At a time when filmmakers are getting lost in a fog of 3-D conversions and assorted digital shenanigans there’s a resistance forming: small DIYers, emerging poets of the film negative, those who make their voices heard through simple yet effective movies. Jan Ole Gerster is such a filmmaker. "Oh boy" recounts the absurd, touching and melancholy wanderings of a young German through a Berlin that would have made

Having begun his career as a TV scribe Tobias Lindholm got co-writing duties on Thomas Vinterberg's "Submarino" (2010) and "The Hunt" (2012). He collaborated with Michael Noer ("Northwest") on scripting and directing, in 2010. These efforts seem to have naturally led Lindholm to direct "Hijacking," his first solo effort.

Danish cargo ship M.V. Rosen

"World War Z" may be the first film in which the cast exceeds the actual population of the planet. There are huge citywide vistas of rambling crowds. Most of these people are infected with a zombie virus that turns them into rattlesnakes with overbites and clammy hair.

These elements pay off quickly in a fantastic opener set in a traffic jam in downtown Philadelphia. Amid startling car-smashing, Brad

Sofia Coppola’s latest is about as interesting as the vapid microcosm in which it takes place: the small world of a bunch of half-wit Louboutin- and Vuitton-obsessed rich kids in L.A. They come up with the brilliant idea of finding out on the internet when this or that celebrity is out of town so they can sneak in the empty house and get their hands on the objects of their dreams. It’s mansion after mansion, gaudy and kitsch and

“Violet & Daisy” is more conceit than film. It steals a little from “Pulp Fiction” (both before and after a bloody hit, two nonchalant assassins discuss unrelated things, in this case bestiality), a tad from “Suicide Kings” (criminals in way over their head are outsmarted by their hostage), a smidgen from “The Professional” (a troubled girl finds a daddy figure in an older criminal). The soundtrack is, course, incongruously light and

Seen from the outside the situation in the Middle East conflict—the plight of Palestinians in the Territories, the sense of insecurity of Israelis, the second-rate status of Arab Israeli citizens--may seem both hopeless and distant. Hopeless it may be but distant it certainly is not for the millions who live it every day. The point is forcefully brought home by the excellent film “The Attack” by Lebanese-born director Ziad Doueiri, based on

Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is, like Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series “Girls,” fixated on the insular, entitled world of artsy, twenty-something Manhattanites, where twenty-seven year-old bachelors are still bankrolled, unapologetically, by their parents, and barely employed comedy writers and sculptors refuse to relocate to cheaper, less happening outer-borough apartments. Like Dunham, Baumbach bravely