In "Joy joy nails" unusual close-ups and adept cinematography combine the claustrophobic feelings of a confined workplace with the eerie lighting from the city's streets, its buses and subways. “Joy Joy Nails,” directed by New Yorker Joey Ally, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at a Queens nail salon from the viewpoint of its employees, most of whom are Korean. Subtitles (in the foreign film tradition) help convey what they’re

One of the best things about Tribeca (this film premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Festival recently) are the more character-driven independent films that get screened there. One example of this is “My Art,” written, directed and starring Laurie Simmons. Simmons of course falls into that underrated category of “Female Director” that thankfully Tribeca recognizes more and more each year. The story of the film revolves around “Ellie"

The premise of Nacho Vigalondo’s "Colossal," a Godzilla monster comedy starring Anne Hathaway, is such a creative burst that the movie earned a decent review just by getting to paper. A drink-til-you-drop party girl gets dumped by her boyfriend, moves home to a small town, takes a job as a waitress, and tries to sober up. Meanwhile across the world, a giant lizard creature appears and disappears each night to attack Seoul, Korea. When she scratches her

The footage is muddy, but we see it clearly enough: a pink dolphin—one of many endangered species populating the Brazilian Amazon—is harpooned to death by a group of fishermen, to be used as bait for the pirapitinga, a breed of scavenger catfish. This is just the beginning of Mark Grieco’s wrenching documentary “The River Below,” currently showing at Tribeca. Filmed over two difficult years

Syria's white helmets are the country's first responders. They're there when bombs go off, when buildings collapse, when bodies need to be recovered and the wounded hospitalized. "Last Men in Aleppo," a documentary directed by Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad in collaboration with the Aleppo Media Center, follows two men from the White Helmets who navigate the war-torn city of Aleppo in various search-and-rescue missions.

Several viewings of the trailer for “Hidden Figures” before my usual cinema-going routine failed to convince me that it was a film worth seeing. On the strength of those two minutes, I quickly pegged it as yet another moral, inspirational tale about disadvantaged people overcoming great odds. Talk about disadvantage. The three main characters in question are women--not easy today and even less easier in 1961--and black

The mood is melancholy, the road ahead unclear. Which may explain the slew of biographical and autobiographical novels and films in a meandering Proustian fashion that go for the past. And, just like Proust’s oeuvre, never boring but intriguing and beguiling at the same time. After the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir, “My Struggle,” the gorgeous Mike Mills film, “20th Century Women.” I hadn’t seen “Beginners”