Kurosawa's first use of the wide screen, and his ingeniousness with images of that shape becomes apparent fairly soon — say about the first or second shot. The storyline, if not the images alone, pulls you in, and along, with a folk-tale kind of enchantment, and it makes room for …
Once upon a time, there lived in a valley above the clouds a young Austrian couple, secure in their beliefs that fascism would never reach them. The fact-based story of a conscientious objector who refused to fight alongside the Nazis — villagers turn against the #NeverHitler for not returning their …
A rom-com with precious little com but plenty of unintentionally hilarious rom. Wes Bentley takes his perpetually perturbed mug south of the border to investigate the mysterious woman who stopped in at his dad's funeral and made everyone wonder if the old man had a piece of pollo on the …
Documentary explores the far reaches of the universe.
To speed his daughter's recovery from her mother's sudden death, a Manhattan psychotherapist whisks her upstate to a Gothic monstrosity, big enough to house a family of twenty, on the edge of a deep dark woods, where she seems to sprout into a Bad Seed. But is her imaginary new …
After an elaborate car wreck and two hours of death, a resurrected antiques dealer begins to see through the eyes of a Satanic serial killer and vice versa -- each tracking the other via geographical landmarks transmitted back and forth between retinas. Cumbersome concept, clumsily conveyed, with the special touch …
Time-capsule exoticism centering around a free-thinking Englishwoman in search of Sufi wisdom in Morocco, 1972, with her two young daughters in tow. More travelogue than narrative — an effect heightened by the montage-y brevity of most of the scenes — but nice bright color. And director Gillies MacKinnon, who handled …
In Hyderabad, two police officers begin the inquiry and crack the case, but in the process, more people go missing. A noteworthy aspect is that all the victims are girls with one other interesting commonality. Directed by Aneel Kanneganti, starring Ashwin Babu, Nandita Shwetha, and Makrand Deshpande.
Jon Cryer, too old to go on playing high-school students, is also too old to be playing a young stockbroker who disguises himself as one. (He has to lie low from the Mob, and the motivating violence, portrayed very straight, postpones the movie's arrival as a comedy.) Annabeth Gish, of …
Based on the true-life story of Corrie ten Boom, the ten Boom family joins the underground resistance to help save persecuted Jewish families after the World War II Nazi invasion of Holland. But when the family is arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps themselves, they're left with nothing to cling …
Writer-director-producer Pieter van Hystee takes the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Netherlandish painter’s death to make a film about...Bosch’s hometown museum’s attempt to mount a comprehensive exposition of his work in honor of the 500th anniversary of his death. So, yes, we are treated to tremendous close-ups of …
Out of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, Akira Kurosawa has fashioned a formula kidnapping melodrama that, elaborated to two-and-a-half hours, manages to engage all his burning moral concerns, undimmed, as well as all his ingenuity as an action director unsurpassed on the wide-screen. Kurosawa makes good use of McBain's …
Angst-laden New York story: a drip from the bathroom ceiling leads a doll-faced fledgling magazine editor to meet her upstairs neighbor, a lesbian hophead drop-out photographer in a relationship with a former Fassbinder actress. This third character, played by Patricia Clarkson, is an amusing caricature of a poor-man's Dietrich, but …