No one grieves onscreen quite like Charlotte Gainsbourg, here playing Dawn, made a widow within the first ten minutes of The Tree. When not sobbing or sleeping, she expends her depleted energy wrangling her four kids, ranging from toddler to teenager, who scamper around their stilt-built house in Boonah, a…

Celebrity airplane wizzer Gérard Depardieu, playing massive dimwit Germain in this syrupy tale of intergenerational friendship, looks aghast when a bar buddy, in a state of pickled despair, takes a leak on his own front steps. No PR materials I’ve received for My Afternoons With Margueritte, based on a novel…

“AIDS” isn’t uttered until well past the halfway mark of Oliver Schmitz’s problematic South Africa-based tale about the fear, gossip, and superstition surrounding the illness in a township 125 miles outside Johannesburg. Bright, stoic 12-year-old Chanda (affecting newcomer Khomotso Manyaka) puts her studies on hold to handle one unbearable situation…

What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic, comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…

As reported in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the actress in 2006 (three years before her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Vera Farmiga has expressed her disgust with the roles offered to her by setting scripts on fire: “I stack up all those crass female…

Nothing screams “French crossover comedy” like jokes about Auschwitz and childhood sexual abuse, the main rib-ticklers of Michel Leclerc’s blood-clot-inducing second feature. Cowritten with Baya Kasmi, Leclerc’s partner for the past decade, and apparently inspired by their own culture-clash meet-cute, The Names of Love traces the bumptious courtship between reserved…

Exposing a little-known piece of Holocaust history — the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris in July 1942 — Sarah’s Key dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality. The film toggles between…

Tyler Perry returns to transferring his own stage work to the screen, donning once again the Lane Bryant floral prints that have made his millions. Like its predecessors, this Madea film features a saintly matriarch (Loretta Devine), a vilified bourgie princess, emasculated husbands, trifling heifers, a lengthy church scene, last-minute…

Appearing in every frame of Applause, Thea Barfoed (Paprika Steen), an aging actress and recovering alcoholic trying to get her life back together, is a woman under the influence — of Gena Rowlands’ Myrtle Gordon, another aging, alcoholic actress, in John Cassavetes’ Opening Night. Danish director Martin Pieter Zandvliet, making…

As in his equally exceptional last film, Secret Sunshine (2007), Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence. In her 60s, Mija (the marvelous Korean screen vet Yun Jung-hee)…

More accurately titled Vidal Sassoon: The Slavering Advertorial, Craig Teper’s obsequious documentary on the stylist who popularized geometric haircuts in the ’60s is in desperate need of shaping and trimming itself. Organized, sort of, around executive producer and Bumble and Bumble founder Michael Gordon’s assembly of a coffee-table book on…

Ned (Liev Schreiber), the beleaguered patriarch in writer/director Richard Levine’s middling first feature, slogs through slowly simmering domestic and work stresses. Wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) has begrudgingly allowed her sour, incapacitated father (Brian Dennehy) to move into their Queens home; recently out teenage son Jonah (Ezra Miller) has set off…

J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his recalcitrant German shepherd, My Dog Tulip, is one of the finest, most insightful chronicles of interspecies devotion. It’s the antithesis of both Marley & Me cuddliness and Cesar Millan militancy. A complex love story, his book plumbs the inner lives of hounds: “I realized…

Biutiful stays in one place (Barcelona) and follows one main character (Javier Bardem’s Uxbal) in a linear story line. Though its structure may be whittled down, Biutiful is morbidly obese, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber. Beyond dying of prostate cancer — a situation that calls for several scenes…

Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature is at times similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan that the writer/director has made another indulgent film about…

Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of Pastry has none of the shame-and-humiliation rituals of reality-TV cook-offs like Top Chef. Though Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s food-fetishizing documentary offers a welcome break from the sensibilities and…

It has taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. In the interim, we’ve bided our time with big-screen depictions of man-man love such as Brüno and Colin Firth’s suicidal fusspot in A Single Man. Save it, Mary:…

Rock-bottom expectations are rewarded, sort of, in this update of Hanna-Barbera’s necktied ursus, which hopes to outdo the live action/computer animation success of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise by adding one more dimension. Yogi (who debuted in 1958 and was loosely based on The Honeymooners’ Ed Norton) is voiced…

The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer stammers and hesitates when asked to explain the psychosexual motivations behind his spectacular flameout in Alex Gibney’s gripping Client 9 — or, if you prefer, Inside Blow Job. Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led to his cooperation in this doc, receives an entirely…

In her recent English-speaking roles, 50-year-old bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas has gamely endured the fate of most actresses her age, cast as the fretful mother of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl and the pinched, sexless guardian of Aaron Johnson’s John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Her…

“What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically to his class in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’ fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this remake of the…

It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf in December 1974 to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…