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PICK Somers Town: An Adorable Boy Lost in the Big (Not So Bad) City
Commissioned by the Eurostar train company as part of the promotional campaign for its new high-speed rail service…
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The BQE: Sufjan Stevens Puts Pavement to Music
Commissioned by and first performed (in 2007) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens’ orchestral suite isn’t…
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The Burning Plain: Charlize Theron Is Lost in a Jigsaw Puzzle
Oregon restaurant manager Charlize Theron, prone to submissive promiscuity and self-inflicted violence, sits naked in bed next to…
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The Informant!: Matt Damon Is Totally Deluded
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing to turn real-life pulp into floss…
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Bright Star: The Quiet Return of Jane Campion
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early-19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane…
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PICK Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: Animation We Dont Hate
By the time the brilliant fuck-up of a hero says to the heroine, “Why do you do that—say…
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9: Animated Puppets Survive the Apocalypse
Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers, and…
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The Baader Meinhof Complex: Germanys Radical 70s Make Little Sense Today
Founded by self-described urban guerrillas Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction were the…
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PICK The Beaches of Agnès: A Veteran Director Powered by Love
The great idiosyncratic original of the French nouvelle vague generation, Agnès Varda began her career as a photographer,…
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PICK You, the Living: More Deadpan Vignettes From Sweden
You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny, arranged by Roy Andersson, a Swedish director…
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Interview: Bobcat Goldthwait on the Comedy of Disappointment
From a Seattle-made midlife comedy of disappointment is career resurgence found.
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PICK Il Divo: Italian Politics Before Berlusconi
After the acclaimed Gomorrah, Italian corruption gets a much quieter but equally vigorous workout in Paolo Sorrentino’s highly…
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My One and Only: Renée Zellweger Gives Birth to George Hamilton
Your enjoyment of My One and Only will depend on how much the words “inspired by incidents in…
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PICK World’s Greatest Dad: Robin Williams Tries to Erase His Son
Comedian Bob “Bobcat” Goldthwait was exploring inappropriate humor long before Shakes the Clown or the little-seen Stay (in…
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Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha: Melvin Van Peebles Overshares
In Melvin Van Peebles’ homely home-video-art love-story curio, incorporating fragments of his 1982 stage musical Waltz of the…
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Lornas Silence: The Dardenne Brothers Repeat Themselves
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, secular worker-priests of the Belgian cinema, emerge once more from their lower depths. In…
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PICK Burma VJ: The Revolution Will Be Twittered
How we view the relationship between traditional and new media should forever be changed by Danish filmmaker Anders…
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The Answer Man: Why, Jeff Daniels, Why?
In his quiet way, Jeff Daniels can coax to vivid life the most cardboard type—which is just as…
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It Might Get Loud: Jack White Hates Technology
Marketed as a guitar summit with The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White, Davis Guggenheim’s affectionate, intermittently insightful…
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It Might Get Loud Director Talks Guitar Heroes
With an Oscar on the mantel for producing and directing An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim decided to take…