Recent Stories
A Dog of a Story: Darling Companion takes the boring travails of rich people to the dullest of lows.
Dogs and spouses: Both make fine companions until they misbehave or run away. Lawrence Kasdan, the filmmaker who so well encapsulated generational preoccupations in The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, tries to do the same ...
Footnote
Talmud Tale: Father and son academics engage in rivalry of Biblical proportions in Footnote.
The usual strife between fathers and sons charts an uncommon course through academia in this laceratingly comic and award-winning Israeli film. The Shkolnik men – father Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba) and son Uriel (Loir Ashkenazi) ...
The Kid With a Bike
Simply Beautiful: The Dardenne brothers use simplicity and the mundane as tools of transcendence in The Kid With a Bike.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, The Kid With a Bike is indeed a towering achievement, perhaps all the more so because of its deceptive simplicity. This latest film ...
Pariah
Coming Out On Top: Pariah refuses to conform in its telling of a closeted lesbian’s trials of self-discovery.
Pariah encompasses the personal and the universal with its emotionally engaging story about a Brooklyn teenager who struggles to find a place to fit in and thrive. The film is fresh yet familiar, raw but ...
My Week With Marilyn
The Goddess Effect: Michelle Williams conjures immortality, but My Week With Marilyn fails to charm.
Colin Clark was 23 years old when the most famous movie star in the world, Marilyn Monroe, came to England to co-star with acting legend Sir Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, which ...
The Ides of March
George Clooney-led ensemble cast in The Ides of March is an intern romance away from landslide success.
The perfectly captured gray slush of Ohio in winter provides a suitable backdrop for George Clooney’s morality tale about politics in America. Clooney’s fourth directorial outing calls to mind ’70s political thrillers such as The ...
Bloody Aliens
England’s Attack the Block moves the extraterrestrial attack flick to a fresh and clever new ’hood: the projects.
Smart, quick, funny, and economical, Attack the Block is an alien-invasion movie that is a breed apart. Set largely within a London housing project, the film turns on the idea that its young hoodlum protagonists ...
Another Earth
Parallel Pooper: Another Earth fails to make it out of its own sci-fi field of gravity.
Shaky science fiction shacks up with a corny redemption tale in this Sundance Film Festival double award-winner. What emerges is a film with a potent signature image, a swirl of half-baked ideas about the possibility ...
Sarah’s Key
Sad Truth: Sarah’s Key turns audiences on to arresting characters persevering through onerous but dramatically different obstacles.
Two parallel stories from different eras intertwine and inform each other in Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s film, which is based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel. The structure is a delicate balancing act, since one story is ...
Hesher
Strong performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rainn Wilson undone by nonsense.
Hesher, the nihilistic character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the antidote for what ails this movie’s dysfunctional family. The character is designed to be pure id – a snarling, half-dressed squatter bearing ominous tattoos on ...
