When early in the forties a young Greek director called Elias Kazantzoglou showed up at a major Hollywood studio, the studio head (one imagines him sending cigar smoke the way of the hopeful visitor), advised him on a name change as a first step. “How about Cézanne?” the studio head asked. The director who would go down in film history as Elia Kazan demurred. “There already is a Cézanne,” he said. The studio head

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Augusto Pinochet, the benevolent-looking Chilean general who overthrew Allende in 1973—putting an end to a long spell of democracy--and oversaw seventeen years of terror, responsible for thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested, tortured and “disappeared” died in his bed (though under house arrest) in 2006. Wrangling over extradition procedures while he was holed up in London before being returned to Santiago didn’t give

After Luciano, the main character in Matteo Garrone’s new film “Reality” (out March 15th) gets the call from a T.V. studio telling him he’s made the first cut in a casting call for the reality T.V. show “Grande Fratello” (“Big Brother”), he gradually slides into full-blown paranoid megalomania. Watching him wait anxiously for the next round of callbacks is comical at first, until his affliction threatens to take him and his family down. It’s

The story of four college students on spring break (played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) is inevitably going to spin out of control—agreed—that’ s what the movie’s poster tells us, what the trailer confirmed, and what the dozens of similar previous films have told us before. But let’s not sweat the small stuff. What’s interesting is how effective “Breakers” is cinematically: a great, awesome thrill ride. Watch out, however, because “Breakers” could prove to be yet another of Hollywood’s

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I should be describing “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” to let you know the positives and negatives of the latest Steve Carell mass-market comedy. But watching it, all I could wonder was, whatever happened to Steve Buscemi and the Coen Brothers? At one time he was arguably the foremost actor associated with the reticent Minnesota siblings, playing roles in all five of their features in the nineties. Then it suddenly stopped. Why? Obviously there wouldn’t appear to be a rift, a falling out, as he starred in their segment of “Paris, Je t’aime.” They just suddenly quit. Was it money? A desire to try new