Pina, Wim Wenders' gorgeous 3D document of the Tanztheatre Wuppertal, might not leave you in tears, but it may well convert the uninitiated: fans of Wenders who know nothing of the late choreographer; devotees of Bausch unfamiliar with the German’ director’s arthouse favorites Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club; and finally, film skeptics who feel 3D adds nothing but a gimmick to the moviegoing experience. more ›

Can a graphic novel successfully make the transition to a live action feature film? more ›

50/50 has a well-meaning script that gets a lot of the details right. But it's so wrapped up in Hollywood convention that not even Seth Rogen can make this more than Lifetime for Hipsters. more ›

Whether you find it funny or infuriating, Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is an intriguing study of how information spreads, and a sober meditation on human relationships. more ›

Part documentary, part street-opera, John Turturro’s homage to the music of Naples will have you humming. more ›

Director Denis Villeneuve wastes no time setting the hook at the start of his engrossing mystery, Incendies. In the first scene, a brother and sister, college-aged twins, sit in the office of their mother Nawal's boss, and executor of her will, not long after her death. Their mother's will has some odd requests: she's to be buried naked, face down, in a grave without a marker, and the twins cannot place a headstone at her resting place until they've completed a task: deliver two sealed letters to their father and brother in Iran, the country where their mother was born (they have been raised in Quebec). The problem is, they've never met their father, don't know his name, and didn't even know that they had a brother. more ›

For his debut exercise in stunt-documentary filmmaking, Super-Size Me, Morgan Spurlock spent thirty days putting a whole lot of beasts in his belly. This time around, he heads into the belly of the beast. more ›

Credit director Joe Wright with trying to avoid pigeonholing himself. His first two films, the period dramas Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, garnered much critical love and comparisons to a previous British master of sumptuous, graceful period pieces, David Lean. Not content to play just to the Masterpiece Theatre set, he set his sights on more modern material -- with mixed results -- in The Soloist. And now, radically shifting genres yet again, Wright delivers a thoroughly breathtaking, heart-racing international espionage thriller with fairy-tale overtones and a thumping electronic soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers -- a band he used to work with in his pre-cinema days directing and crewing rave-inspired music videos that probably inform this work a great deal more than anything he's done in feature films. more ›

The art of Matthew Barney tends to be divisive within the art world, so when he began making forays into cinema, it was bound to rouse arguments with an entirely new audience. His series of Cremaster films is a unique collection of movies, in that they seem at home in both art galleries and movie theaters. These are high-minded art pieces, yet they use recognizable building blocks of narrative filmmaking that make them more accessible than the abstract works that usually come to mind when one thinks of experimental film. Despite his high-art pedigree, Barney's films owe as much, if not more, to commercial filmmakers like Kubrick, Lynch, and Cronenberg than to avant-garde figures like Brakhage or Deren. more ›

Do you have the next Small Press Expo marked on your calendar? Do you have Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men volumes, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the collected works of Douglas Coupland all placed on your top bookshelf, filed under "A" for "Awesome"? Do you have an original, operational Nintendo Entertainment System currently hooked up to your TV? Have you watched Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the entire run of Spaced within the past year? more ›

Maybe it's just that I was spoiled by Inception, by the notion that a summer action flick could be both thrilling and smart. But then again, that's also been the attraction of the Bourne series: the notion that adrenaline-based cinema doesn't have to come with the caveat that one has to check their brain at the door. Not that action films are universally smarter these days, but the mindless and the thoughtful are generally easy to separate: the A-Team? No frontal lobe required. A spy flick starring Angelina Jolie and directed by the (generally) thoughtful Phillip Noyce? There's a reasonable expectation of smart thrills going in. more ›

The latest cinematic puzzle-box from French director Alain Resnais shows the director -- now, at 87, rather staggeringly in his 7th decade of making movies -- still more than capable of creating films that are, at once, thought-provoking, engaging and thoroughly befuddling. Wild Grass is the first literary adaptation in that long career, taken from the novel L'Incident by Christian Gailly. Resnais seems intent on keeping the story's literary underpinnings intact, and does so through the constant use of narrations, both from a third person narrator and internal monologues from the characters themselves. more ›

Some movies are impervious to criticism. Their true-life stories are so inspirational, so extraordinary, so much stranger than fiction, that quibbling over the way they've been presented doesn't seem to serve much purpose. Luckily for Clint Eastwood, such stories are also largely impervious to poor storytelling. His Invictus hits all the right formula notes of both the inspiring historical biopic and the underdog sports movie, making it impossible to hate. He also hits those notes so insistently and with such a lack of his usual understated grace that he makes it a difficult movie to really love. more ›

Séraphine Louis (1864-1942, dite Séraphine de Senlis), the subject of the recent film Séraphine, is not exactly an unknown painter. Her work is found in only a few museums now, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Les Pommes and Tree of Paradise). She was a naive painter, an ultimately unsatisfactory but unavoidable term indicating that although she was untrained, she painted as a sort of compulsion, what now is sometimes called visionary art. Director and screenwriter Martin Provost drew most of the material for his film from the work of Françoise Cloarec, who has also just published a version of her thesis on the painter with Editions Phébus. Provost has come out of practically nowhere as a director, his last film Le ventre de Juliette having won a prize at the 2003 Avignon Festival, to come close to a clean sweep of this year's César Awards, the French Oscars, with this beautifully crafted movie. more ›

As demonstrated by so many remakes, often it is best to let a film remain in its genre or language of origin. Blood: The Last Vampire was apparently a pretty good, if somewhat short, manga film about a human-vampire half-breed who turns against her evil kind while working for a secret agency. Action flick director Chris Nahon, who made Kiss of the Dragon with Jet Li and the marginally better L'empire des loups, could not leave well enough alone and has made it into a live-action film. (Nahon reportedly replaced Hong Kong-born director Ronny Yu when the French independent studio Pathé took responsibility for co-production.) Screenwriter Chris Chow, who has also worked as an assistant cameraman, helped adapt the anime storyline created by Kenji Kamiyama from the comic book characters of Katsuya Terada. Manga fans will surely enjoy seeing a cult favorite come to life, as will anyone who has ever wondered if a film could satisfy an Asian school-uniform fetish and a love of martial arts violence at the same time. Everyone else, even those like me obsessed with vampire flicks, is advised to wait for DVD. more ›