Most documentaries about Hurricane Katrina — and there have been a lot in the past four years — address its many disasters, whether political, natural, man-made, and/or moral. A Bridge Life: Finding Our Way Home doesn’t shy from such material, nor does it avoid the painful, shameful memories. It recycles…
The rationale behind Lessons From South Africa is something like this: Lots of people in both Miami and South Africa have AIDS, but in South Africa, people are doing a lot more to address the problem. True! Producer Allan Richards, interim dean of Florida International University’s journalism school, could probably…
We’re introduced to Trucker’s main character, Diane Ford (Michelle Monaghan), in the midst of a drunken one-night stand in a seedy truck-stop motel. Once lust has run its course, Diane refuses her conquest’s half-hearted attempt to keep in touch via email, gets back in her truck, and takes off. Two…
The vampire trend continues, but the only authentic bloodsuckers in Cirque du Freak are its producers and studio execs. Drawn from the young-adult books by U.K. author Darren Shan, Cirque du Freak has F/X creatures, teen angst and romance, mysterious backstories, and a brewing war between beasties. On paper, it’s…
Perpetually grumpy Robert (David Thornton) is a musician who’s unable to pick up his saxophone anymore due to depression, and he’s being kicked out of his New York apartment because he can’t pay the rent. When his mover, a Serbian immigrant named Branko (Branislav Trifunovic), shows up, they form a…
Official Rejection may be too insidery to appeal to a mass audience, but it’s a documentary custom-made for aspiring independent filmmakers and the festival-cruising set. Paul Osborn, the film’s director, practically admits as much during the end credits when he asks his interviewees what they thought of his documentary’s chances…
You’re not always entirely sure what is happening in Tony Jaa’s new movie, but there certainly is a lot of it. In this sequel in name only, the martial-arts maven plays Tien, a scion avenging his family in a 15th-century Thailand marked by arcane hybrid fighting styles and a numbing…
Tantric Tourists follows a group of wealthy, Western, New Age-types in their journey across India and toward enlightenment — or so they believe. Their mantra is “Breathe and squeeze.” (Squeeze your asshole, that is. But you must do it without squeezing your butt cheeks.) And with all this squeezing and…
The Yiddish shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be an evil spirit — is pretty clumsy. But at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned a series of bubblegum cards into Mars Attacks! Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
The movie wastes no time: Before the opening credits, a man watches two home invaders slaughter his wife and daughter — and we don’t even know their names. And then: Deals are cut, the murderer walks while his less culpable accomplice is sentenced to death, and the dad wonders, “But…
More Than a Game follows Akron’s Fab Four (later Five) kids on the basketball court, from their “Shooting Stars” traveling youth team into high school and a run of championships. The reason this documentary tells their story — instead of that of the team that miraculously upsets the by-then-nationally recognized…
Billed as a “collective feature film,” New York, I Love You is the second in the “Cities of Love” series, an idea that has so far proved better in theory than execution. As with its predecessor, Paris je t’aime, there are hits and misses. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy decreed that each…
A new Holocaust film grammar is forming about what it means to be a succeeding generation, suspended between the impulse to forget and the urgent need to remember—and to understand how suppressed memories have warped families. I don’t know how close writer-director Jeremy Davidson’s own family is to the Shoah,…
There’s not much in the way of climbing here in South Florida, unless you’re into rock gyms or scaling the sides of condos. But for one night only at Cinema Paradiso, the traveling Reel Rock Film Tour will bring mountain climbing to town with various short adventure flicks featuring some…
In the Oscar derby for Best Actor, is it better to die or to grieve? Clive Owen opts for the latter route in this strained, sentimental adaptation of a memoir by widowed English journalist Simon Carr. His 2001 book — boozy, breezy, and thoroughly unsystematic — was a precursor to…
Did you know that goy god Steve McQueen got an early walk-on on a Jewish television sitcom? That’s just one of the tasty tidbits in Aviva Kempner’s celebratory but clear-eyed portrait of Gertrude Berg, the creator, writer, and star of The Goldbergs, which, against the odds, grew into a huge…
Couples, retreat. In the latest from Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (co-starring and co-writing), we learn that one compelling reason to make a life commitment is so you will always have someone to eat with at Applebee’s. The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films —…
The Invention of Lying’s plot hook sounds like a pileup of Jim Carrey/Tom Shadyac concept comedies. The assumption is that there isn’t much crossover between the Liar, Liar and the Ricky Gervais fan base. Gervais’ fuzzy parable exists in an alternate universe where nobody has made a word for “truth,”…
A montage of news footage crisply introduces the not-too-distant future, where the world’s white-collar professionals live vicariously through plastic-smooth swimsuit-cut surrogate bodies, psychically remote-controlled by flesh-and-blood selves abandoned to storage and pallid vegetation. These superdurable avatars are free to live in (somewhat timidly imagined) consequence-free hedonism. No real victims means…
Drew Barrymore, making her directorial debut, is blunt onscreen and off about her inspirations for this tale of an anguished debutante-turned-roller grrrl. Take a little bit of Peter Yates’ Breaking Away (a teen townie trying to escape his humdrum existence and Dad on a ten-speed), toss in Adrian Lyne’s Foxes…
