Rock and roll proves the coming-of-age crucible in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semiautobiographical feature debut of shaggy…
The way to a queen’s heart is through Rousseau in A Royal Affair, in which church and state oppression can’t,…
Equating teens and animals has long been a handy horror-cinema way to tackle pubescent sexual development. So with its most…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a spectacular Titanic-by-way-of-Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its…
Ursula Meier’s Sister is a Dardenne-lite drama about a 12-year-old boy’s efforts to support himself and his older sister by…
Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, Frankie nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless ever to achieve true absurdity. Already…
Ross McElwee attempts to understand his son in the present day by revisiting his own past in this autobiographical doc,…
Less a bastardization than simply a watered-down and superfluous redo, Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn’s 1996 Danish crime saga…
Exhibiting great specificity about gay sexual mores (the phone-sex hookups, the fear of AIDS, the dichotomy between carefree promiscuity and…
Spike Lee returns to the Brooklyn of his most famous early works. There, a sustained single take—tracking his protagonists as…
Switched-at-birth sagas don’t come much more convoluted than Chen Kaige’s latest period epic, about a doctor named Cheng Ying (Ge…
The nonfiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in this glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young…
Connected opens with director Tiffany Shlain confessing to cell-phone addiction, a focus on herself that’s indicative of this documentary, which…
Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in this magnificent finale of the beloved…
A plucky young heroine, a mystical quest to save the environment (and a missing father) from callous corporate-military development, and…
Famed martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) melds his trademark wirework with gonzo CGI fantasy…
Anthropomorphizing its animal stars to a borderline-dubious degree, Disneynature’s nonfiction African Cats situates itself in Kenya’s river-divided Masai Mara National…
Mark Kostabi is a talented artist and a smug, antagonistic douchebag, both of which made him an art-world celebrity. Con…
A gleeful celebration of nonstop doping, Limitless offers a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on…
Despite the bio-doc implication of its title, Bhutto is not just a portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto, but also…
Akin to Truffaut’s Day for Night as reimagined by Howard Zinn (to whom it’s dedicated), Even the Rain revolves around…
To age brutishly is Liam Neeson’s apparent career goal—with Taken, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, and now Unknown, the…
The famed titular Wing Chun martial arts master Ip Man returns to protect Chinese honor in Ip Man 2, a…
