Independent and World Film Titles A-Z

Inglourious Basterds

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen star in Tony Gilroy's spy romance Duplicity. Jurgen Fauth reviews.

Watchmen: a review of Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel.

2001

There’s a certain kind of twisted logic to it: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness.

Kapur’s sweeping spectacle forgoes all musty pretensions of middle-brow edutainment, and if you expected a history lesson you’ll emerge from the theater deaf and dumb. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the work of a director who is intoxicated with the power of cinema, and as an aficionado of Revenge of the Sith, I felt right at home in his world.

"A funny story, in its way, about a man who wanted to poison his wife and found he'd be lost without her." With these words, Richard (Pierce Brosnan) sums up the events of Ira Sachs's second film.

Veteran director Sidney Lumet sends Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke to Westchester for a botched robbery in this grim family crime drama scripted by playwright Kelly Masterson.

Just in case you somehow managed to avoid the longest-running TV sitcom in American history, do not worry: The Simpsons Movie is careful to include everybody in the fun. In the opening minutes, after Itchy and Scratchy have landed on the moon and everybody in the audience has been declared “a sucker” for paying good money to see what you can get for free on TV, the script introduces every character fresh.

Colma doesn't deflate or abuse the conventions of the musical; it relies on them to tell three heartbreakingly honest tales about growing up.

The two bad boys of indie cinema team up for an exploitation double feature: Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror make up the two halves of Grindhouse.

Mel Gibson's follow-up to The Passion of the Christ uses the decline of the ancient Mayan civilization as backdrop to enact another epic blood bath. Come for the solar eclipse and stay for the large-scale serial human sacrifice!

Two new films opening this week rely on broken taboos to draw viewers into theaters. In Gabriel Range's mockumentary Death of a President, we are invited to imagine the assassination of George W. Bush. In his art house snuff film The Bridge, Eric Steel shows all-too-real footage of human bodies hurtling to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge. Both films want to provoke discussion on their respective topics, but once the shock value wears off, it turns out that they have very little to say.

Haven't you heard--there's been a revolution. Not long ago, Sofia Coppola reigned supreme, feted with a golden statuette for Lost in Translation. Now, she's feeling the torches and pitchforks of an angry mob. Critics booed her at Cannes, and she has been called the Paris Hilton of directors. Jurgen gave the film a bad review a few weeks back, and Sofia's answers at the NYFF press conference didn't win us over, either--but instead of piling on, we figured it might be time for some alternatives.

David Lynch's first movie since Mulholland Drive is a phantasmagoria with the intensity of a bad fever dream. Starring Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jeremy Irons.

Familiar Ground (En Terrains Connus) Review - a review of the Canadian film Familiar Ground (En Terrains Connus) by Stéphane Lafleur which has its world premiere at the 2011 Berlinale

Review: Red Hook Summer.

The Oscar-nominated Belgian 'Bullhead' film written and directed by Michaël R. Roskam, does all it can to hit manhood directly where it lives. Jordan Hoffman reviews.