Slick assembly of archive footage and interviews with retired astronauts (Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Mike Collins, Jim Lovell, Edgar Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott, and John Young), to tell the story of the Apollo moon shots. It's a big story -- history merged with science fiction -- and …
Privileged access behind the scenes at the San Francisco Opera, where the focus is all on the lesser lights, the nameless members of the chorus. These are engaging enough in interviews (if sometimes insufferably theatrical), and the casual glimpses of them -- playing poker and pingpong in full makeup backstage …
There is a spot on God’s green earth, Ukerewe Island in Tanzania to be exact, where witch doctors continue to prescribe the severed limbs of albinos as good luck charms to patients looking for eternal prosperity. After a rash of 43 murders, two men with albinism — Vedastus, a teenager …
Siblings Violeta and Eva live in California with their mother, but every summer they travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente (René "Residente" Pérez Joglar). Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva …
A more commendable writing and directing effort from Paul Haggis (writer only on Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers, among others) than his hokey Oscar-winner, Crash. More focussed, more concentrated, more self-contained, more consistent: an uncompromisingly mournful murder mystery, and strangled antiwar cry, about a veteran of Operation …
Sunao Katabuchi directed and co-wrote this beautifully painted, emotionally muted anime adaptation of Hiroshima native Fumiyo Kōno’s manga series of the same name. The story’s origin as a serial shows; what dramatic shape there is here stems largely from events outside the characters’ control. This happens, and then this happens... …
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and director Patrice Chereau (Queen Margot, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) combine to bring the British kitchen sink into the French boudoir. Or vice versa. Two Angst-ridden Londoners -- a bartender and a small-time actress, the …
A former merchant seaman, now adrift on land, gets himself in a tight squeeze between his sex-starved landlady and her pubescent daughter. Supercilious snigger over the wormy underside of Fifties-era England: "You're a hyp -- a hyp -- what's that word? You're a bloody hippo!" With Julie Walters, Rupert Graves, …
Patrice Leconte's psychological nonthriller (the Bernard Herrmann-esque music and the visual allusions to Rear Window are red herrings, and the frequently jostled camerawork is the furthest thing from Hitchcock) goes from one improbability to another: an abstracted thirty-something woman walks through the wrong door and tells her innermost troubles to …
If time were currency, would you hoard it for eternal life or make every day a risky spree of mortality? In the near-future of an L.A. shot with elegant noir streamlining by Roger Deakins and directed by Kiwi-Brit stylist Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), people live to 25, stop aging, and then …
Philip Gröning's nearly three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, covering a space of time from winter to winter. (Since the German filmmaker, a one-man crew, spent but five months in the monastery, one must presume a bit of editing-room illusionism at work.) Evocative rather than instructive, …
The Coen brothers film with the widest, the broadest, the massiest appeal to date, or in the common phrase their "most accessible." Two glamorous A-list movie stars of opposite sexes, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking their respective bests, sugar-cured and honey-glazed, and none of the Coen "regulars" -- no …
Werner Herzog will go anywhere for film discovery, and this is one of his better documentaries. In the piney woods north of Houston, he found ugly crime scenes and in a prison two convicted killers who murdered for a joyride. One is a smiling sociopath who thinks lethal injection will …