With “The Place Beyond the Pines” arriving in theaters with a bang last month, now may be a good time to remember “Blue Valentine,” Derek Cianfrance’s debut film of 2010 that critics called “astonishing” and audiences confirmed as such. It was and remains so on second viewing, this story of the unraveling of a marriage, for reasons all too familiar yet still unexplainable. What happens to people in a couple, how does a spouse go from

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 crowd and you meet a fraction of those 533 when they’re young adults, way beyond nappies and baby formula. This is what David Wozniak (Patrick Huard) is faced with, a hapless meat delivery man with enough problems of his own, whose plan to somehow stagger

When early in the forties a young Greek director called Elias Kazantzoglou showed up at a major Hollywood studio, the studio head (one imagines him sending cigar smoke the way of the hopeful visitor), advised him on a name change as a first step. “How about Cézanne?” the studio head asked. The director who would go down in film history as Elia Kazan demurred. “There already is a Cézanne,” he said. The studio head

Augusto Pinochet, the benevolent-looking Chilean general who overthrew Allende in 1973—putting an end to a long spell of democracy--and oversaw seventeen years of terror, responsible for thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested, tortured and “disappeared” died in his bed (though under house arrest) in 2006. Wrangling over extradition procedures while he was holed up in London before being returned to Santiago didn’t give

Pangs of nostalgia are inevitable upon seeing or revisiting “L’innocente,” the 1976 film that would be Luchino Visconti’s last. The sixties and seventies were two of the most remarkable and prolific decades of cinema--Italian cinema the most idiosyncratic of all so that the works of extraordinary directors such as Fellini, Scola, Pasolini, Antonioni or Bertolucci

Throughout 2012 I found myself drawn more toward world cinema--particularly European films--and less to American ones. Reasons are numerous, among which the number of rote big-budget efforts, repeated from one movie to the next, totally predictable, with nothing to surprise viewers, let alone engage them. Full disclosure: I don’t live on the planet where audiences flock to the "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" franchises, nor Pixar-created

"Argo" is a great thriller, well-acted (special kudos to John Goodman and Alan Arkin), with spectacular cinematography in an Istanbul passing off as Tehran and a nail-bitingly suspenseful last half-hour. Incredibly, the far-fetched story really happened. The year is 1979 with Iran’s Islamic Revolution in full swing. In November, when the terminally ill Shah who has left Iran months before is allowed into the United States for huma-