Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class with Mr. Holland’s Opus and Dangerous Minds. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving…
Rooted in the old Confucian proverb (“See no evil…” etc.), this slow-paced Turkish crime tale is constructed more from holes…
“How do you define yourself?” It’s not until its third act that Medicine for Melancholy‘s lead male character explicitly asks…
Lance Hammer’s remarkable, unfailingly intelligent debut film, rooted in the Mississippi Delta’s vanishing way of life, tells of the fallout…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would feature John Thain begging the American public to forgive…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and…
Some political documentaries suffer from overselling the urgency of their agenda, but director Gini Reticker’s Pray the Devil Back to…
Determined to cast only locals in his 1976 adaptation of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière (also playing NWFF this week),…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like the 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You—which sold a regrettable two million copies…
Something like Encounters at the End of the World, only without Werner Herzog philosophizing about the meaning of the Antarctic,…
Don’t expect all 10 entries here, divided into the live-action and animated categories, to be mini-masterpieces. Nonetheless, there’s some lovely…
A corporate tool, but a stylish corporate tool, Renée Zellweger is dispatched from sunny Miami to rural Minnesota to close…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an…
Tom Gustafson’s queer-centric take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream teeters between banal conceptualizing and inspired execution. When high-school homo…
I miss Arnold Schwarzenegger right about now, and so does this movie. Instead we have dour, scrawny Jim Caviezel, come…
Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex day-care as Mo Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer and member of a race of “Silvertongues”—those…
And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of…
Can a heartwarming meet-cute as unambitious and overtly sentimental as Last Chance Harvey be simply too nice to get beat…
