Every January Hollywood releases streams of dreck, mostly third-rate action vehicles that have long been sitting on the shelf. "Broken City" appears to be an excuse to get Mark Wahlberg fans flocking to the cinema, to net the studios some quick cash during a time when the Oscar-nominated indie pics are the main attraction. Surprisingly, though, it is a compelling thriller, packed with endless twists that eventually work themselves

The principal pleasures of “Hitchcock”—which, in the end, is a film of decidedly few pleasures—comes from watching Anthony Hopkins’s transformation into the Master of Suspense. Hopkins may have worn a fat suit and prosthetics for the role, and he may not possess the disproportionately gaunt cheekbones and bulbous nose of the real Hitchcock (the star’s nose is so pointy here it almost upstages his character’s alarmingly

Benjamin Dickinson's "First Winter" could have been a long-overdue excoriation of certain latter-day urban hipsters, and how the fatuity of their forced earthiness and anti-establishment attitudes would be brutally exposed should they face actual danger and isolation from the modern world. Using the familiar shaky camerawork and penetrating close-ups that curiously characterize virtually all indie films, Dickinson follows a group of blank-

Writer/director Franklin Martin first met Kevin Laue, the one-handed Division I college basketball player who recently graduated from Manhattan College, in August 2006, while completing editing on his debut film, the Hurricane Katrina documentary “Walking on Dead Fish.” A former Hofstra University basketball player and Tennessee State University coach, Martin was dazzled by the prowess, grace and heart of the 6’9 athlete, then

In 1990, Kevin Laue was born with only a right arm; ten years later, his father, who had pushed him hard to persevere despite his disability, died of cancer. Haunted by the feeling that he let his father down, Laue vowed to make something of himself and, sometime during junior high, began training with the rival school’s basketball coach. By sixteen, the nearly seven-foot-tall Laue had become a whiz at blocking, rebounds, hook shots and

For her third feature film “Nobody Walks” (opening October 19), thirty year-old writer/director Ry Russo-Young reached an enviable amount of career milestones. It was her first time working with a relatively mainstream cast (John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Dylan McDermott and Justin Kirk, among others). It was her first screenwriting collaboration with Lena Dunham, creator of the hit HBO series “Girls,” who happens to be a

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL - “Sopranos” creator David Chase should be commended for choosing some of the most heavily-mined subjects in all of fiction for his feature film debut, “Not Fade Away.” It’s a nostalgic growing-up story set in the early to mid-sixties, chronicling—as did Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and “Liberty Heights” and television’s “The Wonder Years”— rock’n’roll and its countercultural appeal which swept over that