Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” is a contemplative, leisurely look at the world of art as a parallel to ours. A loose narrative pulls together the director’s musings on the correspondence between the two. The story, such as it is, introduces us to a Canadian woman (singer Mary Margaret O'Hara) who travels to Vienna to visit a cousin she hasn’t seen in years and who has fallen in a deep coma with little chance of recovery. For someone

In the department of gems to discover, “Starlet,” by Sean Baker.

Once in a while we’re lucky enough to come upon an excellent film that had somehow slid under our radar screen. I’m thinking “Tiny Furniture,” showered with awards at indie film festivals, written about, lauded but attracting only a small audience. As a writer, I was green with envy when I finally saw it. How can an author be so smart, so hip, so original, in a context done

For a few years in the early seventies Karen Black, who died a few days ago was the face of cinema, along with her male counterparts Peter Fonda or Jack Nicholson. Not surprisingly, they were all in the iconic film of that period, “Easy Rider” (okay, 1966). Fonda directed, Nicholson with a supporting role lasting a few minutes burst on the screen and on the scene, and Black had a small but as always unforgettable part.

“Blue Jasmine” is a perfect film, the first perfect film I’ve seen all year. It is smart, well-written, entertaining, beautifully filmed and the performances are unbelievably good. The film is also more remarkable for what it demonstrates of the faculties of Woody Allen. After his amusing but rather shallow exercises of the past years, not only with his European forays but even before (remember “Whatever Works”? I didn’t think so), he manages to completely renew himself

Memo to bombastic directors who come up with ill-digested “Philosophy for Dummies” concepts on the nature of love and life in hardly watchable films (e.g. Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”): Don’t. Unfortunately, chances are they won’t listen and will continue to come up with these half-baked offerings to convey a message so obscure we don’t get it. Case in point, “The Congress.” But before talking about that movie, note to self: Never assume that a director who gave us a masterpiece as first film will follow up with something half as good. High expectations set us up for big disappointments. So we’re mad when Florian Von Donnersmarck, author of the superlative “The Lives of Others,” hits us with a dud like "The Tourist"

Alain Guiraudie’s film, shown in the “Un certain regard” section at the last Cannes Film Festival, is a perfect illustration of why European cinema works while American cinema is drowning in a sea of either loud, big productions wrapped in close-ups of interchangeable actors (Brad Pitt or Leo di Caprio? Nicole Kidman or Jessica Chastain?) and special effects or self-indulgent, quirky indies where one almost hears the whirring of the

About the restored “Desert of the Tartars” (“Tartar Steppe” in the English title) screened at the last Cannes Film Festival as part of Cannes Classics, Beatrice de Mondenard quotes in the “Cannes Festival Daily” Angelo Cosimano of Digimage Classics, the company that carried out the restoration:

"From the first tests, the richness of the content on the negatives deeply astonished us, almost