Sometime last year Eddy Moretti, co-founder of Vice Magazine’s film division, assigned three movie directors from different countries a fairly abstract project. They were to each shoot a short film about the concept of a fourth dimension, and follow such rules as “the hero needs to be bold,” “the hero also needs to be flawed,” and “a stuffed animal needs to make an appearance.” Moretti also instructed them to make “the best film you’ve

Babygirl is Irish filmmaker Macdara Vallely’s alternatively wistful and funny tale of a sixteen year-old wise-beyond-her-years Bronx girl named Lena (Yainis Ynoa) who defiantly protects her mother (Rosa Arredondo). A lonely single mom, Lucy is easily swayed by flattery, which repeatedly links her to unworthy male suitors. When an oily, mustachioed youngster named Victor (Flaco Navaja) flirts openly with both Lena and Lucy on a

I saw Lee Hirsch’s documentary Bully (previously called The Bully Project) at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, before the sound mix was officially finished; shortly after it was purchased by the Weinstein Company. There may have been a few changes made before its release last Friday so I am writing, as it were, from memory. Bully couldn’t have been timelier. In the thirteen years since Columbine, America has seen an alarming uptick in suicides

21 Jump Street yields three solid chuckles in one-hundred-nine minutes of running time, which is simply inexcusable. Though engineered by human beings (directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller), 21 might as well be a factory-made blueprint of Starsky & Hutch, Hollywood’s last nod to kitschy television shows. Take a cult T.V. cop show (the late eighties-early nineties Fox series 21 Jump Street, which put Johnny Depp on the map)

There’s plenty superfluous commentary in Detachment, most of it delivered via the protagonist’s narrated monologues. We get a classroom lecture on the virtues of reading and the perils of an image-obsessed culture (which makes the image-obsessed Tony Kaye something of a hypocrite); we get cobweb-ridden life lessons such as “the world is a confusing place” and “everyone has chaos.” And in case we can’t tell that the entire

With today's dried-up loan markets and lack of funding for the arts, financing all of their film's budget through credit-cards, endless bartender shifts and selling internal organs is the norm for independent filmmakers. What you don't hear about often is someone shedding his identity to dodge debt collectors. New York-based David Spaltro suffered through this for two years, ever since wrapping his first, largely autobiographical film

The most deliciously scabrous skit on the mid-nineties HBO comedy series “Mr. Show” was “The Dewey Awards,” which skewered the sanctimonious trend of rewarding A-list Hollywood actors for their “brave” portrayals of the autistic, the mentally retarded, and other less fortunate types. Those rankled by the sight of Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks playing these parts, rather than real-life challenged actors, could gasp in private delight at this long-delayed