(from affiliate Iranian Film Daily) - “About Elly,” which stars Golshifteh Farahani (pictured) is finally getting a stateside limited release, well after the fact. Let’s remember that the year of release for this film is 2009. That’s six long years during which theater-going Americans were deprived of this slow-burning drama surrounding the mysterious disappearance of a woman vacationing at the beach with a group of friends.

Ever since the “Twilight” franchise the label “vampire film” seems to invite derision or at the very least weariness, from viewers who believe that stories of vampires have long outstayed their welcome. And yet, regardless of the ambivalence towards vampire films there's no shortage of filmmakers willing to take a stab at them. The results run the gamut from the painfully mediocre to the prodigiously inventive.

The slyest aspect about Lone Scherfig’s “The Riot Club” is also its most maddening one. Structurally, the whole production is a come-on, a tease, a manipulative stunt. It begins in lusciously ribald fashion as we are treated to nineteenth-century sexual shenanigans amid the upper classes at Oxford University: white wigs, splashy capes and all. A beloved hedonist is murdered after cuckolding an older man; to pay heed to his decadence, his peers vow to start a club

Beautiful, heartbreaking, ambitious, and spiritually invigorating. “The Salt of the Earth,” a new documentary directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, gives social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado (the co-director’s father) center stage and illuminates his life’s work with a focus on his photography work and travels. Salgado’s photographs cover diverse subjects, from migrants to workers to

The opening of Neill Blomkamp’s “Chappie” sweeps across multiple stories in multiple places in early stage apocalypse-Johannesburg, South Africa. A helicopter fleet of robocops dives from the sky and blasts through a collection of menacing gangsters. It’s a lovely, frantic movement of action, editing and scoring. And then everything goes wrong after that. It’s common for critics to wish that movie characters would grow brains.

Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale: "No, I'm not ready; I have no makeup on... but things are getting better!" (one of the many choice quotes from "Grey Gardens").

For the sadistic movie-goer "Grey Gardens" might just be the epitome of schadenfreude: look, rejoice, at how Big and Little Edie Beale, a mother-and-daughter team of recluses living in a run-down mansion in East

The film world a political injustice loveth (but it also loveth good cinema). And in a perfect storm of urgent, inspired filmmaking and jurisdictional accuracy the Golden Bear, the top award at the Berlinale, went to Jafar Panahi for his film "Taxi," a day after the FIPRESCI prize was given to him. Many of the other awards given out last night went to the underdogs, directors making cinema on a small but vital scale.

Alan Turing was a complex man, a mathematical genius who broke the seemingly unbreakable Enigma code through which the Nazis conducted their war on Europe with encrypted messages. Before that he was a highly gifted student at a public school, years marked by endless bullying and the awakening of homosexual tendencies. At a very young age, he becomes a Fellow at Cambridge University where he produces a number

(Every so often articles published on our affiliate blog Iranian Film Daily will be reprinted here based on relevance). Filmmaker Marion Poizeau has some kind of chutzpah. Two years ago she grabbed her board and traveled to the most dangerous place in Iran to surf and share her love of the sport with others. “A friend of mine told me about the waves in neighboring Pakistan. We figured there might be some ocean swells in Iran

If you have ever watched a televised murder trial and wondered why the family would support the killer, then Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy” is the film for you. This provocative French-language Canadian film (it had its world premiere at the 2014 Cannes Festival) zeroes in on the extreme relationship of a mother and her child. At times violent at others tender and finally doomed to tragedy Dolan's "Mommy" draws the full circle of a mother's love