Norwegian film by the Danish-born newcomer, Joaquim Trier, traces the diverging literary careers of a pair of pissy-and-vinegary young friends in Oslo. One of them (the sallow Anders Danielsen Lie, with an institutional shaved head) has an earlier success, a mental meltdown, and a prominent girlfriend, while the other (the …
Werner Herzog's handcrafted studio film, light on special effects, shot on location in the suffocating jungles of Thailand, immersed in palpable physicality, a true-life POW survival tale that formed the basis of the filmmaker's ten-years-earlier documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about a Navy pilot downed in Laos on the …
The adaptation of a nongenre novel by John Burnham Schwartz bears a first-glance resemblance to the Claude Chabrol thriller ca. 1970, This Man Must Die, in both of which a bereaved father tracks down the hit-and-run killer of his young son. But Chabrol's killer, from a genre novel by Nicholas …
Post-apocalyptic posturing, in an ankle-length duster, with two sheathed machetes, by a feminine Mad Max, or to be more exact an Angry Alice, a plasticky, poreless, yet perspiry Milla Jovovich. The door is left wide open to a third sequel. With Ali Larter, Oded Fehr, and Iain Glen; directed by …
Goree Island served for centuries as the shipping-off point for West Africans bound for slavery. In this documentary, African supersinger Youssou N'Dour sets out to bring the music made by those slaves and their descendants back to the island.
John Turturro, in his director's hat, dips into lip-sync musical fantasy in the proletarian mode of Pennies from Heaven (or the more rarefied and bourgeois Same Old Song of Alain Resnais), with minor modifications: the people engage in raunchier talk, and instead of simply mouthing the words to old pop …
Claude Lelouch, still very much his own man at age seventy, retains an authentic romanticism and optimism, undimmed by rueful realities. A fully rounded filmmaker, good with actors, locales, color, camera, movement, dialogue, the works, he is here shown off at about 300 degrees of his maximum circumference. Fundamentally a …
The cross-cultural cop partners, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, take their tired comedy act to Paris. Or to be more precise, their act is tired; they're not. But no matter how high his energy level, Tucker maintains his narrowness, while Chan can shift in a blink between low humor and …
Philip Seymour Hoffman in the male lead, blond and bearded, as a Buffalo drama professor at work on a tome on Bertolt Brecht. And Laura Linney in the larger female lead, brunette and bedraggled, as an unproduced dramatist at work on a "subversive, semi-autobiographical play" (as she describes it in …
IMAX combines animation with recreations of prehistoric creatures for an adventure that begins at the bottom of the ocean.
Claude Miller’s adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Philippe Grimbert chronicles more than a half-century in the lives of a family of French Jews, working its way forwards and backwards from its postwar starting point: the weakling son of athletic parents, taking refuge in fantasies of an adept fraternal alter …
The academically advanced daughter of a fundamentalist rabbi, postponing her arranged marriage in order to study the Talmud at a seminary for women in the holy city of Safed, gets thrown together with a cigarette-smoking rebel from France, and the two of them (the ardent Ania Bukstein, the kittenish Michal …
A frog farm connected to a corrupt politician and one of the most powerful men in Brazil; a kidnapping victim who had both her ears cut off before she was released to her parents; a wealthy plastic surgeon who pioneered the procedure used to reconstruct the ears of kidnapping victims; …
Another 9/11, year of 1857, to be exact. A dark chapter in American history (the Mountain Meadows Massacre), written with hammer and chisel. Taking up the bulk of time, however, is a tale of Young Love at First Sight (a Mormon Romeo, a Gentile Juliet), written with blueberry syrup. Trent …
Lightweight romantic comedy to heavyweight classical music, Schubert, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak. The framing story, which is to say the actor and actress in it (Michaël Cohen, Julie Gayet), has more charm than the arch central story and arch central players (Emmanuel Moret, the writer-director to boot, and Virginie Ledoyen), swathed …