The Persian story goes, when your heart is filled with sorrow, find a patience stone or syngué sabour that will listen as you talk to it until it can take no more and bursts into pieces, lifting that weight from your shoulders and leaving you free. This well-known legend has been written up any number of times, including by Iranian novelist Sadegh Chubak, and filmed at least once, in 1968. It is also the basis of the novel by Atiq Rahimi, Syngué sabour, that in 2008

Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” is a contemplative, leisurely look at the world of art as a parallel to ours. A loose narrative pulls together the director’s musings on the correspondence between the two. The story, such as it is, introduces us to a Canadian woman (singer Mary Margaret O'Hara) who travels to Vienna to visit a cousin she hasn’t seen in years and who has fallen in a deep coma with little chance of recovery. For someone

In the department of gems to discover, “Starlet,” by Sean Baker.

Once in a while we’re lucky enough to come upon an excellent film that had somehow slid under our radar screen. I’m thinking “Tiny Furniture,” showered with awards at indie film festivals, written about, lauded but attracting only a small audience. As a writer, I was green with envy when I finally saw it. How can an author be so smart, so hip, so original, in a context done

The car porn chiller “Getaway” is a movie of wonder. I wondered about the way the film was actually made, the shooting sequence, the extravagant car flips and pile-ups, the monotone acting. Did Ethan Hawke actually shoot all of the gear-shifting shots? Or was that Ethan Hawke’s hand double? Did they shoot one gear shift and re-use that footage? Or is there a special gear shift for each scene so that each one has a different feel? And were Ethan Hawke and Disney queen

I dressed like that. In college more so than high-school. Black trench coat (but mine was brown). Black slacks. Doc Martens. I never owned that Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, but I did own the album with that cover.

That was Gary King’s wardrobe on the last day of high-school in 1990, the day he and four friends started (but didn’t finish) a legendary twelve-pub crawl in their English hometown. It’s still what he wears twenty-three years later as he rounds

For a few years in the early seventies Karen Black, who died a few days ago was the face of cinema, along with her male counterparts Peter Fonda or Jack Nicholson. Not surprisingly, they were all in the iconic film of that period, “Easy Rider” (okay, 1966). Fonda directed, Nicholson with a supporting role lasting a few minutes burst on the screen and on the scene, and Black had a small but as always unforgettable part.

This is Wong Kar Wai's first martial arts outing, not to mention his first film since his embarrassing English-language attempt “My Blueberry Nights” from 2007.

Wong spent three years researching “Grandmaster,” which tells of Kung Fu masters in Northern China and Hong Kong in the years before WWII until the fifties, and he seems to have gotten all the details, down to the buttons on