mix of creepy horror and romance seems fairly straightforward and predictable, it does a better job of creating the atmosphere of pending doom under the surface while leading up to a fairly shocking resolution.

Denis Lavant (Lovers on the Bridge, Very Long Engagement), who looks like a French Robert Davi, with a face that's been around the block - or smack into it - a few times, or as more than one critic noted, with a little Billy Bob Thornton mixed in, plays an ex-con trying to start a new life as a sailing instructor. He quickly falls under the spell of Isild Le Besco's Camille, a sultry, sulky teen bored by her surroundings and troubled by her family in ways the film never attempts to fully explain.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Paying as much tribute to Douglas Sirk as her previous film But I'm a Cheerleader did to John Waters, Jamie Babbitt uses a sort of magic carpet ride of hyper-stylization to explore grief, sexual abuse, drug addiction, physical disability and sexual repression. What could have easily slid into teenage (read: inane) psychosexual dramagedy nonsense plays instead like an interesting little character piece drenched in syrup.

Recently orphaned deaf-mute Dot (Camilla Belle) goes to live with her godparents (Hal Hartley go-to's Martin Donovan and Edie Falco) and their cheerleader daughter Nina (Elisha Cuthbert). Since everyone believes Dot cannot hear (and thus not judge) under the guise of condescending inclusivity they use her as a constant human confessional to unburden their souls.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

While Wondrous Oblivion often approaches the first word of its title and never comes near the depths of the second, it does not, unfortunately, live up to its initial promise. There is a great deal to savor here, however, beginning with the time and the place: a lower-middle-class London neighborhood in 1960. In its center are two families: one Jewish, that has lost most of its progenitors to the Holocaust; the other Jamaican, ready to put down stakes in a changing England. The sport of cricket figures prominently in the film, yet this is no standard "sports" movie, for it deals as much with coming-of-age, racism and passionate, forbidden attraction as it does winning and competition. Writer/director Paul Morrison (whose 1999 film Solomon and Gaenor helped push Ioan Gruffudd toward stardom) and his production staff have recreated the time and place impeccably, and Morrison has cast his film equally well.

Delroy Lindo has perhaps his best role ever as the Jamaican patriarch, and he is splendid--as is every cast member down the line. The film is also to be congratulated for taking the road less traveled where sex, sin and infidelity are concerned. But after setting up a rich situation, peopling it with unusually decent but problemed primary characters, and giving it all such a gorgeous gloss, the filmmaker allows a certain predictability to slowly drain the movie of some--though not nearly all--of its energy and strength. Toward the close, there is almost a sense that Morrison is simply diddling, as the pretty visuals and effects go on and on when a less sentimental close would have been appropriate. Perhaps he was finding it difficult to say goodbye to these people whom he cared so much about. Whatever--I recommend you see Wondrous Oblivion because its strengths easily outweigh its flaws as it tells its nostalgic yet still-timely story about some of our favorite topics: race, religion and class.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): **

The middling and awkwardly titled British drama Shaking Dreamland starts as a high-pitched fairy tale. A wedding in a striking cathedral with beautiful flower girls and a bride and groom so gorgeous they can't even make it to the altar; they must run to embrace each other halfway down the aisle. Minutes later the new bride takes her husband to the crest of a waterfall to inform him they're about to have a beautiful baby. But soon after this announcement the groom is haunted by ghoulish nightmares about having sex with underage prostitutes and molesting his future son. As the missus gestates (all the while humming the theme song from Disney's Snow White) he partakes in a steady diet of long walks, self-mutilation and psychotherapy before coming to the realization he was molested by his father who is now dying of cancer and wants to spend his last few months with his new grandchild. His descent forces the wife to recognize that her parents were raging alcoholics who beat her and each other on a regular basis.

British cinematographer Martina Nagel makes her directorial debut with this zestless psychodrama that despite plumbing into almost every imaginable neurosis about sex, relationships, family and commitment, does so with such austerity that there is no one emotional uptick. Couple this with the near-constant, obtrusive musical cues and Shaking Dream Land becomes an exercise in balancing patronizing boredom with dull voyeurism. The performances are all solid and the cast includes a few faces that will be familiar to an American audience; Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale) is particularly good as the charming, porn-addicted child abuser and newcomer Cloudia Swann manages to retain sympathy and strength despite having little more to do than sigh woefully and shift the angles of her french braid.

See also: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, The Conformist, Gideon's Daughter, Mystic River, Separate Lies, The Woodsman, Mysterious Skin.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Candela Peña is so good so often that I wonder when American audiences are going to catch on. (We're often slow, particularly when critics aren't paying enough attention.) Ms. Peña is quite different from film to film, though she usually looks rather similar: Torremolinos 73, Take My Eyes, God Is on the Air, No Shame, What Makes Women Laugh, All About My Mother, Mouth to Mouth--to name a few of her 20 appearances so far, often in lesser roles in which she is never less than wonderful. In Princesas, winner of three Spanish Goya awards but which came and went theatrically in the blink of an eye, she plays a prostitute. The actress won several awards for the role, but her version is no whore-with-a-heart-of-gold: she's angry, frightened-but-determined and oddly decent. This decency infuses the entire film and is likely to do the same for viewers.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *** {add a star if you’re a Ninth Symphony fan}

Music is front, center and as gorgeous as you might expect in Copying Beethoven, one of Agnieszka Holland's (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) more commercial efforts that, sadly, didn't find the classy mainstream audience who might have embraced it. That the movie is also terribly flawed by dialog occasionally both stilted and foolishly vernacular ("He mooned me!" notes the heroine about her composer/boss) will give nay-sayers ample opportunity to dismiss it. But if you're among those who consider Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to be one of the world's musical treasures, I urge you to give the film a shot.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***½

The Hours and the Times could almost be called a "speculative documentary" as it takes a real event in the lives of John Lennon and founding Beatles manager Brian Epstein, namely a private four-day holiday to Barcelona in April of 1963, and speculates as to what might have occurred between the two close friends behind closed doors in their hotel room. Of course, the result requires an opening disclaimer stating that everything we are about to see is "entirely fictitious," but perhaps the best indication that it is successful is that somehow it feels as if this is quite likely what did happen, that perhaps by some form of witchcraft writer/director Christopher Munch managed to get it exactly right, even though we know rationally this would be impossible. Wonderfully shot in old-school black and white, it even brings to mind the D.A. Pennebaker documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England, Don't Look Back.

[Even though they essentially agree on the film, we thought it'd be fun to get two reviewers' takes on this one, two perspectives for the price of one! First Erin, and then James. -- ed.]

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

[Note: Release date changed to May 15.] A more cynical viewer could see the recent popularity of vignette storytelling as a desperate move for cash-strapped productions to attract big name talent to their films with the lure of a small time commitment and big showpiece scenes without the burden of having to carry an entire narrative. But the flipside of that coin is that to effectively tell those stories a director needs very good actors who can quickly engage our imaginations.

Writer/director Karen Moncrieff's film was inspired by her experiences as a juror on a murder trial after seeing the temporary community that had sprung up around the witnesses called to testify. The Dead Girl is the story of a murder that's become ghoulish normalcy in almost any part of the country: a drug-addicted prostitute is randomly killed, her mutilated body dumped in a field and discovered a few days later by a passerby. The discovery creates a small stir in the local media, but there is very little outrage and no one is ever arrested for the crime.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½ (nostalgia and noir buffs may want to add a star)

Admiring, as I do, so many of the films of Jules Dassin, I find myself surprised that Brute Force (which I had never seen until the arrival of this new Criterion release) does not rank as highly. Though I can understand its being hailed for style, believability and originality in its time, time is the very thing that has left this film in the dust. Despite good performances and superb black-and-white cinematography, the writing and direction are so doggedly of their time and often overly didactic in terms of calling attention to class/economic differences and the dangers of unbridled power that, finally, it's hard not to snicker now and again. When, toward the end, what looks like the entire prison population is given some bad news, their reaction, I swear, sounds exactly like that of Oprah's audience when it learns something sad. (The prisoners have deeper voices, of course.) Granted, this was 1947, yet the entire penitentiary appears to house but a single black inmate. And he sings. Any hint of homosexual behavior is quite veiled, in the character of the villain, 'natch, well-played by a relatively young Hume Cronyn.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½

Theatrical release: May 11
DVD Release: TBD

Retelling the real story of a landmark British case in which a Punjabi woman kills her husband, burning him alive after ten years of abuse both physical and verbal, Provoked (opening in select theaters today) often feels a bit like an earnest Lifetime movie but the appealing cast and the intrigue of the Indian-British culture clash raise it above that level, at least.

Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai is truly luminous, if a little inert at times, as Kiranjit, the victim and accused, even when her character remains, in the film's first half especially, frustratingly passive. But the meek, reserved nature of her dutiful wife is part of the point, as her culture, as in many, emphasizes the subordinate role of women in marriage and how most societies do little to protect them, even if they - and their children - are physically threatened by the husband. Her story becomes one of gradual awakening and empowerment.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Kids gone bad and the parents who enable 'em have been movie staples probably since Reefer Madness and certainly since I was a kid gone bad (the Rebel Without a Cause era), so you can be forgiven for imagining that Alpha Dog will not add much to the canon. And at first, so it seems. The assortment on display of Southern California twinkies masquerading as raw sirloin--oh, the posturings, the potty mouths, the "acting" opportunities given this up-to-the-minute ensemble of young Hollywood!--is enough to induce you to grab that remote. I swear I reached for mine a number of times before realizing midway that I was beginning to care about what might happen.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Perhaps it's fitting and unsurprising that a small, quiet (Canadian, natch) film about the lingering effects of war, strife and torture was unable to permeate the membrane of spangles and schmaltz that make up the awards frenzy over December releases. But people who stand up and applaud when our presidential hopefuls beat their chest demanding more torture would be well served to acknowledge the longview of becoming indifferent to state-sanctioned violence.

Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me) revisits the themes of dysfunctional introversion as coping strategy with her third film The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays Hanna, a Yugoslavian factory worker living a monastic lifestyle of repetition and solitude in grimy Belfast. The factory's manager is so bothered by both her foreignness (at one point hastily mentions "my wife is also... an immigrant!") and her unwillingness to socialize that he forces her to take the vacation she's accrued.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½

"One person in the 60s fascinated me more than any I'd known." So says artist/pop-culture icon Andy Warhol of Edie Sedgwick, the subject of this flashy, if fractured, art-biopic. While the film looks good and features a memorable turn by Sienna Miller as an eerily spot-on Sedgwick, the art student who hooked up with Warhol in New York in the 60s, the film overall is a disappointment, managing to be both colorful and yet curiously muted.

Sedgwick's bumpy past, struggles with mental illness, trauma, and drug addiction is the focus, even if the film isn't quite - focused. Even if her UK accent occasionally slips forth (which, in a way, matches her background, she came from American faux-aristocracy), Miller is the best reason to see Factory Girl. With her performance here and in the new, also uneven, film Interview, she should finally prove herself as more than just fodder for tabloids. Guy Pearce embodies Warhol's quirky fey charm, hiding behind glasses, white hair and pasty skin. "I'd love to work with her," he sighs early in the film, "I've never seen a girl with so many problems." Yet Pearce plays it so low-key at times when he's on screen the film becomes almost as somnambulant as one of Warhol's films. The film interweaves flashforwards to heartfelt Sedgwick - from a hospital - in the early 70s reflecting on the wild years in the New York art scene and her subsequent breakdown.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Puccini: Rating (out of 5): ****
Sweet Land: Rating (out of 5): ***½

We watch a lot of movies in our household; even our cat is starting to develop critical tendencies. But when my companion did not realize that the same young woman had played the lead role in two new-to-DVD films we'd watched within three days of each other, I realized that there might well be other movie-lovers out there not making this rather extraordinary connection. The films are Puccini for Beginners (released on July 3) and Sweet Land (July 10) and the actress is the pretty, petite Elizabeth Reaser, who creates two utterly disparate characters with conviction and aplomb. Reaser has worked more in television ("Grey's Anatomy" and "Saved") than in film, but since I watch almost none of the former, I found myself a virgin to her rather extraordinary talent.

In Puccini, Reaser is the narrator and lead, a young NYC lesbian named Allegra who bemoans her fate as one who consistently chooses the wrong mate. The most recent of these choices is Julianne Nicholson, and soon she becomes involved with a young man played by Justin Kirk and a young woman (Gretchen Mol of The Notorious Bettie Page)--both of whom are currently seeing each other, which, of course, Allegra is unaware. We are in the sub-genre of the NY-relationship comedy, lesbian-bisexual style, complete with witty, racy repartee that offers ideas and remarks on everything from life and opera to eating habits and art. Some critics were as keen on Puccini as others were cool, but I found it lively, funny, fresh and a big step up from writer/director Maria Maggenti's movie outing of the decade previous: The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****½

With Tony Blair stepping down as the long-time Prime Minister of Great Britain and his replacement, Gordon Brown, spending the weekend with W. at Camp David, I thought it would be a good time to recommend the excellent House of Cards trilogy of miniseries, starring veteran British actor Ian Richardson as the fictional Prime Minister Francis Urquhart.

House of Cards, the first of the three series (the other two are To Play the King and The Final Cut), with its perfect blend of Macbeth and Richard III, of humor and drama, is the best--though once you start watching, stopping is hardly an option. The most obvious influence on the character is the aforementioned Richard, with his gleeful, cool, perfectly-reasoned badness and regular catchy audience-addressing. One halfway expects Urquhart to start speaking of his winter of discontent at any moment.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

What constitutes a "sleeper"? I'd always thought a movie required at least a short theatrical release in major cities to qualify for this overused label. After viewing The Big Bad Swim, however, I'd have to say that any film this good--and this unheralded--is a shoo-in for sleeper status. A dramedy about a group of Connecticut adults (of all ages and professions) taking a swim class, this first full-length film from director Ishai Setton and writer Daniel Schechter simply sneaks up and knocks you--sweetly, quietly--off your feet. Granted, Setton and Schechter have not broken any new ground with their movie, yet neither a visual moment nor a line of dialogue rings false, is pushed to excess or wasted. Many longtime filmmakers, even some who’ve won major awards, don’t get this close to perfection when they try to create a batch of interesting, real human beings.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Parker Posey's Nora in Broken English exists further down the continuum of roles she played in the nineties in films like Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, Party Girl and Kicking and Screaming: neurotic, sarcastic, and sort of unambitious. But in your thirties these things are no longer cute (or "quirky", as Posey is so often called) but sort of annoying and self-defeating. In the new Broken English, she's single among married friends, working at a barely above entry-level (but "cool") job in a stable of trust fund-insulated successful artists. She's in crisis and the people in her life think crappy blind dates will lead to fairy tale solutions. But by now she's become so accustomed to isolation and condescension that she no longer trusts her own instincts and has become her own worst enemy. She meets a similarly burnt but far less cynical French dreamboat (Melvil Poupaud of Time to Leave) and they have a weekend romance before he leaves for Paris.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

In terms of providing the world with benign movies--kind, compassionate and benevolent--I would call Canada the champ. From Don McKellar's Last Night (the most benign of all the films about the end of the world) to one of the great television series (Slings & Arrows) from Wilby Wonderful to Falling Angels and so many more, our neighbor to the north insists on showing us that normal life comes with enough major problems that we humans don't really need to make things worse. Forget the serial killers and the ultra-violence: Simply dealing with each other and what life throws us is enough of a challenge. Snow Cake, the near-magical movie from Marc Evans (who, back in 2002 gave us--on a budget of about $1.98--one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen, My Little Eye) and writer Angela Pell, is the latest in a long string of humble Canuck wizardry.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Canadian filmmaker Alison Murray's feature debut (she's done terrific work in shorts) Mouth to Mouth, an imperfect but striking effort, is of a wholly different universe and energy. Based on Murray's own experiences as a teenage runaway, the film depicts the troubled relationship between a mother and the teenage daughter she had too young. The girl, Sherry (played with ferocity by Ellen Page, who jarringly reminded me here of an ex-girlfriend, but never mind), runs away to strike out on her own in Europe and hooks up with an charismatic group of partying activists who call themselves SPARK (Street People Armed With Radical Knowledge). They work to get people off of hard drugs, making them part of a family, travel in a sort of "Burning Van" eventually to their own compound at a vineyard, where, well, when you put the words "compound" and "family" together, you can see where this is going, and not some place good.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

First shown in 1997 but never seen on American television nor available on video until now, A Dance To The Music Of Time offers what seem to me the most effortlessly entertaining characters, conversations and story that may ever have appeared in a miniseries. Lavish praise, but these four discs--totaling around 7 hours of time--scale the heights in terms of providing a literate, ironic view of upper-class England over several decades. That this is due to the series of novels by Anthony Powell, from which Hugh Whitemore adapted his simply amazing script, is beyond question. But putting it all together as elegantly, speedily and bracingly as Whitmore manages is a major accomplishment. Over the decades this journeyman writer has given us many fine pieces, winning BAFTA, WGA and Emmy awards in the process. Remember 84 Charing Cross Road, Return of the Soldier, Utz, Pack of Lies, Breaking the Code (he wrote the play), The Gathering Storm, My House in Umbria--to name but a few? This prolific gentleman is pretty much the "adapter" nonpareil for our time.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Judith Warner wrote, after attending a recent screening of the friendship/revenge/road film Thelma and Louise (a screening hosted by Sen. Susan Collins R-MN and Rep. Jane Harman D-CA... huh?) that the 1991 film's portrayal of the sexual politick already seemed incredibly dated. She noted that the interim changes haven't actually been useful evolutions, but merely the development of many, many shades of gray.

With Stephanie Daley, writer/director Hilary Brougher achieves a mighty feat of making a film about religious education, child abandonment, miscarriage, infidelity and teenage sexuality that's neither lurid nor a polemic. And even with one character fighting for her life there are no Oscar-baiting monologues of hysteria (in fact, the most powerful scene in the film is completely silent). Like Brougher's debut film, Sticky Fingers of Time, Stephanie Daley uses a fragmented narrative to show how the interactions of two people stuck in a morass of denial inspires the other to lift themselves out of their stasis.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

I must admit to some shock at the mostly devastating criticism received by Evening (a 26% score on Rotten Tomatoes!), and I can't help feel that expectation has more than a little to do with this. Here is a "dream" cast by any literate moviegoer's standards: Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, Eileen Atkins, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson (Redgrave's daughter), Mamie Gummer (Streep's daughter), with Patrick Wilson and Hugh Dancy holding up the male side. Add, as the director, Lajos Koltai, one of the world's great cinematographers whose first directorial job resulted in the memorable, devastating, yet strangely beautiful Holocaust tale Fateless. Finalize with a screenplay by Susan Minot (from her well-regarded novel) and Michael Cunningham (the popular novels "A Home at the End of the World" and "The Hours"). How could expectations not be sky-high? And while there is reason for disappointment in the end result, there is also much to savor in this elegiac film.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

At this year's Film Society of Lincoln Center Latinbeat Festival, a special sidebar was devoted to screenings of, as the FSLC put it, "Four Breakthroughs from Mexico's New Cinema": Amores Perros, Japón, Duck Season, and Violet Perfume: No One Is Listening. The first two, and to some extent the third, are well-known to most movie buffs, but the latter, outside of festivals, has hardly made a ripple in the USA. Now that Violet Perfume is here on DVD, audiences have the chance to see and understand why the film is indeed a breakthrough of sorts. It's also a mega-downer, which may account for its not finding theatrical release.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Spaces and places, their relationship to each other and to people who are in love: This rather odd subject matter seems to interest Danish writer/director Christoffer Boe to an extraordinary extent. Based on his 2003 Reconstruction and now Allegro (made in 2005 but released to DVD this past October), I'd say Boe is quite an unusual young filmmaker. His use of symbolism, too heavy for some, works just fine for me because he often twists his clichés, allowing them to surprise us by including more than what we initially expect. He also uses sci-fi/fantasy tropes less obviously than many current moviemakers.

Allegro tracks a world-class concert pianist who loves, loses, and must break through into a parallel world to find… well, all sorts of things. Boe keeps his movies short, which is wise; I don't think they could stand up to much increased length. He also appears to shoot (in Super-16 and DV, blown up to 35mm) rather quickly, which adds to the sense of immediacy and urgency (the cinematography is by Manuel Alberto Claro). Here, Boe combines some simple animation with his mostly live-action story to set things up and propel them along. This works, too.

In the lead role, Boe has cast one of Denmark's best and most oft-seen actors Ulrich Thomsen (The Celebration, Brothers, Mostly Martha), with attractive model Helena Christensen as his love interest. But the movie belongs to Thomsen--who brings a fine combination of gravity and confusion to the proceedings--and to Boe's bizarre but consistently interesting take on life and love. Some lovely classical selections, plus original music by Thomas Knak, help keep the film airborne.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Criterion Collection recently released a double-disc special edition set of the 1984 John Huston film Under the Volcano, starring Albert Finney as an alcoholic ex-British consul named Geoffrey Firmin. Firmin loses his official post in Mexico and is drowning himself in alcohol as he laments the loss of his straying wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset), who suddenly reappears before him at a Mexican cafe to witness what will be his last day--on the Day of the Dead, no less. Finney was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of writer Malcolm Lowry's tragic figure (the film is based on Lowry's novel of the same title), and legendary director Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre) remarked of Finney here, "I think it's the finest performance I've ever witnessed, let alone directed."

Reviewer: Henry Leineweber
Rating (out of 5): ****

The Road to Guantanamo is not what I expected. In a market flush with post-9-11 documentaries, I was expecting more of the same: interviews with experts, former government officials, a brief history lesson, some stock footage, a few classic rock songs, and maybe a stunt or two thrown in to spice things up.

Instead, The Road to Guantanamo presents us with the firsthand accounts of three former detainees from Tipton, England. Asif, Shafiq and Ruhel, along with their cousin, are arrested in war-torn Afghanistan after haphazardly deciding to become fighters. Using reenacted scenes and interviews with the three young men, filmmakers Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom present the viewer with a savage and suspenseful tale of mistaken identity. The film is still timely, too - the three men are tortured (in brutal re-enactments) by American and British intelligence trying to get a false confession out of them.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Somewhat surprisingly, the sport of ice hockey has inspired very few decent films over the years. You might be able to count them on two fingers: 1977's Slap Shot starring Paul Newman, and Disney's Miracle about the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team winning the gold. So it's nice to be able to add to this list The Rocket, a thoughtful biopic about the life of legendary Montreal Canadiens scoring machine Maurice "The Rocket" Richard (who retired from the NHL in 1960 and died in 2000).

Directed by Charles Binamé (Seraphin: Heart of Stone), it stars popular Canadian actor Roy Dupuis, who had already portrayed Richard for two previous projects (including a two-part French-Canadian miniseries). Dupuis reportedly did his own skating in the film, and the hockey scenes—which depict the NHL in the 1940s and 1950s before players wore helmets—have an admirable gritty quality of verisimilitude. Binamé has said of his inspiration for the hockey scenes, "I really wanted to capture hockey the way (Martin) Scorsese had captured boxing with Raging Bull."

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **** ½

A big, fat "thank you" to Martin Scorsese for his championing of Golden Door, which is up there among (if not THE) best-ever renditions of the immigrant experience. It makes "Titanic"--for all its multi-million-dollar budget and billion-dollar gross--seem something paltry in comparison. Scorsese gives a short intro to the film on the current DVD, and his name was associated front-and-center with the theatrical release in May of 2007. Reviews were generally respectful, but the movie soon disappeared into the usual foreign film obscurity which bedevils our current times, particularly where Italian movies are concerned. (Earlier in the year, Golden Door had been Italy's submission for Best Foreign Language Film but, shockingly, did not make the final five nominees.) Now that I've finally seen it, I must place it near or at the top of the list of last year's best films.

From its first frame, the film jars then compels you because its visuals are so strong, bizarre and immediate. Yet writer/director Emanuele Crialese, prefers to show, not tell. There is little exposition as we follow three generations of a poor Sicilian family making their difficult way toward America, with their tag-along companion, a somewhat mysterious British woman, played by the elegant and odd Charlotte Gainsbourg. Both the large events and small moments throughout the film are so specific and completely imagined that--real or not--they come across as truthful. Based on Crialese's earlier film, Respiro, I would not have pegged him to create anything this amazing, and because so much of the reason the movie works is due to its visual beauty and imagination, I suspect that its cinematographer Agnès Godard (Beau Travail, Backstage, The Intruder) bears at least some of the responsibility.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Writer-director Michael Cahill's King of California is a "little film" with a solid script that came and went from theaters in the blink of an eye - not a big surprise, given the oddball plot. While no classic, it certainly deserves an audience on home video.

Michael Douglas plays Charlie, a wayward father and former jazz musician whose estranged, and much more together, teenage daughter Miranda (a most-appealing Evan Rachel Wood) picks him up upon his release from a mental hospital. She's been working at McDonald's instead of finishing high school because someone's got to bring home the McBacon. Her mother, his ex, a former hand model, ran off too. Charlie may have issues, but at least he cares. It doesn't take all that long for Douglas to present his character as a major league eccentric, but to his credit he doesn't overdo it (except for a few wild-eyed moments), and he quickly garners our sympathy for his obvious love of his daughter. The plot - centering on Charlie's obsessive belief that Spanish treasure is buried underneath the local Costco - requires some suspension of disbelief to be sure, and yet Cahill's on to something, too.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***

The fiction-film debut of Spellbound director Jeffery Blitz, Rocket Science is, like its non-fiction predecessor, a finely wrought and authentic portrait of the world of unusual and gifted kids. Instead of plumbing the depths of the world of spelling bees this time around, Blitz tells a story about - among other things - high school debate teams.

The film follows one Hal Hefner, a high school outcast marked by a profound stutter, played to squirming perfection by Reece Thompson, as he tries to overcome his speech disorder by joining the competitive debate team at his New Jersey suburb's high school.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

No, it’s not a documentary exposing the underside of America's real estate market. Director and (with Gal Uchovsky) co-writer Eytan Fox's The Bubble is about the denizens of a mostly gay enclave in Tel Aviv, Israel. This cordoned-off area (not literally, perhaps, but figuratively--by being liberal, secular and "other" in a country not particularly noted for these attributes) is the "bubble" of the title, and its citizens--young, good-looking, smart and self-aware--are not oblivious to the fact that they are living in a kind of homogeneous "closed society." The thing about bubbles is: They tend to burst, and rather easily, too.

Reviewer: Monica Peck
Rating (out of 5): ****

This filial drama from writer/director Philippe Falardeau reveals the bizarre story of Belgian engineer Michel Roy who learns at age forty-one that he was adopted and actually born in a barn in rural Quebec. Played by Oliviér Gourmet (L'Enfant, Les Fils), Roy embarks on a journey to uncover his lost familial roots. Humor and poignancy intermix as Roy begins to learn the truth about his birth through a series of unlikely serendipities. Out of respect for your enjoyment of Falardeau's brilliantly woven divulgences, I dare not reveal anything more of the plot. Suffice it to say, this cinematic puzzle deserves more than one viewing, if only to admire the deft way Falardeau uncovers its many-layered secrets. It is no wonder that Congorama won a Genie for Best Screenplay from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television in 2008. As a doctor remarks in the movie, "It is all so unlikely, it can't be anything but true."

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): **

The subject of unwanted, or unplanned, pregnancy was quite a hot one for US and foreign films alike last year. But with the exception of Romanian Cristian Mungiu's abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007), all of the others, even if apolitical, have essentially been "pro-life."

In the U.S., in addition to Jason Reitman's indie hit Juno (2007), there was the late Adrienne Shelly's Waitress (2007), and of course Judd Apatow's supposedly comedic Knocked Up (2007). No matter how different in inception and presentation these films might be, they all have one thing in common: abortion is out of the question. The female leads decide to, respectively, keep their babies even if that means giving them up for adoption after they're born, bringing them up all by themselves, or settling down with an immature slacker.

Although made in 2006 and by a Mexican filmmaker, Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, the independent film Bella deals with the same subject matter and in a similar kind of way to the other films. Soon after she finds out that she's pregnant, Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a waitress in an upscale Mexican restaurant in New York, loses her job--a humiliating scene where her boss Manny (Manny Perez) fires her in front of her colleagues and friends. Jose (Eduardo Verástegui), the restaurant's cook and Manny's brother, is so affected by the incident that he deserts his kitchen in the midst of lunch-hour craziness, and starts following her around the city doing everything possible to persuade her to keep the baby. Turns out, before becoming a cook, Jose was a successful soccer player whose career got destroyed when he accidentally killed a little girl in a foolish car accident.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **

Has Francis Ford Coppola ever been much of a screenwriter? Don't his real strengths, such as they are, lie in his conceptions, and sometimes in his visuals? (Conceptions more admired, perhaps, for their attempts than for their actual successes.) In any case, with most of his more prominent movies, he's had a lot of good help and/or source material--from Puzo's Godfather and Grisham's The Rainmaker to S.E. Hinton's Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, and John Milius on Apocalypse Now. Though I didn't much care for The Conversation when it was first released (a rare time that Coppola doesn't share screenplay credit), I know it's considered one of his best and plan to re-see it soon. I admit to not being an enormous fan of the filmmaker, but that is no reason to heap contempt on his latest work to arrive in the video bin: Youth Without Youth (which is based on an outside source, too -- the book by Romanian author Mircea Eliade -- but scripted by Coppola). No, indeed -- not when there are so many other good reasons for denigrating it.

Reviewer: James van Maanen

A Raisin In The Sun: Rating (out of 5): **½

The Great Debaters: Rating (out of 5): ****

The recently filmed (for cable-TV) version of the famous Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin In The Sun and last year's "Oscar Bait," Denzel Washington-helmed The Great Debaters were released to video on the same day. After watching both within hours of each other, a comparison seems in order. The former was generally greeted well by critics (and the public: the Broadway version was a rare "hot ticket" for a non-musical play, due no doubt to the casting of a certain Mr. Diddy). The latter, however, was given a shrug of indifference by the public and by quite a few critics. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that movie-goers missed out on something wonderful.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Shohei Imamura is not generally held in the same high esteem as other great Japanese filmmakers such as Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. Even after viewing all of his later films--his segment of 11-09-01, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Dr. Akagi, The Eel and Black Rain, I would have agreed with that assessment. Now that I have also seen two of his earlier works--Vengeance Is Mine and the recently-released-to-disc Ballad of Narayama (from 1983), I'm inclined to hold him in similar, if not greater, regard. Narayama, I believe, is a classic film and should not be missed by anyone with a love for cinema or Japan.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

While fans of the work of the French writer/director André Téchiné will queue up for his newest film, The Witnesses, this first-rate study of a time (the early 1980s), place (Paris) and people (a disparate group connected by everything from friendship and love to employment and sex) also makes a fine entry-point for anyone new to this moviemaker. I've never seen a Téchiné film I did not like, but I admit that some (Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season, Thieves) are more immediately accessible and enjoyable than others (Loin, J'embrasse pas, Changing Times).

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Politically progressive, consistently independent writer/director John Sayles takes his sweet time with Honeydripper, which has a rather slight story and still runs over the two-hour mark. Fortunately, the operative word here is "sweet" -- as in gentle, satisfying and dulcet, rather than sugary or saccharine. This sweetness comes in so many forms--from the wonderfully genuine performances in the redolent tale Sayles tells, to the music that weaves it way--insinuating, sexy, and finally charmingly explosive--throughout the film. It's especially apparent in some of Sayles' writing. Watch for the exquisite scene in which a character muses about how the first slave to learn piano-playing might have managed this: It's thoughtful, specific, wonderfully imagined and executed.

Reviewer: Dylan De Thomas
Rating (out of 5): **½

An uneven melodrama filled with lurches and starts, Never Forever is highlighted by a strong performance by Vera Farmiga, who is still waiting for her breakout role after shining in The Departed a couple of years back. Though impressive - and a must-see for fans of Farmiga's doe eyes and pliant, oft-downturned mouth - this is not the movie that will launch her into the greater public's consciousness.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Here's an odd little movie -- one that, though its DVD release fairly reeks of straight-to-video failure, is often surprisingly well-done. Yet, given the way it circumvents expectations at every turn, The Secret is almost certain to end up doomed, despite a fine cast that includes David Duchovny, Lili Taylor, Olivia Thirlby and Brendan Sexton III.

First off, it's a film about the spiritual, the supernatural, death and (a kind of) resurrection yet is not scary or particularly suspenseful. And there is little in the way of violence or blood. It offers scenes of teenage sex and drug abuse without almost any of the usual nudity and sleaze factor. And it takes what seems awfully close to the premise of Freaky Friday (minus one corporeal body) and turns it into a very adult fable dealing with, among other tricky topics, the possibility of parent/child sex (this movie gives new meaning to the term "fraught"). At heart, though, it is another in a long line of generation-gap stories, and among the better ones, at that: odd, occasionally funny, and finally moving.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of 5): ***½

NOISE: Scourge of Urban Life

While Noise will confirm many of the prejudices country folk feel about the big city, the movie should have those of us who actually live in the latter frothing at the mouth within minutes. Why? Because writer/director Henry Bean's (The Believer) new film delivers up a picture of one of the more crazy-making though least recognized (it is not, after all, mugging, murder, robbery or rape) urban problems: noise pollution. Due to his clever premise, an almost believable follow-through and a first-rate sound department, Noise makes the most of the titular annoyances and ends up seducing you into cheering for a vigilante like never before. (It helps that our "hero" is fighting noise, rather than a bunch of Death Wish-inspired rapists/murderers.)

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of 5):
Saturn: ***½
Heaven: ****

Stylistically, two new films with similar themes by international moviemakers with strong ties to Turkey could hardly be more different, yet both deal strongly and thoughtfully with the subject of loss, grief and guilt.

Ferzan Ozpetek, born in Turkey in 1959, came to Rome to study film and has now become one of Italy's most recognized moviemakers. Fatih Akin's parents emigrated from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s; he was born in Hamburg in 1973. The land of Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, its culture and religion come up again and again in both filmmakers' work -- more in Ozpetek's early films like Steam and Harem than is his latest Saturn in Opposition (but how often he uses the wonderful Turkish actress Serra Yilmaz!). Akin seems to be drawn to Turkey more strongly with each successive film: In July, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, and now The Edge Of Heaven.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Ratings (out of 5): ****

There are those who see writer/director David Gordon Green's career improving, with Undertow (2004) as his best work, and others see it in decline, with his debut George Washington (2000) remaining his finest to date. His fourth feature Snow Angels should at least have both camps in agreement; it's not his best, but it's an accomplished, wrenching, satisfying drama of the highest order. (It's every bit as good as -- but 180 degrees from -- his subsequent film, Pineapple Express, released just a few months later.)

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras usually signs his films with only "Costa-Gavras," as if he were creating a brand name for political thrillers. The thriller part invites audiences to have fun at the movies, while the political part makes them think they're seeing something more than "just" a thriller. Costa-Gavras first broke out in 1969 with Z, which earned him a Best Director nomination and won two other Oscars, and in 1981, he was invited to make his first American film, Missing (now out in a Criterion DVD), with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

Missing takes place in an unnamed country, presumably Chile, in the early 1970s, when a military coup toppled the reigning government (presumably Allende's). A happy, liberal American couple, Charlie Horman (John Shea) and his wife Beth (Spacek) live there, keeping a pet duck, drawing cartoons and occasionally translating articles for left-wing newspapers. They find life increasingly difficult under the new military rule -- with its strict curfews -- and begin to wonder if Charlie's habit of keeping notes on everything is very safe. Soon, Charlie has disappeared and his right-wing, Christian Scientist father Ed (Lemmon) flies down to help investigate. Ed can't understand his son's way of life and believes that Charlie must have created his own trouble; he can't believe that people would be arrested for no good reason. But of course, the major arc of Missing is Ed's awakening and realization that black-and-white thinking just doesn't apply to the real world.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **

Craig Lucas is one of my favorite writers for theatre and film. From his mid-1980s off-Broadway success Blue Window-- still one of the most poetic and original ensembles pieces ever created for the stage -- to Prelude to a Kiss and The Dying Gaul (both the film and stage versions), and the much-maligned but prescient and challenging God's Heart, Lucas has given us a fertile and intense body of work. (His screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists helped enable director Alan Rudolph to make one of his best films in a long while.) So it is with some pain that I have to report being gravely disappointed in Lucas' new film Birds of America, which, like The Dying Gaul, he both wrote and directed.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

Australian director Gillian Armstrong has had an interesting career in which she's tackled various genres (musical: Starstruck; wartime: Charlotte Gray; prison break/love story: Mrs Soffel; family dramas: High Tide, The Last Days of Chez Nous; classic adaptation: Little Women); all, except the latter classic, handled in her own interestingly off-kilter manner. Yet Armstrong has not made as immense an impression since her first big film – My Brilliant Career, which helped launch the international careers (one brilliant, the other very good) of Judy Davis and Sam Neill.

Here comes this talented director again, this time with a rather lavishly budgeted story that tracks the nearing of the end of Harry Houdini's career and the further burnishing of his legend. Death Defying Acts offers Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the lead roles and Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) and Timothy Spall lending their usual fine support, so you can’t fault the film for lack of star presence. It is generally quite beautiful to look at and written (by Tony Grisoni and Brian Ward) and directed with enough flair to keep you going.

What is finally missing -- and becomes apparent early on -- is a strong enough central concept. Instead it gives us a mash-up of the usual hooey about spiritualism and prescience (is it real or is it not?), Freudian mother fixation and a so-so love story. Still, as time-wasters go, this one has its moments, many of which are visual treats. Pearce is interesting, as always (though one continues to wish that he will eventually again find that magical combo: a good role in a good movie), while Zeta-Jones is surprisingly warm and real in a mostly underwritten role.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

For film fans looking for more of Daniel Craig, unclothed especially, the opening scene of Flashbacks of a Fool (dreadfully pretentious title!) should keep you happy, as the menage-a-trois shown is full of fire-lighted flesh and frisky lovemaking. But then it’s the morning after and the angst sets in. Writer/director Baillie Walsh's film is actually one large flashback that covers the character played by Craig in late adolescence, as he discovers sex, love and dancing, all of which leads him to become the has-been star we see at the film’s beginning. How his stardom happened, what it entailed and who this character is – these go completely unremarked upon, which makes the movie seem like a novel that’s been hacked to half-length and then given a TV-level treatment.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

A good example of a film with a "hot" topic (rape) that handles its subject with intelligence, tact and almost no prurience, Open Window also -- unfortunately -- exemplifies failure due to lack of "art."  After watching the interview with writer/director Mia Goldman on the DVD extras, my companion noted correctly that everything Goldman says (the movie is based to an extent on her own rape experience) seemed truthful and correct -- and yet her film still did not work.  It is worth seeing, however, and I do not mean this backhandedly, as much for its faults as for its attempt.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

Alan Ball has an axe to grind, possibly several axes to grind. After many years toiling as a sitcom writer for shows like Cybil and Grace Under Fire, he won an Academy award for writing the suburban exegesis American Beauty, created the HBO series Six Feet Under, an at times cruelly bleak dramedy about a family-run funeral home, and has now developed True Blood, a Southern Gothic melodrama television series wherein vampires and humans reside in strained coexistence. So it makes a certain kind of sense that Towelhead, his feature film debut as a director, would contain elements of racism, child rape, pornography, interracial dating, teen sex and militarism -- all under the umbrella of comedy.

Reviewer: James van Maanen

The Good Life
Rating (out of 5): ***

Netherbeast Incorporated
Rating (out of 5): **-½

All movies are a gamble but straight-to-videos (STVs) seem even more so. There are few places to look for reviews and the often paltry (and sometimes dead wrong) descriptions available will either give too much plot away or leave you thinking, "Huh…?" Two STVs that made their debut last week might jostle your movie viewing a bit -- if you're inclined toward an update/rethinking of the vampire legend, handled in a comic/corporate vein, or are in the mood for a quiet, sad and often strangely beautiful slice-of-life in a downtrodden Nebraska small-town.

The latter is what you'll find in writer/director Stephen Berra's oddly gripping The Good Life, which tells the tale of a young man who works in a gas station by day and moonlights in a movie theatre, while coming to terms with first love, family and the town bully. As played by the sweet-faced Mark Webber (The Hottest State), who's nearing 30 but looks more like 17, the character (who also has a surprising physical impairment not immediately obvious) commands the movie, winning our sympathy and maintaining it throughout.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Most movies that have tackled the question of Christian "sexuality" or "ex-gays" (men who have supposedly fought and succeeded in surmounting their homosexuality via their strong belief in Jesus) -- whether a narrative film like the comedy Saved! or documentaries such as Fall From Grace and For the Bible Tells Me So -- have found the Christian part of the equation wanting. As good as these films were in some ways, the religious folk pictured were too often hypocritical, small-minded, uncaring -- or sometimes plain stupid. What makes Save Me such a find -- and a fine example of the religion-struggling-with-sexuality bind -- is that, here, both sides are filled with caring, decent people trying to do the right thing.

Can a movie that begins in today's Iraq and then tracks the furlough of two American soldiers, along with another who's actually finished his tours of duty, possibly be apolitical? Can it refuse to address whether Iraq was right or wrong -- except via the eyes of some of the home-front folk, and even then so glancingly that their opinions seem paltry? Or is that the point? "What do you think we're doing over there? What were you doing over there?" asks the nasty, confronting character played by John Heard, to the tired, quiet one played so resonantly by Tim Robbins. "Trying to stay alive," comes the reply.

Director/co-writer (with Dirk Wittenborn) Neil Burger (The Illusionist) has created something special with The Lucky Ones: a road/buddy movie in which one of those buddies is a gal; a film about self-discovery that makes the journey achingly real even as the destination remains ongoing; a story that quietly indicts us Americans who gave up not a thing while our countrymen died and killed fighting an "enemy" who had never attacked us. (We're giving things up now, of course: an unhappy continuation of the saga of our past eight-years.) All of the above is implicit in this movie, by the way. I have no idea on which side of the red/blue spectrum Burger resides, nor does it matter. Explicitly, he and Wittenborn (Fierce People) have given us a consistently interesting story inhabited by three wonderful characters -- funny sad, real and rich -- each of whom grows richer as the movie proceeds.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Right around the time of his break with Mia Farrow, Woody Allen began a journey down a new path. It was a journey that earned many new detractors. He had been a filmmaker that kept people happy and comfortable by doing the same thing again and again. Losing that stable, working relationship with Farrow and entering into a new one with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn caused an uproar. Fans could no longer see him in the same way, and his public persona -- which had been so inextricably entwined with the onscreen one -- soon became tarnished.

Starting with Husbands and Wives (his last film with Farrow), Allen began experimenting with hand-held cameras. He tried out new cinematographers, mainly from Europe and Asia, whose work he had admired in art house films. In Deconstructing Harry (1997), he began using copious foul language. From that point on his films had an angry, sour tone. Sometimes it felt as if something were repressed; his usual neurotically funny dialogue began to sound stiff and abrasive. Finally, in 2005 he left his beloved New York for the England of Match Point, and he left behind his skinny, intellectual heroines for the voluptuous, sensual Scarlett Johansson. Critics came to his side for that one, but they soon abandoned him again as his subsequent English films failed to please them once more. He was accused too many times of returning to the themes of his 1989 masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now, for the first time, Allen both looks ahead and settles down with his new film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I have usually found more to admire in Allen's late-period films than many of my colleagues, so my words may not mean much here, but I believe this film is Allen's newest masterpiece, and his greatest film in at least a decade.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Stuart Townsend wrote and directed Battle In Seattle and the film (the actor's first outing in those capacities), makes no bones about his utter dislike and disrespect of the WTO (World Trade Organization) and its "achievements." He lays all this out at the beginning and then launches into his docudrama set during several tumultuous days in 1999 when protestors, joined by labor organizations, managed to prevent the WTO from holding any kind of successful conference in the city of Seattle. At the time, this event -- an important part of the history of the Progressive Movement in the USA -- made big international news and gave a much-needed adrenaline jolt to progressive organizations worldwide.

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose first feature Half Nelson garnered acclaim for both them and for lead actor Ryan Gosling, give us an even more narratively successful sophomore effort with the baseball-fish out of water story Sugar.  The film was produced by Paul Mezey, who also produced Maria Full of Grace, a film this at times reminded me of, full of not only grace but thoughtful, empathetic but non-patronizing depictions of people from a culture different than our own.

Reviewer: Andrew Wright
Rating (out of 5): ***

Even the brashest of screenwriters might have trouble selling a studio on the character arc of Clint Eastwood as a fictional character. To wit: Guy becomes famous as tight-lipped bullet dispenser; moves on to self-aware, awesomely sideburned buddy of orangutans; settles, finally, on being a Grand Old Master of American Cinema. Out-and-out masterpieces like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima aside, what makes Eastwood's output as a filmmaker so fascinating is the way that his different eras tend to come unstuck and swagger into each others' respective turf: even in his most restrained films, there comes the occasional jarring reminder -- Hilary Swank's Lil' Abner relatives in Million Dollar Baby, Tim Robbins barking at the moon in the otherwise magisterial Mystic River -- that, yes, this is also the man behind such barn-broad dillies as Pink Cadillac and The Rookie.

Gran Torino, purportedly Eastwood's final time in front of the camera (and his second film of 2008, following the rather turgid Changeling) is the damndest thing: an elegiac treatise on race, aging, and manhood that keeps rearing up and going full-tilt cartoonishly loco. Featuring no small number of creaky plot contrivances and enough racial invectives to make Redd Foxx blanch, it's the most purely entertaining film that Eastwood has been involved with since In the Line of Fire. That it also manages to be ultimately rather moving may stand as the best testament yet to The Man's considerable skill set.

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): ****

Straightforward, unpretentious, and insightful, Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms is the sort of movie I've longed to see after what often seemed an interminable parade of drek. Anyone recently subjected to the trailer for the new "Transformers" marketing opportunity (some still prefer to call them movies) and its relentless onslaught of whizzes and bangs, not to mention its lurid hotwheels color palette, surely knows what I'm talking about. But even some "serious" filmmakers seem out to get the audience, to measure their worth in how much they can make us squirm with existential dread, or get stuck in moral impasses, or cry our eyes out, or question the very basis of our civilization. Whatever the excuses, too many films feel designed to shake us up and slap us around. Meanwhile, a film like Cherry Blossoms can make you feel human again.

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

Despite some brilliant performances from its three female leads, Daniel Barnz's Phoebe in Wonderland is an off-putting, misguided disease-of-the-week picture that tries to disguise itself as something else before finally coming clean. Elle Fanning plays the Phoebe of the title. She's the child of two brilliant parents, both writers. Her father (Bill Pullman) is putting the finishing touches on a book that will be published by a scholarly press. Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working on a study of "Alice in Wonderland," but never finds the time to write. Phoebe also has a sister (Bailee Madison) who complains that Phoebe gets all the attention--and she's right, because this sister never really makes much of a mark on the film.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

Nikita Mikhalkov's 12 received a 2007 Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film, though it wasn't released to U.S. theaters until March of 2009. Probably the same elements that appealed to the often annoyingly inexplicable foreign film committee -- a long running time and a certain "Russianness" -- also scared off potential distributors. It's also a remake of a beloved American classic, Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) -- written by Reginald Rose -- which may or may not sit well with some cinephiles. But all that aside, Mikhalkov turns in a surprisingly energetic, kinetic and gripping film, filled with an enviable selection of great character actors; it's easy to become absorbed looking at these twelve magnificent faces.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Given The Edge of Love is both a biopic of a famous writer and a film about the horrors of war, it's a wonder that the combo wasn't automatically showered with prizes. But instead it arrives here without much fanfare, after a quiet run in England, and too late for awards season. The Edge of Love tells the story of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys). His wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and his childhood sweetheart Vera (Keira Knightley) meet up during the Blitz of 1940 and become best friends. Dylan flirts with Vera, but she falls in love with a soldier, William (Cillian Murphy), who of course is just about to be shipped out to war and of course leaves her pregnant. In-between, Dylan tries to write, reads poetry, acts outrageously, drinks and argues with his employers, while the others smoke and lay about in shirtsleeves and bathrobes. Later, we're privy to a lot of fighting and yelling, and when William returns from the front, some shooting as well.

Director John Maybury (Love Is the Devil, The Jacket) tries hard to film this routine material with some cinematic flourish; he very often creates a kind of odd, out-of-body feel, as in Knightley's nightclub singing sequences, coaxing and cooing and gazing directly at the camera.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

When Michael Chabon had his first novel –"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" – published in 1988, it created a literary sensation, became a best-seller and sent the young author onwards toward a major career, which he has sustained to this day. Because of the gay and bisexual references in that novel, the author’s initial fan base was perhaps wider than it might have been otherwise, but the sense of young adults experimenting with “forbidden fruit,” from crime to transgressive sex seemed just that: experimentations that may or may not prove conclusive. The widely-panned-upon-release movie version of the novel turns out to be better than expected, due in some part to a deserved backlash against those negative reviews but just as much to the charismatic performances from two of its three leads, and a nicely understated one from the other. For me, these characters proved more involving on-screen than on-page. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is no gem, but it’s no disaster, either. Basically a coming-of-age story, it traffics in cliché but dresses its characters and situations in enough new clothes and conceits to make them live and shine – at least for the 95-minute running time.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Israeli director Amos Gitai can be one of the world's most graceful and effective filmmakers, as in his extraordinary war film Kippur (2000), or in certain sections of his Natalie Portman-starrer Free Zone (2005). But he's equally susceptible to ham-fisted episodes, as with the clunky Kedma (2002). Unfortunately, his new film One Day You'll Understand (a.k.a. Plus tard) also earns that dubious distinction.

It's 1987, during the time of the Klaus Barbie trials. Jeanne Moreau -- at 80, she's by far the most striking creature in the film -- stars as Rivka, a grandmother who refuses to talk about her past with her grown son, Victor (Hippolyte Girardot, Flight of the Red Balloon, Jump Tomorrow). Victor is obsessed with the Holocaust and wants to find out what happened to his grandparents. But Rivka deftly evades questions and we get a sense of the pain and denial involved in her long life. Too bad this wasn't a short film; in the first 20 minutes or so, we get all the information we need from Moreau's performance. Oddly, Moreau had the same affect in François Ozon's Time to Leave, an at times insufferable film that was buoyed by Moreau's unbearably beautiful moments as the grandmother of the dying hero. Far from a grandmotherly grand dame of cinema, she's still vital.

Reviewer: Amy Monaghan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"What happened?" It's a question that's haunted fans of the cult classic Grey Gardens ever since David and Albert Maysles' cinema verité portrait of Big Edie and Little Edie debuted in 1975. The HBO original movie Grey Gardens endeavors to show just how this mother-daughter duo ended up living like a cross between the Collyer brothers and Miss Havisham in a derelict mansion in the Hamptons by filling in the Bouvier Beale women's glittering Park Avenue pasts. So we see mother Edie canoodling with a sybaritic music teacher straight out of 1930s screwball comedies like The Awful Truth and My Man Godfrey, as well as what happens after her husband leaves her. Young Edie escorts her little cousin Jacqueline Bouvier to the beach before lighting out for Manhattan, where she aspires to be an actress and falls in love with a married man. Edie never does find an appropriate beau from the exclusive Maidstone Club to marry. Instead she is summoned home to resume the suffocating codependent relationship she tried to flee.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): **

My wife walked into the room and sat down while I was watching this indie dramedy period piece about a suburban family falling apart and said, "Oh, good, I love The Ice Storm." And I do, too. I can still remember the fullness of the world that Ang Lee created in that indie dramedy period piece about a suburban family falling apart through.

Alas, Lymelife is not that movie.

Lymelife so closely hews to The Ice Storm that one wonders if it came about in a parallel universe where Lee's film was a runaway hit and some savvy studio exec gave the green light to all 70's-era coming of age stories with families torn asunder by self-centered, adulterous parents.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The brilliant writer, self-promoter and publisher Dave Eggers makes the inevitable leap to screenwriting with Away We Go, co-written with his wife, novelist Vendela Vida. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film is very funny when broken into individual scenes, but it takes too many easy potshots at low targets and thereby fails to come together as an emotional whole.

Burt (The Office's John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph, SNL, Idiocracy) are a happy thirtysomething couple, living a simple life. Burt sells insurance and Verona is a graphic designer. But everything changes when they learn that they're expecting their first child. Hoping that Burt's parents (Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) will lend a hand, they're shocked to learn that his parents instead will be moving halfway around the world. Burt and Verona realize that they're not really tied down to any particular place, and so take a road trip to find a new place to live, preferably near some friends or family.

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): **½

Give Atom Egoyan 110 minutes and he’ll give you a handful of unrealized MacGuffins and a whole big piece of his mind. Adoration, just out on DVD, spends more time dabbling in the soft art of misdirection than actually resolving a plot. In fairness, the film does portray our current technological moment (and the teenagers who are its biggest beneficiaries) quite accurately. If only the film's overarching message of our tech-induced de-sensitivity weren’t so 1995 (hello The Net).

The skeletal plot takes off at a saunter as orphaned high school student Simon (Devon Bostick) begins telling his friends a tale of his father’s supposed terrorist tendencies, which resulted in the near-bombing of an airplane and the death of his mother. Living with his financially strained Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman, The Strangers, Underworld), Simon’s story attracts an ever growing internet audience of kids, pundits, intellectuals, ideologues and other talking heads. Can fundamentalism be legitimized? Humanized? Are the people who survived the non-plane crash victims in their own rite? These questions and more grow alongside a confused plot regarding Simon’s family history and his mysteriously doting French teacher, Sabine (Egoyan's wife and frequent star Arsinée Khanjian).

Reviewer: Amy Monaghan
Rating (out of 5): ****½

It is, a title archly informs us, “the very early '80s” - “September,” to be exact - but the strobelight flicker of the opening credits and the thumping beat make it clear that we are in The Last Days of Disco (1998). In the final film of director Whit Stillman's informal trilogy (after Metropolitan and Barcelona), recent Hampshire grads Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloe Sevigny, escaping from Harmony Korine films) spend their days trying to discover the best seller that will elevate them from editorial assistants to associate editors at a midtown Manhattan publishing house.

History, however, is made at night. That's when they go to the club (never named) - if, that is, they can make past imperious doorman Von (director Burr Steers, years before Igby Goes Down). This disco is not meant to be Studio 54 exactly - Bianca Jagger never shows up on horseback, although two-time Spy magazine Ironman Nightlife Triathalon winner and social gadfly Anthony Haden Guest lurks in some shots, while Drew Barrymore's mother Jaid, as nightlife fixture the "Tiger Lady," slinks across others. But the film provides a backdrop for after-dark commingling of the sort that saw Fab Five Freddy heading downtown to collaborate with Blondie.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

With Ballast, writer/director Lance Hammer tells a story about a broken African-American family in Mississippi's Delta: a man commits suicide and his surviving twin brother Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.) finds himself alone, in charge of their little convenience store and dealing with his angry sister-in-law Marlee (Tarra Riggs), who understandably has mixed emotions about seeing him. Lawrence's nephew James (JimMyron Ross) is possibly even more alone, having become involved with local drug dealers while his mother is away working all the time. Hammer lets us in on these details a little at a time, rather than spelling it all out. The setting is relentlessly gray, with leafless, spindly trees, ground so cold and muddy you can practically feel it with your toes, and a slightly foggy emptiness. This film has received glowing reviews from nearly every quarter; and with its non-white characters and barren landscapes, it does feel like an escape from fluffy Hollywood.

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): ****

Judd Apatow’s third film (after 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) Funny People, is slow, disjointed, and riddled with long breaks between laughs. It is also something close to an American comedy masterpiece. Which doesn't mean that it is among the funniest American films. While Funny People is decidedly a film about people, the “funny” in the title is less apparent. But it calls into question our preconceived definitions of comedy: What makes someone a comedian? What makes the rest of us laugh?

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

A kind of Sin Nombre-lite -- very light, but still enjoyable -- Paraiso Travel tracks a group of Colombian immigrants before, during and after their landing in the USA, and finally into my own little New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Beginning with a set of knock-out opening credits, as the camera glides over the tiny rooms in a kind of halfway house for illegals, the filmmakers observe from on high the various goings-on with a clear-eyed, non-judgmental look. (The closing credits are equally good, and even more artistic.)

Reviewer: Jonthan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): ****

Even in an artform as ever-changing as cinema, films from what many consider one of Hollywood's strongest, richest periods -- the late 60s/early 70s -- still feel remarkably fresh. And it's not just the famous examples, from The Graduate to The Parallax View, Chinatown to The Godfather, it's some of the lesser but still important films from that period that make it such a deep and endlessly fascinating era to study. And in that group I'd add Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, which is now out in a sparkling new Criterion DVD. Featuring some of the most innovative sports photography for its day and remarkable performances from Gene Hackman and Robert Redford, it's a wonder that this film isn't more well known. Thankfully, Criterion has reminded us to give it another look.

On its surface, Downhill Racer is a simple story about a man whose only life goal is to win for the sake of winning. Redford plays David Chappellet, a Colorado-born farm boy who quickly rises through the ranks on the U.S. ski team. He is a man-child in many ways, dealing with his daddy issues while chasing after women without any regard for his own (or anyone else's) well being. But because Redford is Redford, he doesn't come off as a complete schmuck. Even as he takes the woman off the arm of one of his teammates, he is suave and genuine. Eyes deep enough to drown in, it's no wonder he has made generations swoon.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale opens with the death of a child, but there's actually a reason for it beyond cheap audience manipulation. In fact, the child's death - which is depicted with shadow puppets - is eulogized in a profoundly joyful way by the boy's father (played pitch-perfectly by Jean-Paul Roussillon). In a tribute with language borrowed from the poet Emerson, he sees his son's death as the well from which the rest of his own life is to spring. It's surprising and complicated and, at risk of sounding bathetic, puts a smile on your face at the same time as putting a tear in your eye.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The admirable, well-made Argentine film Lion's Den features no performers you’ll probably have ever heard of, and that's to its benefit; it adds to the film's documentary-like realism. At the beginning of Pablo Trapero's film (he also did the underrated Rolling Family), a young woman awakens in something of a stupor, looking bruised and bloodied; she showers, still in that stupor, and goes to work. Later, at her job, when her head begin to bleed, she returns home to find her roommates dead and wounded. She calls the police, but with no suspects other than herself on tap, she ends up incarcerated in prison.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"Coming to America" films in the past have typically been packaged as either broad comedy (such as uh, Coming to America) or relentlessly bleak dramas (In America) and tend to gravitate towards the urban centers of the United States. Amreeka (marking the debut of L-Word writer-director Cherien Dabis) posits a recently divorced, non-religious Palestinian woman and her son embarking on a journey to the far more recognizable landscape of contemporary American life: the suburbs.

After Muna and her teenage son Fadi are granted visas through a lottery program, they spend precious little decision-making time to determine that their once comfortable life under occupation is becoming so exceedingly dangerous and lacking in opportunity that taking a chance on a new beginning is their only viable option. They move in with her sister in the outer boroughs of Chicago where Muna looks for work as an accountant and Fadi starts at a new high school. Unfortunately, her accent and his timid nature are immediately deemed unacceptable in each of those worlds, leaving her working at a White Castle restaurant and him getting beat up on a regular basis.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

In 2006, many film writers became excited about a certain movement, a kind of Mexican New Wave, spearheaded by three major movies released toward the end of the year by directors from Mexico at the top of their game, Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. There were several other, smaller films in the movement as well, including Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven and Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season, which were more under the radar. A slightly bigger story was the feud that cropped up between director Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga over the three films they made together (Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel).

It seems that each man wanted to take most of the credit for the success of all three films, to the detriment of the other. Outsiders could not tell which one was right, though given Iñárritu's overall lack of directorial personality, and the fact that Arriaga also wrote Tommy Lee Jones' superb The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, it looked as if the more fruitful artist might indeed be Arriaga. Unfortunately, Arriaga's own directorial debut, The Burning Plain, might just as easily prove everyone wrong. It's a dreary slog of a movie that's so tightly wound and so full of its own convictions that if it seems to loosen up or breathe for just a moment, we know that it's really just foreshadowing the next disaster. Hence, it's all too easy to read in advance. (If someone stops to make tortillas for lunch, get ready for a plane crash.)

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The steal of the Best Foreign Language Film category at last year's Academy Awards ceremony, Departures (Okuribito), the Japanese entry directed by Yôjirô Takita (Onmyoji) and written by Kundo Koyama, was a surprise winner, besting critics' darlings Waltz With Bashir (from Israel) and The Class (France), Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex and Austria's Revanche. This bizarre combination of death, tradition and cello playing did what so many of the winning films in this category have done down the decades: It moved, surprised and enlightened its audience.

But was it the best of these films? Not by a long shot. I'd have ranked them thusly: Baader Meinhof, The Class, Departures, Revanche and Waltz With Bashir*. Having finally seen Departures, I think I understand the dichotomy experienced around the time of the awards -- reading all the negatives from most of the "better" critics, yet constantly hearing such good things about the movie from one after another of what we might call the "average" art-house moviegoer.