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Elaine Stritch has one of the most enduring careers of any performer on earth. She’s an irreplaceable Broadway veteran, drawing thousands of eyes and ears with her skyscraper legs...
It’s hard not to like a love story whose lovers are brought together by a home-cooked meal. Make it an Indian home-cooked meal, with aromatic curries and slow-cooked vegetables,...
In an early sequence in The Rocket, a Laos-set underdog fable by Australian filmmaker Kim Mordaunt, we see our 10-year-old hero Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe, whose chin is perpetually tilted upward...
Tim Jenison’s an inventor with deep pockets (he made a killing in the video software business) and boundless ingenuity. On his spare time, he likes building things like hovercrafts...
Who would have thought a documentary about some urban dirt bike riders in Baltimore could be so fascinating? Apparently Lofty Nathan did, and so will you after watching his...
In Kevin Chenault’s Different Drum (named after the Stone Poneys song), we follow two young ex-lovers as they take a road trip from South Dakota to Indiana, exploring and sampling...
Rose McGowan’s debut short film, Dawn, is a surprisingly original and well-executed revision of a 1950’s teenage romance gone terribly awry. The film opens with our quiet protagonist Dawn...
It is hard not to have absolute admiration for independent filmmakers for their courage, style, and ability to look beyond their production obstacles and see the bigger picture in...
The Square captures the chaotic energy of the Egyptian mass protests of 2011 and 2013, a rush of sights and sounds shot at street level that blitzes the senses as...
In the near future of Her, LA has a few new buildings in its skyline and is as smoggy as ever. The haze only adding to its dreaminess. The...
Since its birth, rock music has thrived on rumour and myth. For example, you don’t have to search too long before finding urban legends about various musicians who supposedly...
Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner won the Best of NEXT Audience Award last year at the Sundance Film Festival, up against some fantastic competition (Computer Chess, Escape From...
I will shamefully admit that when I started to hear some of the buzz generated by Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, I figured much of it was simply due to...
Having taken a short break from independent films for a short while, I was able to watch Nothing Without You with a fresh set of eyes and an eagerness...
Throughout the ’90s and into the early 2000’s, Kathleen Hanna blazed a trail for young feminists everywhere, fronting the blistering punk band Bikini Kill and the dance-y electroclash band...
In 1994, Rwanda was devastated by the genocide that saw the country’s Hutus slaughter nearly 1 million Tutsis in a vengeful, horrific act of malice. Rwanda has been on...
Much like its successful predecessor, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire–directed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) and based on the book series by Suzanne Collins–features rock-solid performances, great writing,...
Turning 18 means different things in different cultures, but almost every culture agrees it’s an age of adulthood. In the religious culture of Orthodox Judaism, at 18 a young...
American Promise is a terrific film about racial imbalance and family dynamics, whose immense 13-year production process (from 1999 to 2012) was lengthy by design; filmmakers Joe Brewster and...
Real-life figure Ron Woodruff was a self-proclaimed legend of the rodeo; a shit-kicking, wild-woman-wrangling, tough sumbitch who’d put up his dukes at the drop of a hat. In the...
In the most infuriating, jaw-dropping piece of footage in Roger Ross Williams’ polemical documentary, God Loves Uganda, members of the Ugandan parliament are gathered in a room, cheering and...
Was I a little upset that I did not catch Blue Is the Warmest Color while at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year? Absolutely I was. Especially when...
All is Lost reveals the true essence of who Robert Redford is as an actor as much as any other film in his career, which spans over half a century....
Muhammad Ali is one of the most enduring social and pop culture figures of our time; he’s almost universally revered as an American icon and one of the best...
Certainly no sci-fi film, and packed with more adrenaline than the average action film, it’s impossible not to have a physical reaction to the film Gravity. From the opening scene...
First time filmmaker Randy Moore certainly made a name for himself when Escape from Tomorrow first premiered nearly a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival where critics were...
In 2009, a man walked into a church and shot late-term abortion doctor, George Tiller. His assassination brought the total number of doctors providing late-term abortions down to 4...
With the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement’s march on Washington having just passed, and with the historically deplorable Columbus Day holiday upcoming, we can’t be reminded enough...
Larry Smith was forced to retire early after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease after serving 26 years as a police officer. He and his family moved to South Dakota...
A moody, sexy drama with bursts of black comedy sprinkled throughout, Concussion takes familiar themes–infidelity, complacency, mid-life anxiety–and explores them from the fresh perspective of a fascinating (if a...
It’s genius in a wicked kind of way, really. Hire a hitman who’s already in prison. Get him outside the prison walls for a day (corrupt prison guards come...
In director Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, a late-middle-aged Viennese museum patrolman and a Canadian tourist share a ruminative brief encounter, like an older, wiser, more meditative version of Sofia...
In perhaps the most definitive image of Wadjda, the titular 10-year-old girl’s bright, zealous eyes track a green bicycle as it appears to glide across the top of a...
Somewhat similar to the documentary The Cove, Blackfish makes persuasive arguments against catching and holding animals in captivity, though this documentary is focused on the directing blame solely on...
Never leaving the rural French lakeside setting on which it opens, Alain Guiraudie’s new film Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) establishes an economy from its opening frame....
It’s become fashionable over the past few months to shower Destin Cretton’s (I’m Not a Hipster) social worker drama, Short Term 12 (a veritable Sundance phenom), with buckets of...
It’s no wonder Adam Wingard’s indie horror flick You’re Next is so damn good—with fellow indie powerhouse filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, and Ti West walking around the...
For many (myself included), the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi was relatively unfamiliar before a little film called A Separation rode on a huge wave success; from unprecedented...
When I was a kid, movies like Beauty and the Beast, The Sandlot, Toy Story, and Star Wars opened the floodgates of my imagination, inspiring me to dream up...
Joe Swanberg is a well-known independent director who is notorious for his no budget, no script approach to filmmaking. The results tend to be very personal (he acts in...
