Amy (Amy Schumer) is a single girl living the life in Manhattan. Well-trained into shunning monogamy by her offensive, lovable father (Colin Quinn) who a couple of decades ago abandoned Amy, her sister Kim and their mother, she works at a sleazy men’s magazine by day and is into some serious bed-hopping at night. She uses men as one does tissues, rumpling them into a ball and tossing them in a corner when she’s done.

A comparative review of casino films pre-2000s with movies released in the new millennium suggest that this generation’s screenplay writers and directors have exhausted the genre, and the Internet’s various lists of top films in the category have not proven otherwise. The recent additions in the category have failed to impress at the box office with Jason Statham’s Wild Card, a substandard attempt to channel Burt Reynolds in Heat, as well as Runner, Runner which a Rotten Tomatoes

In THE TRIBE we're propelled head-first in a boarding school for young deaf and mute people, the tribe of the title, in which violence, trafficking and prostitution are commonplace. For the over two hours of the film's length there's not a single line of dialogue or caption, just the power of cinema to induce raw emotion through ruthless framing shots that spare us nothing and zeroes in on actors who are apparently

Ever since his first outing there in the nineties Jean-Michel Frodon, one of France’s most distinguished film specialists, traveled four more times to Iran, the country whose filmmakers gave us festival favorites like GABBEH, A TASTE OF CHERRY and CLOSE-UP. As your not-so-average tourist, at times, and as officially-summoned authority on cinema, at others, Frodon soaked up the lore and took in the sights, giving talks and trekking it

Writer/Director Diane Bell’s sophomore film BLEEDING HEARTS, a selection at the last Tribeca Film Festival, was a very personal journey that combined her own experiences with the challenge of making a film with strong female characters. In this case sisters played by Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet. Biel’s May is a yoga instructor (a vocation once held by Bell in real life) living a clean, somewhat boring life

One of the great things about smaller independent films is that the freedom they explore in not getting pigeon-holed into one specific genre. As the recently-passed Tribeca Festival caters to the independents it follows that they reap the benefits of this formula. Case in point is one of the festival’s better selections this year ASHBY which combines drama, comedy (or dark comedy) sprinkled with a bit of teen angst, romance, action and even neo-noir.

There are years when everyone knows which film will win. 2015 was not one of them, although there was some consensus among the major press that CAROL and MIA MADRE were the strongest films, cinematographically and stylistically and the Hou Hsiao-Hsien-directed THE ASSASSIN, the rare film by a filmmaker who's completely in control of his art, would not go home empty-handed. We expected the Coen Brothers-led jury would award them but not