Film
PICK Soul Power: James Brown and Others in Their Funky Prime
Soul Power documents the three-day music festival that accompanied the iconic 1974 Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the…
Film
PICK In the Loop: Beltway Bozos Battle British Bureaucrats
The creative team behind the BBC’s political satire The Thick of It has added a few Yanks to…
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The Windmill Movie: Documentary as Ventriloquism
If an obscenely privileged person has the good sense to apologize for his whining, does this self-awareness make…
Film
The Country Teacher: Coming Out in the Czech Republic
The solemn new addition to the tiny elementary-school faculty in a rural Czech outpost gets off to a…
Film
The Girl From Monaco: Crime and Farce in the South of France
There’s not much to this thin, sun-drenched concoction about a straight-arrow Paris lawyer (Fabrice Luchini) who descends on…
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The Ugly Truth: Katherine Heigl Tries to Tame the 300 Guy
In this lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly…
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PICK Lake Tahoe: Deadpan Doings in Mexico
Coming down from the Saturday sugar rush of his 2006 comedy Duck Season, Mexican auteur Fernando Eimbcke’s lovely,…
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Audience of One: Faith on Film
Michael Jacobs’ Audience of One belongs to a particular nonfiction genre—the docu-exploitation of a spectacularly miscarried movie. Jacobs’…
Film
$9.99: A Claymation Spiritual Quest
Tatia Rosenthal’s stop-motion animation feature adds a measure of stolid creepiness to co-writer Etgar Keret’s brand of dark…
Film
PICK Unmistaken Child: A Buddhist Detective Story in Nepal
Tibetan Buddhism has become the Hello Kitty/noble lost cause for Western spiritual seekers. But though the Dalai Lama…
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The Stoning of Soraya M: More Bad News From Iran
For those ambivalent about whether stoning women to death is a cruel punishment or not, here’s a dutifully…
Film
(500) Days of Summer: We Heart Zooey Deschanel
Can there be a thing as too much cute? This is the dilemma for Summer (also the name…
Film
PICK Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Six Is Not Enough
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter…
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Management: Oh, Jennifer Aniston, We Tried to Warn You
Each new superfluous Jennifer Aniston rom-com is already met with low expectations, but add some overcooked, middlebrow Indiewood…
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PICK Kabei: Our Mother: Family Drama From Japan
An unpretentious and old-fashioned (that is, crisply legible) domestic drama, Kabei shows how Rising Sun Japan’s sense of…
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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…
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Objectified: Yes, Design Is a Product
Gary Hustwit name-checks his stylish 2007 typography doc Helvetica in this second film of a proposed nerd-porn trilogy,…
Film
PICK Brüno: Sacha Baron Cohen Feels Your Shame
Willkommen to the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza Brüno (directed by guerrilla filmmaker Larry Charles), which is often…
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Humpday: Would-Be Seattle Pornographers Talk About Transgressive Art
Let’s save the snickering bromance jokes for another day, another movie. Local director Lynn Shelton is no…
Film
PICK The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelows Ticket to the Oscars
There’s nothing more cinematic than a ticking bomb and the life-or-death deadline to defuse it. The LED…