FEATURED
Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is, like Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series “Girls,” fixated on the insular, entitled world of artsy, twenty-something Manhattanites, where twenty-seven year-old bachelors are still bankrolled, unapologetically, by their parents, and barely employed comedy writers and sculptors refuse to relocate to cheaper, less happening outer-borough apartments. Like Dunham, Baumbach bravely more >
NEWS
ASGHAR FARHADI’S THE PAST
Asghar Farhadi’s “ThePast” deals with the same types of issues as “A Separation”: everyone separates. One couple has unraveled and another one is in the intensive care ... more >
YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL
Four songs and four seasons provide the pace in “Young and beautiful,” (original title: "Jeune et Jolie") the engrossing film by France’s filmmaker Francois Ozon (“The ... more >
HELI AT CANNES FESTIVAL | MEXICO
There’s a scene in Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s film « Heli » in which a young woman returns home to find a pool of blood across the floor of her home and a family ... more >
THE WEEK IN REVIEW
Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is, like Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series “Girls,” fixated on the insular, entitled world of artsy, twenty-something Manhattanites, where twenty-seven ... more >
A different take on “The Great Gatsby”
Lucky the [few] viewers of Baz Luhrman’s "The Great Gatsby" who come to the film virgin of the book, without even a brush with it in high-school. They can dive into the vulgarity of the ... more >
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the billion-dollar staple of American high-school reading. At times, watching Baz Luhrmann’s fantasy “The Great Gatsby” feels like reliving ... more >
Caroline and Jackie
Jackie (Bitsie Tulloch; pictured) is porcelain doll-fragile, her gaunt frame as rigid as her pulled-back hair. Her eyes, strewn with mascara, dance with hurt when something gets under her ... more >
Iron Man 3
In a movie where flying metal meets flying metaphors, “Iron Man 3” is like rooting for a good hammer. Billionaire playboy industrialist Tony Stark makes it possible to pilot a fleet of ... more >
To the wonder
Here’s a topic for sitting around the campfire: are the worst films by the best directors still better than 80% of what is released? Are say, "Bringing Out the Dead" or "The Hudsucker ... more >
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners
Contrary to her ideological and racial brethren (Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, to name a few) Angela Davis has survived. She wasn't shot down like some of her peers who ... more >
It’s a disaster
Eight self-absorbed thirty-something Los Angelenos gather at that yuppie-est of conventions: the Sunday couples brunch, held at the lavish home of the brittle, bickering married pair Emma ... more >
Oblivion
Tom Cruise is indestructible, it seems. After escaping unscathed out of the Paramount fiasco, he now teams up with Universal to help create "Oblivion," a sci-fi thriller that's ambitious and ... more >
The company you keep
Things begin in the sixties in Robert Redford’s "The Company You Keep." A group of radicals rob a bank in Michigan. The ringleader, shown in dusty old FBI wanted posters, looks remarkably ... more >
STARBUCK
Raising two is hard enough but after that you sort of get the hang of it. The next 533 should be almost a breeze. Unless you’re in your early forties and have no idea you’ve sired this ... more >
Stories we tell
Stories told in the movies are often unearthed from the bric-a-brac of our own lives, since life teems with narratives. For her first documentary, Sarah Polley lifted the veil on a family ... more >
PEOPLE TO WATCH
Adèle Exarchopoulos seems to have unlimited amounts of energy and charm and apparently this is helping her career in film. The young actress from France is headed to the Cannes Festival in a few days on the heels of a string of well-received independent films in her home country. Will she follow Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds”) and Léa Seydoux (“Mission Impossible”) to Hollywood, too? What’s striking about Exarchopoulos is the pout (sulky and delicious). Then, there’s the self-assuredness and the strong voice. At 19 more >
FOLLOW US