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PICK JCVD: Belgian Tough Guy Just Wants Respect
JCVD wastes little time working itself into a pretzel. The action begins under the credits with Jean-Claude Van…
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Fuel: One Suggestion for Our Petroleum Addiction
Screened at SIFF as Fields of Fuel (now expanded with new material), this documentary about the virtues of…
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PICK Bolt: John Travolta Goes to the Dog
Like every other kids’ movie coming off the studio line these days, the charming and well-crafted animated feature…
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PICK A Christmas Tale: And You Thought Your Holiday Gatherings Were Messy?
Twelve days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama is a heady plum…
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Days and Clouds: More Problems From Italy
Elsa (Margherita Buy) and Michele (Antonio Albanese) have a problem: They’re a married couple in a middlebrow arthouse…
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Slumdog Millionaire: Like Charles Dickens in Mumbai
Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, who wouldn’t in this economy, even if the currency in question…
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Let the Right One In: Adorable Swedish Child Vampires in Love
This lucid Swedish indie gem, adapted for the screen by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel and directed…
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Quantum of Solace: Not So Royale as the Last 007 Flick
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had…
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Festival of New Cinema From Spain: Where’s Javier?
Javier Bardem must be in here someplace. Yet skimming through my clutch of preview DVDs, I failed to…
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Role Models: Paul Rudd Meets McLovin
In every way, this is just another formulaic romp about two selfish slackers getting their priorities rearranged by…
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Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback: Obscure Band Has Local Connection
Some musical footnotes remain just that for good reason. Rough contemporaries of the recently reunited Sonics, the Monks…
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The Romance of Astrea and Celadon: Eric Rohmer in the 17th Century
A film that Eric Rohmer has suggested will be his last, Astrea and Celadon is a costume pageant…
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PICK Synecdoche, New York: Inside Charlie Kaufman
If you traveled the length of John Malkovich’s medulla oblongata and walked through the adjoining door of the…
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Flow: We Must Protect Our Precious Planetary Fluids!
One of those charming little documentaries that make you question whether the human race is really worth preserving,…
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Ive Loved You So Long: Would You Trust Kristin Scott Thomas With Your Kids?
As Juliette, a Frenchwoman newly released from prison, Kristin Scott Thomas is so relentlessly unbending, so full of…
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Bush on Film: Will He Have a Screen Life After W.?
Oliver Stone’s surprisingly sympathetic biopic W. isn’t the only Bush movie at the multiplex. An American Carol opened…
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Soul Men: We Miss Bernie Mac
In Soul Men, actor-comedian Bernie Mac, who passed away in August, plays Floyd Henderson, a present-day car-wash mogul…
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PICK Fear(s) of the Dark: All Cartoons, All Scary
While some may snicker at “graphic novel” as a term for comic books that take themselves too seriously,…
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The Pool: Sorry, Wrong Caste
Leaving Milwaukee to tell an indigenous tale of life on India’s west coast, director/DP Chris Smith inevitably brings…
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Eden Lake: An English Vacation in Hell
Gleefully demonizing both the British “chav” working class and the horror genre’s usual target audience of mid-teen males,…