The political is personal, and all pervasive, as revealed over and over
as we move to the first full day of screenings at the 41st edition of
this year's festival. The mode of political inquiry, moral, aesthetic
and existential is recurrent in...
As a sometime theater critic, I try not to play for tickets and I
rarely sit in the front row, but for George Takei's musical "Allegiance"
I made an exception in 2012. That was not because I was a fan of "Star
Trek: The Original Series" or...
Every major film festival cultivates a privileged aura. Sundance asserts
the primacy of the American independent and heralds the wonder of the
breakthrough discovery. Cannes celebrates the cultural prominence of
film as a fabric of French...
I wish I could recommend "As Above, So Below" more strongly. It's that rare found-footage film with a strong premise, a memorably eccentric style, and plenty of energy to burn. It's also poorly conceived, and hard to watch. Normally, that's...
A title as good as "The Last of Robin Hood" deserves a better movie. In fact, it deserves a good movie. That's a shame. If you were fantasy-casting this story of the sad final days of Errol Flynn—who became an international star in 1938's...
How to make Hollywood poetically tragic when most of the time it's
just plain old depressing? The players are forgotten, abandoned, chewed
up, spit out and they die everyday, and the show goes on. Geniuses and
visionaries have to conform or...
Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland
beige in the mostly straight-to-video “The Calling,” a piece that almost
miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan...
The late great Elmore Leonard, on whose novel “The Switch”
this movie is based, gets an executive producer credit on the movie. It’s
significant, perhaps, that said credit doesn’t appear until after the...
Characterizing Belgian co-directors/writers Helene Cattet
and Bruno Forzani's style is tricky since they've only made two
features to date. Both "Amer" and "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears" are visually overpowering homages to Italian...
Telling of 13-year-old twin boys (László Gyémánt and András Gyémánt) who endure the harsh punishments of World War II’s final stretch in rural Hungary, János Szász’s "The...