The 2000s had been difficult for Robin Williams who was found dead yesterday at his home in California at age 63. That decade did not yield any major successes for the actor who wore bittersweetness on his sleeve and made poetry out of life’s daily vexations.

He earned one Oscar in 1998, a feat that happens rarely, if not at all, for most actors and directors (it took Scorsese forty years

"Golan-Globus ..." To this critic who grew up in the eighties in France in a decade when "La Boum" and "Un homme et une femme" where big, the hyphenated combo held the promise of cinematic thrills and brash entertainment: high stakes cop-vs-bad guys intrigues, meatheads in military gear knocking doors down and car chases aplenty. This was Hollywood at its best, making money without the obscenely outsize budgets

What can you do when you know that death is approaching? Joaquim Pinto contracted HIV and hepatitis C twenty years ago. In this film-diary which he directed he reveals his innermost thoughts as he lines up one difficult day with another, powerless to do anything about his debilitating afflictions. And yet, his documentary is less about the philosophical implications of life and death as it is, more simply, about how to live with

For those of you in the New York area look for this new documentary about sculptor and painter Bahman Mohassess, an artist from Iran who's lived in exile and seclusion in Italy for thirty years until his untimely passing in 2010. "Fifi howls from happiness" is slated for release tomorrow Friday. Paris-based filmmaker Mitra Farahani spent time at his Italy-based studio discussing his opus, his triumphs and his failures

The Kids generation is back and skateboarding down the red [...]

In "An Unwanted Man" Philip Seymour Hoffman is Gunther Bachmann, the leader of a secret team working for the German government fighting the war against terror from Hamburg. The film follows a plan to bring down a doctor (Homayoun Ershadi, who was seen notably in Abbas Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry" in 1987) suspected of financing terrorism and Al-Qaeda. Bachmann works with a tight-knit posse of spies, the group's

This is the surreal and poetic story of a young idealistic and inventive man, Colin, who meets Chloe, a young woman who could be the incarnation of a blues piece by Duke Ellington. Their idyllic marriage turns to bitterness when Chloe falls ill due to a water lily that's growing in her lung. To pay for his care in a fantasyland Paris, Colin must work under increasingly absurd conditions while all around them their apartment deteriorates