While the film’s plodding pace and largely muted action may be discouraging for some viewers, “Year” triumphs from the slow and gripping tension of its character drama. Writer and director J.C. Chandor (“All is lost”) has proven to be especially adept at depicting characters battening down the hatches. His first film “Margin Call” was a taut Wall Street drama set during the onset of the 2007-08 financial crisis. In “All is Lost” a man battles it out

FRANCE - This week, the right wing-leaning mayor of a small Parisian suburban town ordered local theaters to take the film “Timbuktu” (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) off its program slate “in the name of the fight against glorifying terrorism.” The terrorist attacks that occurred in France last week have had many consequences, this incomprehensible cancelation of “Timbuktu” by Monsieur le Mayor being the collateral

The New York-based INDEPENDENT FILM PROJECT, an incubator for indie-minded [...]

In college I wrote a paper on the subversion of the detective novel in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. I got an A, although the paper received its highest compliment in 2009. That’s when Pynchon finally lived up to my astonishing insight and published a detective novel, “Inherent vice.” This survey of Los Angeles weirdness circa 1970 is brought to the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. The Crying of Lot 49 features suburban housewife Oedipa Maas

"Effie Gray" is a 2012 British biographical drama film directed by Richard Laxton, released in 2014 in the U.K. The film's release was delayed by several lawsuits that alleged that the script, written by Emma Thompson, was plagiarised from earlier dramatizations of the same story (Thompson won the suit). The subject of "Effie" is the love triangle involving Victorian art critic John Ruskin (played by Greg Wise), his wife, Euphemia "Effie"

Even though she was born in Malmö, Sweden on September 29, 1931, Anita Ekberg was an Italian actress. She had become a star elsewhere first but it was in Rome that her marquee lights flared. She was a living, breathing representation of cinema that drove both men and women, avowed cinephiles as well as Sunday movie-goers, crazy. And it is Rome, too, that Ekberg would call home ever since the fifties, never returning to her

Sean Penn, there’s an actor with range. This time around, [...]