• 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

  • Monica Bellucci arrived yesterday in Bosnia to commence principal photography on a new film by Serbian director Emir Kusturica. The film is a love story in the time of war.

    "Monica will be with us for about fifty days of shooting. My plan is to finish in November and for the film to be presented at the Cannes Film Festival next year," Kusturica said yesterday at a press

  • “Blue Jasmine” is a perfect film, the first perfect film I’ve seen all year. It is smart, well-written, entertaining, beautifully filmed and the performances are unbelievably good. The film is also more remarkable for what it demonstrates of the faculties of Woody Allen. After his amusing but rather shallow exercises of the past years, not only with his European forays but even before (remember “Whatever Works”? I didn’t think so), he manages to completely renew himself

  • If there were a subtitle to Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing," it could be "Fun Loving War Criminals." A cadre of aging Indonesian gangsters relive their part in a pogrom against communists in the sixties.

    In the political chaos of the time, the Indoneisan army staged a coup in order to pre-empt a suspected communist takeover of the government and saved Mel Gibson and Sigourney

  • Lynn Shelton is an undeniably accomplished writer, editor, and director; her first film “We Go Way Back” won the grand prize at Slamdance in 2006. Since then she has distinguished herself through her astute observations of human relationships in all their weirdness and confusion. 2009's “Humpday” focused on two male friends considering making a gay porn film together, and led to a remake being done in France. Her 2011