The Other Son
With elections around the corner, candidates are reminding voters how important principles of faith and family have made them capable to lead. But what happens when the two are so much in conflict that you doubt your own identity? In The Other Son (Le Fils de Lautre), director Lorraine Levy shows a world where a shift in family can challenge and perhaps create a new kind of faith.... read more
Cloud Atlas
Within an innovative structure that toys with genre, the individual plots are mere sketches, each worthy of its own full-length script. read more
Pusher
In adapting Nicholas Winding Refn’s 1996 cult favorite Pusher, director Luis Prieto stays close to the original material. So close, in fact, that his English-language remake is essentially a scene-for-scene—sometimes line-for-line—transplanting of Refn’s story from the underworld of Copenhagen to its counterpart in London.... read more
Nobody Walks
From the outset, Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks surges with sexuality. New York artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby in a cute pixie haircut) flies to Los Angeles to work on her experimental film and gets pulled into a hot make-out session before she even gets out of the parking lot. Turns out her partner is the guy she happened to sit next to on the plane. He’s giving her a ride, and although she doesn’t go all the way, it’s like she thinks—or he thinks, or they both think—that she owes him something, and sex is her currency.... read more
Yogawoman
It’s hard to pinpoint when yoga really took off, but sometime in the past decade, women started going to yoga like they were going to lunch or picking up the drycleaning. Studios began popping up like Starbucks in big cities, and suddenly there was such a thing as yoga apparel. Ironically—considering that for centuries, exclusively men practiced yoga—not just the followers were women, but the leaders were, too. The documentary Yogawoman, directed by theater producer and yogi herself, Kate Clare McIntyre, charts how female yoga teachers have transformed yoga into the popular hobby, expertise and lifestyle that it is now.... read more
Gayby
It’s the stuff of sitcom gold: girl and guy want baby, but they don’t want each other. Gayby is strikingly similar to a Will and Grace plotline that never materialized, following a pair of best friends aware that their time for parenting might soon pass them by. Jenn (Jenn Harris) is thankfully not as neurotic as Grace, but she is equally self-deprecating. She suffers under her overbearing boss at work and has no luck choosing male partners. Her best friend, Matt (Matthew Wilkas) is a sweet comic book nerd who also has no luck finding a male partner after an... read more
The Sessions
Hawkes is as wonderful as ever, physically transforming for the role by adopting Mark’s distinct nasal, little-boy voice and lying on a soccer-sized foam ball to achieve the character’s spine curvature. read more
War of the Buttons
Transplanted to 1944 Nazi-occupied France, Louis Pergaud’s 1912 Lord of the Flies-esque novel about a play war between the boys of two neighboring villages takes on metaphoric significance in this adaptation helmed by The Chorus’ Christophe Barratier. Classically styled with a sweeping score, dramatic crane shots and golden hues, War of the Buttons is adorable but sentimental, an earnest whitewash of a painful period during World War II.... read more
Smiley
Before diving into any serious criticism, it must be noted that the version of Smiley recently screened for press was not the final cut. That being said, any changes made to this ridiculous and only sometimes-entertaining horror movie would most likely only be lipstick on a pig, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.... read more
Argo
For those people with lingering questions about Ben Affleck’s talents as a filmmaker, Argo should remove any doubt. The actor has now directed a trio of hard-working, blood-pumping dramas—his latest joins Gone Baby Gone and The Town—covering serious subjects like kidnapping and foreign affairs with a vitality that’d too often missing from Hollywood today. Argo, a precise blend of classic narrative genres, is the capper of Affleck’s behind-the-camera work to date, a remarkably well-sculpted film built from a fairly basic, step-by-step framework. Argo looks like a smaller undertaking, plays like a big Hollywood movie and succeeds despite the hundreds of... read more
Dredd 3D
Seventeen years is probably far too long after the fact to offer an apology to comic book fans for 1995’s abominable film adaptation of Judge Dredd. The good news is, after that extended leave of absence, American audiences have long since stopped wondering why the hell John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s grim lawman endures as one of Britain’s most popular comic book anti-heroes. Better still, 2012’s Dredd 3D wastes no time explaining why, which is just one of the reasons director Pete Travis’ Dredd proves a brutally efficient exercise in B-movie know-how.... read more
Looper
Consider the humble Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Chocolate. Peanut Butter (-ish). Two ingredients—each tasty enough in its own right—brought together in the right proportions. The result? Adult-onset diabetes never tasted so good.... read more
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
For someone who was the editor-in-chief of Vogue for nearly a decade, it’s amazing how well Diana (dee-yahhh-na) Vreeland lived out the philosophy that the best things in life are free. In Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, a dazzling fashion documentary directed and produced by her granddaughter-in-law, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Diana’s legacy is shown to have more to do with imagination, personality and a bit of lunacy than with anything sold on her pages.... read more
Kingdom Come
You’d think it would be a bit easier. True, when actor Daniel Gillies set out to write and direct his first film, he hadn’t yet landed the role that, today, most fans know him for best, in The Vampire Diaires. But it’s not like he was a nobody. He had appeared in major hits like Spiderman 2 and Into the West. And his wife, and co-star of the film, was Rachael Leigh Cook, for goodness’ sake.... read more
Wuthering Heights
It’s a tale as familiar as Romeo and Juliet—a disadvantaged orphan boy is brought into a farmer’s household and is raised alongside the man’s own children. The boy, Heathcliff, forms a passionate bond with the farmer’s daughter, Catherine, and together the two face complicated lives of love, jealousy, pain, betrayal and grief.... read more
The Other Dream Team
The Other Dream Team focuses on the role basketball has played in the Lithuanian community by helping them through bleak economic and social times, focusing specifically on the members of the first ever Olympic Lithuanian basketball team in 1992 after the collapse of communism. Marius Markevicius’s documentary begins in 1988 when the USSR were led to a gold medal over America in the Seoul Olympics thanks to the four Lithuanian men who had been recruited for the team. At those ’88 Olympics, Valdemaras Chomičius, Arvydas Sabonis, Šarūnas Marčiulionis and Rimas Kurtinaitis were not only given a taste of what it... read more
Broken Kingdom
Broken Kingdom, the writing and directorial debut of Daniel Gillies (perhaps best known form his role in The Vampire Diaries), finally gets unveiled to the world next week, along with its companion documentary Kingdom Come.... read more
V/H/S
For a genre that thrives on gimmickry, horror is a natural fit for the ubiquitous found-footage method of filmmaking. Movies like the Paranormal Activity or [REC] series that have the camera and/or cameraman exist in the reality of their stories draw a direct line to the viewers and make them feel more like a part of the scary action.... read more
How to Survive a Plague
A New York journalist who has covered the AIDS epidemic for 30 years, first-time filmmaker David France has assembled a superb record of the decade-long fight for a viable treatment protocol and an intimate portrait of the personalities leading the charge. January 1981 marked the first known AIDS death; there were 41 cases that year. A half-dozen years later, when How to Survive a Plague picks up with the formation of activist AIDS group ACT UP, the virus had claimed 500,000 lives worldwide. By the time this story ends in 1996 with the development of a combination drug therapy that... read more
La Source
There’s a haunting moment early in director/co-writer Patrick Shen’s documentary, La Source, in which Chrismendonne, brother of the film’s subject, Josue Lajeunesse, matter-of-factly discusses the financial reasons he was unable to complete his education. Above his shack in the eponymous Haitian village of La Source hangs a swaying blue canopy emblazoned with the FEMA logo.... read more
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