Film
Cracks: Heavy Breathing at an English Boarding School
As boarding-school bodice-rippers go, this assured debut by British director and girls’-school alumna Jordan Scott fairly bursts with…
Ella Taylor
Film
In a Better World: The Afghan War Hits Home
If The King’s Speech was a comfy middlebrow choice for Best Picture of 2010, how much more depressing…
Film
Zero Bridge: Kashmir Is Complicated
Made for a song with a non-pro cast and DV camera gear out of his backpack, Tariq Tapa’s…
Film
Winter in Wartime: A Dutch Teen Hero in WWII
Updated for a skeptical age, this new World War II movie comes impeccably groomed in period-attentive tans and…
Film
Nuremberg: A 65-Year-Old Film Finally Sees the Light of Day
Delivering the news in the late 1940s that Universal Pictures would not release Stuart Schulberg’s documentary about the…
Film
Barney’s Version: Paul Giamatti as Lovable Drunk
The late Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) was a bellicose practitioner of Jewish fiction…
Film
Budrus: An Uneasy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
The little-told story of a small but growing nonviolent opposition movement among rural West Bank Palestinians gets an…
Film
How Do You Know: Reese Witherspoon Must Choose Between Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd
This brave odd duck of a romantic comedy from James L. Brooks strays as far from a barrel…
Film
A Film Unfinished: Deciphering Nazi Propaganda
Does it matter that a young Israeli filmmaker’s imaginative reconstruction of an abandoned Nazi propaganda film about the…
Film
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: More of the Same From Woody Allen
Kept afloat by an excellent cast, Woody Allen’s fourth movie about callow Londoners recklessly pursuing emotional wreckage begins…
Film
Killing Kasztner: A Little-Known Tale of the Holocaust
For the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who still remember him, and the thousands of young Jews and…
Film
Harry Brown: Michael Caine Gets All Death Wish
Purely for the reliable pleasure of Michael Caine’s company, I came ready to praise what threatened to be…
Film
Cyrus: Jonah Hill Seriously Creeps Us Out
In this freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent…
Film
Sex and the City 2: Sarah Jessica Parker Refuses to Act Her Age
Sarah Jessica Parker is now 45 years old, and frankly I cannot stomach another moment of the simpering,…
Film
The Secret of Kells: No Oscar, but an Animated Treat
Nominated for an Oscar, the animated Secret of Kells came out of nowhere—an enchantingly old-fashioned Irish upstart about…
Film
Mid-August Lunch: The Golden Girls, Italian Style
Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for…
Film
American Radical: A Jew Takes Issue With Israel
Noam Chomsky reveres him. Leon Wieseltier hates him. Alan Dershowitz called him an anti-Semite and applied successful pressure…
Film
The Girl on the Train: Catherine Deneuve Loves Too Little
For better or worse, there isn’t a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into…
Film
Fish Tank: British Teen Grows Up Too Fast
Katie Jarvis, who makes her acting debut as a rabid teenager in writer/director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, was…
Film
Waiting for Armageddon: A Trenchant View of the Bible Belt
Line up this terrific documentary about end-times evangelical Christians against Bill Maher’s sneering Religulous, and you’ll see an…