There is something surreal about Swedish journalists, “fueled by curiosity and naïveté,” gaining unlimited access to America’s black-power movement. The raw footage sat neglected for 30 years, as though waiting for documentarian Göran Olsson to liberate it. Add contemporary commentary by scholars and surviving activists, and the result is an …
A new Western classic, enough to make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seem like a sappy prequel. Old Butch (Sam Shepard), now called Blackthorn, hides out in deep Bolivia raising horses and loving a village woman (but still able to ride hard and shoot fast) when a Spanish mining …
An indie documentary about the underground indie-film craze in New York City in the late ’70s — sort of a low-budget SparkNote to the big bang of Super 8. The archive footage is expectedly atrocious, but it does garner some nostalgia for the time — the outlaw attitude, the financially …
Derek Cianfrance’s first feature is about a boyish ex-con (Ryan Gosling) who lacks ambition. His more focused wife (Michelle Williams), a nurse, tires of his limitations as drink, temper, dutiful sex, and parenting corrode the remains of romance. Williams is excellent, Gosling ragged. In a way that recalls John Cassavetes’s …
A beautifully filmed and cogent tribute to two women and their adopted animals. Birute Galdikas rescues orphaned orangutans in Borneo, and Daphne Sheldrick raises baby elephants in Kenya. The creatures, once weaned, are returned to the wild. In IMAX 3-D, the orphans are so vividly present they’re almost beyond adorable. …
A retro "woman's picture" more than a modern "chick flick," Ben Sombogaart's fact-based film is like a nostalgic collector's set of cherished movie types. Three young women bond on a postwar flight from Holland to New Zealand. They then share crises, a lover, even a baby, as each finds her …
A raunchy comedy with integrity from star and cowriter Kristen Wiig. The movie is unquestionably from a female perspective, a quality that is pervasive but never exclusive. Wiig plays Annie, a heart-ravaged, recession-broken middle-ager struggling to maintain an emotional parallel with her best friend whose life is on the up-and-up. …
Rowan Joffe wrote and directed this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel about warring mobster gangs in England, circa 1964. The crime element is merely backdrop to the film’s real interest, a dysfunctional love story between a psychotic young mob boss and a sheltered waitress, desperate to be his moll. …
A great documentary portrait. Buck Brannaman, inspiration and advisor for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, seems able to get inside horses on an intuitive, spiritual level, gentling the animals (except one that is dangerously crazy) as he teaches them and their awed owners. A survivor of paternal brutality, Buck is …
From Adam Sandler and the other schmucks at Happy Madison Productions comes a comedy about a compulsive masturbator who suffers from microphallus. A clueless, virginal dweeb (Nick Swarsdon), whose overbite extends further than his manhood, discovers that Mom and Dad were legendary porn stars and decides to follow suit. Bucky, …
Marvel continues its lightweight but well-muscled march toward the superhero ensemble piece The Avengers, this time calling on director Joe Johnston and his gift for rendering unclouded heroism and golly-gee romance. You know, olde-timey stuff, appropriate for a decent guy (Chris Evans) who gets turned into a WWII super soldier …
A fallen lawyer hustles insurance scams for thugs who exploit auto accidents in teeming Buenos Aires. His only relief is a dedicated, weary nurse. The criminal contagion is ground into voyeuristic pulp by director Pablo Trapero, whose blatant closeups and hectic polarity of violence and tenderness are as subtle as …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
Intrepid auteur Werner Herzog goes with a tiny crew into the Chauvet cave in France, otherwise visited only by scientists for a brief time each year. His camera and imagination feast on the sculpturally elaborate caverns, the bone-covered floors, the amazingly vivid Cro-Magnon paintings of animals. Typically, the narrating Herzog …