Stormy skies have threatened to overflow the lagoon and the part of this year’s Selection that’s already been screened is stoking an enthusiasm that’s mitigated. It’s near the end of the festival and this 69th edition of the Venice Film Festival is still struggling to gain traction and also get in step with the bold ambitions of its new artistic director, Alberto Barbera. And yet this year’s poster was handsome enough and significant changes have been

To properly discuss David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” we need to discuss something that film reviews rarely touch: the relationship between film and literature, in a general and historical sense. The challenge that cinema placed upon the primacy of literature in the last century has resulted in marketplace rivalry. Like any good products, the two began to differentiate. Film became the reserve of action, plot, emo-

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Last year “Bridesmaids” showed that women could do crude humor. When did that stop? Didn’t Cameron Diaz expertly handle a “hair gel” scene more than a decade ago? Anyway, now here is Lauren Miller and Katie Ann Naylon’s “For a Good Time, Call”. It’s got laughs, it’s got heart. Looks like crude women are 2 for 2, so far.

In addition to sharing screenwriting duties

According to this documentary that hit the screen just in time for the Republican Convention, what fuelled Obama’s meteoric rise to the White House was his rage against the white man and the influence of the colonialist-hating worldview of his father (never mind that Obama’s father left his wife and son to go back to Kenya when our future President was all of two). If you add to this already volatile mix the burden of other psychological

“The Avengers” is the smorgasbord comic book movie we’ve been [...]

This second DVD offering includes movies very different from each other but nevertheless combined in a boxed set which is remarkable in and of itself since it is the first available materialization of the activities the World Cinema Foundation has been conducting since 2007.

Founded and chaired by Martin Scorsese, the World Cinema Foundation works with many of the world’s leading