Are you having enough chances to see documentaries? I myself in the past couple of weeks missed my chances at Fuel and The Way We Get By, the latest environmental and Iraq War documentaries respectively. …

If I had to read it cover to cover before reviewing it, there’s no telling when I would have leave to speak of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Issued on …

The standard line on A Serious Man, and I see no reason to deviate from it, is that this is the Coen brothers’ most “personal” work to date. To be sure, the brothers have never …

You simply wish to nip over to France for a couple, three weeks, prior to the full-on rush of prize-hunters in the year’s final quarter, and you find on your return that new movies by …

The pace holds steady…. The September Issue. R.J. Cutler’s documentary version of The Devil Wears Prada, a revealing inside look at the putting-together of the year’s fattest issue of Vogue, what turns out to be …

Collision of the end of summer and the start of fall: massive pileup. Quite separate from the seven new movies that opened in our town last Friday alone, eight more are slated to open this …

The latest offering of “alternative” cinema at the Reading Gaslamp comes up easily to the Landmark caliber. Which, in light of such recent specimens as Captain Abu Raed, Shrink, and The Stoning Soraya M., isn’t …

August, the customary summer dumping ground, has suddenly yielded the best wide-release mainstream films of the season. And a long, long season it has been: the kickoff, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, feels like another year. Reparation …

You know very well, if you have been paying attention, what you are going to get from the Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc. You are going to get quality control as rigid and …

As per its own punchy subhead, Julie and Julia is “based on two true stories,” parallel stories of feminist self-determination, set half a century apart, then and now. One focuses on Julie Powell, a beleaguered …

Pick of the week, pick of the season to date, is the French Séraphine, a speculative, segmentary biography — twenty years in scope — of an obscure figure from 20th-century art history, Séraphine Louis, dite …

Reteaming the star and director of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles respectively, Brüno peddles the same or a similar shtick in a different persona: a different funny accent, different funny wardrobe, different funny …

Fictitious countdown of the final six weeks in the twelve-month tour of an army bomb squad in Baghdad five years back, The Hurt Locker seems on a limited sampling to have excited other commentators more …

The news, or at any rate the publicity, that Woody Allen had originally written Whatever Works for Zero Mostel (d. 1977) and had only lately pulled the script out of a drawer and plugged in …

The art-house patron can only take what he gets. Last time out I noted that the Japanese director of Departures, Yojiro Takita, though he has literally dozens of films in his résumé, was a new …

The surprise winner (as we are all obliged to call it) of this year’s Oscar for foreign film, the Japanese Departures, is somewhat less surprising when you see it. That’s not to say it’s a …

With two blockbusters in a single week — Terminator Salvation, alias T4, and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — the summer sequels would appear to have leaped over the prequels. (Siding with, …

While the mainstream has wound down to its summer speed of one blockbuster per week, the alternative cinema has been spewing out counterprogramming aplenty, some of it by big fish. The Limits of Control is …

And so begins the summer of ’09: prequel, prequel. The first of these, opening Friday last, is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, entrusted to director Gavin Hood of little Tsotsi from South Africa. (How much say does …

Report from the front: pressure mounting, resistance weakening, defenses leaking. Try as I might to hold the line, more and more movies in recent months and years, mainly movies of the “alternative” as distinct from …

At last a bone to gnaw on. Not a very meaty bone, only a very scrappy bone, but a bone nonetheless. State of Play, the Americanization of a BBC miniseries, qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, …

For some years now, whenever Rialto Pictures (it usually was) had selected a foreign film for theatrical reissue, I was given to wonder when they’d get around to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle, known in …

To feel affection for the grade-Z science-fiction films of the Fifties, especially as their descendants get ever more deluxe, is perfectly natural and no cause for shame. (A Not-Guilty Pleasure.) To set out in the …

From where I sat, the San Diego Latino Film Festival peaked early. (Probably the whole year did.) The first film I saw, on opening night, was my most anticipated film, Carlos Saura’s Fados. It turns …

How high can the escalation go? Watchmen is just another step on the stairs, one or two above The Dark Knight, nothing to get worked up about one way or the other. Adapted from “the …

It all began with the death in mid-December of Van Johnson. As is my wont, I found something in the Los Angeles Times obituary to grumble about at the breakfast table: no mention of The …

Steven Soderbergh’s atonement for the Ocean’s capers: a four-and-a-half-hour worship service in honor of Che Guevara, conducted in Spanish with English subtitles. Or rather, if Full Frontal and Solaris were atonement for ...Eleven, and Bubble …

Fresh from the Jewish Film Festival, Avi Nesher’s The Secrets starts a theatrical engagement this Friday at the Reading Gaslamp. (Not to be confused with the singular A Secret, also Jewish-themed, that played there in …

As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title, He’s Just Not That into You, is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in …

Although movies had been set in Minnesota before Fargo (notwithstanding its misleading North Dakota title), movies as disparate as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Heartbreak Kid, Purple Rain, Grumpy Old Men, it was the Coen brothers …

The dim month after the year-end Oscar drive — Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Bride Wars, The Unborn, Notorious, My Bloody Valentine, Inkheart, Outlander, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, et al. — looked to be brightened …

Another few stragglers from the year gone by.... Revolutionary Road comes confusingly too soon after Reservation Road, a mere year apart, although in fairness the novels on which they were based (by Richard Yates and …

This is the interval when the Year That Was in the centers of civilization drags on into the Year That Is in the boondocks. The interval of overlap. Clint Eastwood, for the occasion, has repeated …

Short of the outlying fields of basketball playoffs (the Jayhawks, the Celtics) and Presidential campaigns (Obamanos!), strictly confined instead to my assigned field, the year just past felt pretty dismal. On the personal front, Manny …

Don’t open before Christmas: The Reader is the trite and true story of a once fat and sassy alternative free weekly, now struggling for survival amidst a plummeting economy, skyrocketing paper costs, shrinking page size, …

Counting down the final movies till Christmas.... Doubt, from the prize-winning stage play by John Patrick Shanley, is an ambiguous drama of possible priestly pedophilia at a Catholic school in the Bronx. The playwright, perhaps …

The natural suspicion surrounding any and all of the “alternative” programs at the Reading Gaslamp (né Pacific Gaslamp) is that these must be films that the Landmark chain turned up its nose at. Rejects. Undesirables. …

Got Milk. An affirmation, that, not a question. Gus Van Sant’s biopic on Harvey Milk, the gay-rights activist and San Francisco City Supervisor martyred by assassination in 1978, should afford sustenance and fortification for all …

It sounds more like a sensitive literary little indie, maybe something to do with a Physics teacher passed over for tenure and consoled in the arms of a fatherless grad student, but Quantum of Solace …

Clint Eastwood was due for a dud. Changeling stacks up as his flattest film, his stumpiest film, since Blood Work, bookending his hot streak of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and the Second World War …

This is the new world order. Any movie that wants to be seen as Serious, however delusional it may be, wants to enter the Oscar race, and therefore wants to make its entrance in the …

The preponderance of Claude Chabrol’s fifty-some films fit under the umbrella of “thriller,” and no matter how tepid the temperature of his more recent ones — The Bridesmaid, Flower of Evil, and presumably the one …

Like any aficionado of the Western, or of any other genre for that matter, I’m picky. The nonaficionado, if he ventured to attend at all, might have been quicker to accept last year’s remake of …

Here’s another bucketful. Blindness. Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We …

We can easily tell when summer’s over. In lieu of the lazy pace of one mainstream blockbuster and an also-ran, plus perhaps one or two “alternatives,” we get seven, eight, nine new movies per week, …

Perception that the Coen brothers are running a little low on inspiration, albeit still nowhere near empty, will not now need to be radically revised. Remake: The Ladykillers. Book adaptation: No Country for Old Men. …

Have passions cooled? Can we discuss calmly? Without dispute The Dark Knight was the big story of the cinematic summer, which is the same as saying the big money of the summer, $500 million domestic …

He was ninety-one-and-a-half. It had been a long and gradual decline. Yet how quickly I could switch over from “I can’t believe he’s still here” to “I can’t believe he’s gone.” The passing of Manny …

Human pretension is generally good for a laugh. Two new comedies to do with the Creative Process, unequal in size, equally uneven in quality, equally unsteady in mood, deliver the laugh over and around constant …

You can’t claim that Woody Allen’s rapid rate of production doesn’t show. Even the title of his latest handiwork sounds more like brainstorming for a title than like a final decision, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Three …