After a decade’s absence, Takeshi Kitano returns to the yakuza genre with this violent, blood-soaked Bad Guy vs. Worse Guy revenge tale of feuding crime organizations. Kitano stars as a ruthless mobster assigned the task of straightening out a rival gang. He does so with great precision and an overabundance …
Rachid Bouchareb’s churning film is like an Algerian-Islamic take on The Battle of Algiers, though set mostly in slum Paris and packed with American-gangster clichés. Three émigré, brothers fight the French as revolutionaries and simply to survive. Ironically, the movie seems to sustain the old, racist, French-colonial claim that the …
Made with Times support but more than a rah-rah, Andrew Rossi’s documentary shows the travails and enduring, workaholic pride of a great newspaper during tough times. Tall, caustic, croaky-voiced reporter David Carr is charismatic, but the hero of the film is print journalism, practiced with fierce application, although mistakes and …
The static, surveillance-camera imagery has been replaced by jump cuts and jiggly cinematography, and several of the jolts in this prequel, cleverly set in 1988 at the dawn of camcorders, can be chalked up to nothing more than people piercing the dark silence by screaming “Boo!” Still, if you like …
Slightly boyish, sweetly smiling Alike (Adepero Oduye) suspects she may be gay, and a bold new friend (Aasha Davis) leads her to a lesbian dance club that Alike’s cop father (Charles Parnell) sees as a cesspool. His macho anxiety stifles her coming out, as does her devout, hovering mom (Kim …
A newly divorced lawyer (Catherine Keener) goes to see her grandkids in Woodstock, New York, which leads her into the rainbow afterglow of the hippie era as personified by Jane Fonda. Bruce Beresford directed the comedy; featuring Elizabeth Olsen, Rosanna Arquette, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Nat Wolff.
Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) went through 12,000 hours of footage to put together this rockumentary (a word we are apparently allowed to use without irony now) about Pearl Jam.
Kenneth Bowser’s talking-and-singing-heads film is about ’60s folk troubadour and tireless activist Ochs, who seems almost as oppressed by the fame of Bob Dylan as by the Vietnam War. A high-pitched singer, witty lyricist, and true warrior for good causes, Ochs comes off as a gutsy dreamer whose personal charm …
Barbara Brenner, highly persuasive breast cancer activist, argues her disease is “the poster child of cross-marketing.” Léa Pool’s gutsy documentary calls into question what exactly the pink ribbon culture does to bring about change. (With billions raised, why have breast cancer rates in North America risen to 1 in 8?) …
The third sequel has more story focus, although the silly, stretched plot is about finding the Fountain of Youth. Johnny Depp, as rigged-up as any sailing vessel, does his wry, sporty, mincing schtick as Jack Sparrow. With grungy villain support from Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush, sexy but decorative work …
A delicate, autumnal film concerning a Korean lady afflicted by a difficult grandson and by her incipient Alzheimer’s. As troubles mount, poetry becomes her bridge to stoical consolation, though final eloquence is tied on like a ribbon. Chang-dong Lee directed with felicity, as if channeling echoes of the more rigorous …
Stealing its title from the great 1967 Lee Marvin film, this Euro-trash thriller directed by Fred Cavayé stars Gilles Lellouche as a mild Parisian nurse who becomes a Real Man by reclaiming his pregnant wife from drug gangsters. One of them, played by Roschdy Zem, has some of the old …
Quirky documentarian Morgan Spurlock sets out to research the effects of advertising on modern society. The gimmick is that Spurlock is seeking corporate sponsorship for the project, a decision that means he will have to use advertisements in the film. Unfortunately, too much screen time is devoted to securing sponsors …
Director François Ozon’s love letter to the post-menopausal woman: wise, matriarchal, and unencumbered by desire. What opens as a seemingly breezy domestic farce set in late-’70s France quickly ventures into the-personal-is-political territory as an aging trophy wife is forced to reckon with her seeming superfluity. But just because the story …
Mimi Chakarova's documentary about Eastern European young women who have been drawn into a world of sex trafficking and abuse was filmed undercover.