What with all the political unrest in their region of the globe, who knew that a major culinary revolution was currently taking place in Israel?
A morality tale of curdled love and corrosive guilt that works, because the morality arises from within - within the characters, within their dealings with each other, within the dim, desperate world they inhabit. Everyone comes in for a measure of sympathy (though sometimes, it's measured out with a heavy …
The Boy Wonder of silent movies has been reduced to directing stag films downstairs in his own home, while the sounds of freeway construction, off in the distance, threaten imminent destruction. Some of the feelings for Hollywood's Golden Age and for the dilemma of the commercial artist, sullied but still …
Sarah, a young and recently widowed mother-to-be, lives a quiet life in a suburban neighborhood. One night, her life is turned upside-down by a mysterious and evil woman who breaks into Sarah's home and will stop at nothing to claim the unborn child as her own. Starring Rachel Nichols, Laura …
A revisitation of the advent and aftermath of what we might call, with more literal meaning than usual, the seminal work in "adult" films of the modern era, or what Camille Paglia calls, with her characteristic amount of self-restraint, "an epochal moment in the history of human sexuality." It's a …
High-dudgeon documentary, concise, lucid, and loaded, on the economic nosedive of 2008: “This crisis was not an accident.” Writer and director Charles Ferguson succeeds in whipping up disgust and outrage even while he fails at fighting off strained brains and glazed eyes: “derivatives,” “leverage,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” …
The Coen brothers, as successful a pair as any in show business today, consider the fate of a '60s folk duo after one of them jumps off a bridge. (This being the Coen brothers, it is of course the wrong bridge: the George Washington instead of the Brooklyn). Surprise, surprise: …
Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …
Self-indulgence on a humble scale. Steven Antin, a seemingly unremarkable talent, has written a starring role for himself as a screenwriter surrounded by a cast of Fruit Loops. He gets little help from Jefery Levy's penny-pinching, energy-saving direction. With Patricia Arquette, Katherine Helmond, Sandra Bernhard, Martha Plimpton, and Tate Donovan.
These are the denizens of Max's Bar in Oakland, the crippled, the blind, the maimed, with nothing to hang on to but their dreams. And their story is a sort of Iceman Cometh warmed up and wearing sweatsocks. The moral of it seems to be that dreams are fine and …
Call it kid-friendly psychology: Pixar's latest begins with a lot of bold (and visually appealing) assumptions: first, that our emotions run the show when it comes to our interior landscape; and second, that those emotions are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. (Whither Envy? Hate? Desire? Best not to ask; …
Nine years ago, Pixar took us inside the mind of young Riley to meet the emotions that guide her: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. At the end of the film — spoiler! — after Joy has learned she can’t just repress Sadness and take the helm at all times, …