Documentary co-directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, and Sarah Price, with a routinely (for documentaries these days) awful image, about a pair of political pranksters named Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. The film concentrates on their adventures upon setting up a parody website modelled on that of the World Trade …
A very long movie of very small events. It starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and has a birth in the middle -- the full cycle of life -- in addition to an off-screen suicide attempt, an off-screen murder, and even an eleventh-hour touch of the supernatural. But …
Akira Kurosawa's bloody-minded political parable about the struggle for supremacy in a godforsaken 17th-century rural village. The feudists on both sides are uniformly petty, pea-brained, and baboonish (the only thing protecting them from one another is their cowardice), and justice is done when an unemployed samurai wanders into their midst …
Shigeharu Takahashi and Shinji Ushiro direct this story of young Nate's journey back in time to recover his stolen magical watch.
Yilmaz Güney, Turkish actor, writer, director, and political prisoner, was still in jail when he smuggled out instructions for this film, to be implemented by his assistant, Serif Gören. (Güney later escaped prison and fled the country.) The off-screen circumstances have no doubt warmed the reception of this film on …
After argument with younger sister, Le Ying moves out on her own. She meets a boxing trainer and starts boxing. Directed by Ling Jia.
Documentary disinterment of a half-forgotten (or more than half), and deservedly remembered, radio and television trailblazer, Gertrude Berg, the writer and star of the approachably ethnic sitcom, The Goldbergs. Her warmth emerges even through the degraded broadcast footage (only the final 1955 season comes through sharp and clear), the degradation …
A ten-years-on followup to the gay Israeli wartime love story Yossi & Jagger. Yossi - a closeted, aging, thickening Israeli doctor - hasn't had a lover since Jagger's death during a nighttime ambush. Lover? He hasn't had a life. (Nothing says "quiet desperation" like a scene of a man unbuttoning …
Old scores, old high-school scores, resurface before a big wedding, leading to old, old gags: the plumbing mishap, the nature disaster, spilled food, purposely dumped food. A plucky cast — Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Odette Yustman, Betty White — goes down fighting, but goes down hard. Directed …
Fritz Lang lightens up a bit after the oppressive gloom of his first and second Hollywood films, Fury and You Only Live Once. Amusing notion of a department store staffed exclusively by ex-convicts in need of second chances. Charming scene of Sylvia Sidney acting the schoolmarm to a classroom of …