Film
Today’s Special: Starring Aasif Mandvi From The Daily Show
Cheerful in outline and yet prone to maudlin bulges in its middle, Today’s Special stars Daily Show correspondent…
Film
Mademoiselle Chambon: French Romance Across the Class Divide
Discreetly drawn and elegantly photographed, Mademoiselle Chambon gives a French working-class love triangle the Brief Encounter treatment. With…
Film
Looking for Eric: Ken Loach Makes a Welcome Foray Into Comedy
What might strike American viewers as the most quizzical thing about Looking for Eric, Ken Loach’s humble ode…
Film
Living in Emergency: Meet the MDs of Medecins Sans Frontieres
Not interested in heroicizing the four Western doctors it follows through their missions in the Congo and Liberia,…
Film
Paper Man: Jeff Daniels Is Taunted by Ryan Reynolds
An artist-in-crisis piece run through a drab but quirk-conscious indie processor, Paper Man is everything a film like…
Film
Oceans: James Bond Gets Cuddly With Nature
An almost miraculously photographed showcase of some of the seven seas’ least seen and most incredible specimens, Disney’s…
Film
The Sun Behind the Clouds: The Dalai Lama Can Only Do So Much
Documenting both the largest Tibetan uprising since the 1959 Chinese takeover and the Dalai Lama’s pre-Beijing Olympics diplomatic…
Film
Motherhood: No, Uma, No
Casting against type is one thing, but putting Uma Thurman—an unheralded character actress; the more extraordinary the character,…
Film
Pressure Cooker: If You Cant Stand the Heat
Wilma Stephenson runs her high-school culinary-arts class like a Marine sergeant: She’s loud, cranky, and prone to threatening…
Film
Enlighten Up!: Yoga for Dummies
There are a number of tensions at play in Kate Churchill’s documentary about the proliferation of yoga as…
Film
A Wink and a Smile: Seattle Burlesque Documentary Shows Its Slip
Made in Seattle, A Wink and a Smile combines a survey of the underground burlesque resurgence, where the…
Film
PICK 12: Russia Does Right by an American Courtroom Classic
Russian actor/director Nikita Mikhalkov’s masterful, engrossing 12 is a revamp of 12 Angry Men that takes place in…
Film
Beauty in Trouble: Melodrama From the Czech Republic
The center of Beauty in Trouble, Czech director Jan Hrebejk’s trying foray into soapy realism, is the kind…
Film
Ballerina: From Russia, With Long Legs
Manuel Legris, a French dancer interviewed in Bertrand Norman’s involving study of the Russian ballet, insists that a…
Film
PICK Back to Normandy: Burrowing Into Old French Cinema
Determined to cast only locals in his 1976 adaptation of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière (also playing NWFF…
Film
Azur & Asmar: For Those Who Like Their Tolerance Parables Animated
With its delicate fairy-tale bones and layer of politically conscious muscle, Azur & Asmar is a sleek yet…
Film
Lake City: Crime and Punishment in Rural Virginia
Troy Garity has a rangy, lonesome-stranger body and pouchy eyes. He can boot a cigarette butt to the…
Film
The Grocer’s Son: A Red State-Blue State Divide in France
Director Eric Guirado’s The Grocer’s Son is a small, self-assured film that moves at its own pace, always…
Film
I.O.U.S.A.: Our National Debt Is Just as Bad as the Mortgage Mess
Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom, I.O.U.S.A. is an Inconvenient Truth for…
Film
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2: Ugly Betty, Blake Lively, and the Other Girls Are Back
Resist if you dare, and for as long as you must, but even the hoariest haters eventually succumbed…