Bill Maher’s one-man stand-up attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite—a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding…
For the three Muslim-American stand-up comics showcased in this concert film, terror is something more than stage fright. Mohammed “Mo”…
The world’s oldest civilization is in some respects the world’s newest. And 37-year-old filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the preeminent cine-chronicler of…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal…
La France is a platoon film unlike any I’ve ever seen. Director Serge Bozon treats the first total war with…
A combat doc once removed from combat and twice mediated by stagecraft, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’ Iraq (or rather…
At once cerebral film essay and unsweetened ear candy, Pere Portabella’s Silence Before Bach is nearly as tough to categorize…
Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war…
Catherine Breillat hitches her wagon to the hottest of European stars, Asia Argento, in a highly entertaining adaptation of Jules-Amédée…
Guy Maddin’s frozen reverie on Canada’s “Gateway to the West” is barely defrosted by the warmth of the…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line—a found “noir” that served to free an innocent…
Predicated on the spectacle of functionally depressed types stuck in mildly ridiculous situations not entirely of their own making, the…
David Mamet Puts Himself in a Headlock
The Wachowski Brothers Regress Into Their TV Infancy
The Red Balloon was the art-house E.T. of 1956. Flight of the Red Balloon is something far more baffling—a literal-minded…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art”…
There’s basically one reason to see Olivier Assayas’ self-consciously meta-sleazy English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller, and her name is Asia Argento. Argento’s Sandra—a…
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant’s masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film’s narrative structure…
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory on a new 35mm print, is a chunk…
Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory on a new 35 mm print, is a…
