Salaam Dunk is a genial high-five to team sport as a route to girl power and a sense of community.
Headshot is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.
The film pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.
Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman’s bumpy path to enlightenment.
The film pulls us back in as easily as an old friend after a years-long absence.
All In is at its most interesting when it gives one a passing sense of Buenos Aires’s elite.
From its title to its closing caress, Teddy Bear skates perilously close to the cliff’s edge of mawkish sentiment.
Pregnancy, infertility, blackmail, bribery, and murder are just a few of the items that are ticked off in perfunctory fashion by the pointed script.
A playfully self-reflective rumination on what Terence Nance has described as “self-awareness through experience with love.”
The nuanced nitty-gritty of the story’s politicking extends to the two traffic accidents that bookend the film.
Part Coen brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like abortion and midlife crises.
With The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius stretches a feather-light gimmick to feature-length.
The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they’re even asked.
Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, the film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and driven deep into our hearts.
The film lacks the fire and emotional depth of Almodóvar’s best work.
Unpredictable twists, a gathering sense of dread, and the tender humanism that infuse it all make Farhadi’s film absorbing.
It’s hard to imagine a better pairing of talent and material than Steve James, Alex Kotlowitz, and the street-savvy, impassioned antiviolence crusaders of The Interrupters.
Life, Above All feels more like a lecture about a problem than a window into a world.
The film is a Petri dish of English culture wriggling with thwarted ambition, dreams deferred, and good intentions gone awry.
A frothy fantasy dressed up as a quirky character study, Copacabana is a mishmash of mismatched parts that left me feeling a little queasy.