The key to a film’s success may be casting — yet the timing of a film’s release can be just as important.  Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino‘s latest  gunfest, is rallying an audience, just as proponents of …

Beware of a film called Love. In Amour, Michael Haneke takes you to an end of life inevitability that seems distanced enough to shield you from some of the pain there. Then he takes you right …

Zero Dark Thirty is a tautly constructed account of the pursuit by the US military of a terrorist leader who ordered the 9/11 attacks, with most of those US characters constructed to seem professional, competent and …

Does poetry run deeper than perception? Alan Berliner spent five years examining how Alzheimer’s disease closes down a poet’s creative life in First Cousin Once Removed.  At the risk of making light of that affliction, this …

Ninety minutes from Detroit, the home of the hard-core MC5, heavy metal has risen its graceful stubborn head. The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, is a sleek formation of pleated stainless …

The conclusion of Lincoln by Steven Spielberg (USA 2012, 165 minutes) is that Abraham Lincoln is a saint. Why else would Spielberg make a film about a historical figure? That said, this sacrament in devotion to Lincoln …

Will Screen Seals Seal the Election? No one ever accused Harvey Weinstein of lacking a flair for marketing.  Weinstein is the man who made a fortune with Pulp Fiction. This time he’s out to cash in …

Just as foreign policy only makes it to the presidential debates in gaffes, The Iran Job isn’t getting much attention in the marketplace. It should. This jock-umentary by Till Schauder (produced by the Iranian-American Sara Nodjoumi) …

If you thought the handheld camera that’s so much in vogue these days was dizzying, prepare yourself for Leviathan. If you thought you loved fish, prepare for an industrial-sized portion that might make you reconsider. This …

He’s back. Roman Polanski, the fugitive from US law enforcement, is back on the screen in Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, the sequel to Zenovich’s  documentary about the filmmaker/ celeb-defendant, Roman Polanski: Wanted and …