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Chop Shop: Neorealism in New York
You come away from Chop Shop with a mood, the voluptuous sum of its fine-tuned parts: the way…
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Body of War: Yes, You Should Still Care About the Iraq War
Co-directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue—yes, that Phil Donahue, who will do a Q&A following the 7…
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Young @ Heart : Is Kirk Douglas Available for the Remake?
From the washed-out images to the twee voice-over (courtesy of director Stephen Walker), this British television documentary about…
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Backseat: Slackers Venture on Emo Road Trip
Ben (Rob Bogue) has no job and a sexpot girlfriend (Aubrey Dollar) who wants to see other people;…
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Refusenik: News Flash! Soviets Oppress Jews
The strain of living and scheming under a totalitarian regime can make for great drama, as The Lives…
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Chaos Theory: Is Ryan Reynolds the New George Clooney?
Who can lift the American screen comedy from a vast muck of sniggery boner gags and crap-pop bricolage?…
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New on DVD: Javier Bardem Still Super Scary in NCFOM
The Darjeeling Limited Fox, $29.99 With the exception of his debut—Bottle Rocket, still his most human film—all of…
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Irina Palm: How Could They Do This to Marianne Faithfull?
Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of…
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Super High Me: Skip the Movie, Score Your Own Laughs
Stoner comic Doug Benson is nothing if not scrupulous about crediting the inspiration for this cold-turkey/baked-turkey documentary—Morgan Spurlock’s…
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Sex and Death 101: Just Rent Heathers Instead
Writer-director Daniel Waters, who scripted Heathers eons ago, inexplicably keeps gigging. Here, the name of the game is…
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The Year My Parents Went on Vacation: Drama and Comedy in 70s Brazil
A brutal crackdown on left-wing dissidents by Brazil’s new military dictatorship hardly registers in a country preoccupied with…
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Blindsight: Adorable Blind Tibetans Outshine Their Benefactors
It’s difficult to find anything bad to say about a movie featuring six adorable blind Tibetan children who…
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Street Kings: Keanu Reeves Kicks Ass, Takes Names, Bores Us
Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim…
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Smart People: Ellen Pages Middling Juno Follow-Up
Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid, beneath a greasy moptop and a brushy beard) is a misanthropic college prof who,…
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Leatherheads: George Clooney Makes Like Preston Sturges
On-screen and off, George Clooney is like a holdover from a time—which, admittedly, may only have ever existed…
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Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman: Six Hours Long, Yet Surprisingly Not Awful
Jennifer Fox’s Flying should be a supremely irritating movie. For starters, it’s a six-hour meditation on the filmmaker’s…
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The Grand: Woody Harrelson Leads Poker Spoof Crew
As the convergence of two cooling trends—poker and the comic mock-doc—this largely improvised comedy set at a Texas…
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Seattle Jewish Film Festival: No Politics, Please!
For the 13th edition of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, let’s ignore the politics of the Middle East,…
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Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness: A Scottish Road (Movie) to Whimsy
Fitzcarraldo hoisted a steamboat over a Peruvian mountain so that a tiny village could experience opera. Not literally…
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Bomb It: Waging a Jihad With Spray-Paint
Graffiti taggers wearing masks, lurking in the shadows of our urban grid, watched by security cameras, and running…