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RIP Howard Zinn, Wake Up Progressives
"Think for yourself. Don't believe what the people up there tell you," Howard Zinn said. "Don't depend on saviors or the founding fathers or our leaders to do what must be done." Leanne Goebel contemplates Zinn's death and what his message means for American progressives today. Read More >>
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Best of the Docs at Berlin
A look at Sir Norman Foster, a 40-year-old orangutan, and two shelved films from the Nazi era -- one German, one American. Read More >>
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David D'Arcy on Art of the Steal
 Don Argott's documentary, Art of the Steal, opened in theaters in New York and Philadelphia last weekend. David D'Arcy reports on the documentary film in which he has a feature role.
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Polanski Wins Silver Bear at Berlin
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Polanski's "Ghost Writer" Premieres
 Anticipated at the Berlin International Film Festival was the premiere of the Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's adaptation of a novel in which, guess what?, there is no such thing as paranoia.
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Scorcese's Shutter Island Opens
Shutter Island, set in the 1950s Age of Anxiety, demonstrates Martin Scorcese working as an architect of film, directing film as infrastructure. Read More >>
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John Ford Westerns Re-Viewed
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Sebastian Junger Face-to-Face
 Sundance 2010 ended with the award of the top documentary prize to Restrepo, a first film by the writer Sebastian Junger (left) and the photographer Tim Hetherington about a US Army unit posted to a remote mountaintop in Eastern Afghanistan. David D'Arcy interviewed Junger before the festival.
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Banksy and Mr. Brainwash at Sundance
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"Next" at Sundance
The "Next" part of Sundance features films made for less than $500k, but who's counting when it comes to Bass Ackwards? Read More >>
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Ozark Noir and The Killer Inside Me, at Sundance
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Heather Rae in Native Lineup--Twice
Heather Rae has production credits on a Navajo movie and on the competing film in the US dramatic category , The Dry Land.
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Sundance Festival Diary: Opening Night
 A2's film critic, David D'Arcy, previews opening night films at Sundance Film Festival, Howl and Restrepo, along with Smash His Camera, Leon's Gast's documentary on Ron Galella, and the Alex Gibney doc on Casino Jack Abramoff (left), who was not interviewed for the film. He was in federal prison.
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Sundance Audio Diary: Freedom Riders
On MLK Day, David D'Arcy previews Sundance and the documentary by director Stanley Nelson, The Freedom Riders. 
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A First Preview of Sundance
On the documentary watch list. Read More >>
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The Anti-Invictus
 David D'Arcy on the doc beat with a review of Freetime Machos, a documentary by Mika Ronkainen.
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New Mexico Film in Gray and Black
 A panel at Santa Fe Film Festival found Albuquerque Studios COO Nick Smerigan talking production in New Mexico with Ira Behr (left) of "Crash," Rob Markovich of Starz, and Kirk Ellis, the Emmy Award-winning screenwriter.
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Avatar: Eco Fable on Steroids
 James Cameron has been making Avatar for 15 years, longer than the US has spent in Iraq. That's proved enough time to construct a movie cosmology with a clash of cultures at its core. But isn't Pandora a fool's paradise?
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Tom Ford's Directorial Debut, A Single Man
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Tom Ford's shift from fashion to film would be stylish. His directorial debut, A Single Man, is a stylishly personal adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel -- but will it play in the heartland?
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Reitman's "Up In the Air," Loved by Critics, Delivers Limbo
 After premiering in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, Up in the Air, Jason Reitman's film about the collapsing economy and the human toll, is now the flavor of the week among movie critics.
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Ellen Kuras Wins Cinematography Honor at Santa Fe Film Fest
 Being honored by a Santa Fe Film Festival Milagro award Saturday, Ellen Kuras has a long resume - Swoon, Unzipped, I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, Analyze That, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, and the list goes on.
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Apocalypse Along The Road
 Tis the season for movies about the end of the world. As characters loot, vomit and cannibalize each other, you might wonder why The Road is a commercial movie.
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The Last Days of Empire
 Watching the remake of Grey Gardens and reflecting on the fall of empire.
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Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces
 The real love story in Broken Embraces is Pedro Almodovar's love of cinema.
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David D'Arcy Reviews Three New Films
Precious, Pirate Radio, and the Messenger.
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Project Runway in the Post Season
 Irina's mean, Althea's needy, and Carol Hannah's vomiting. Marching toward the Project Runway finale. As of November 19th Irina won but all three ruled on the runway. Great season. Even Heidi looked happy.
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"Untitled" Captures Artist Angst
 (Untitled), directed by Jonathan Parker, is a satire of the art world, wrapped around an earnest drama about the pain of the unrecognized artist.
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Robert Frank's Notorious Film
 Last Saturday Robert Frank's film Cocksucker Blues (CSB) played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a 50th anniversary exhibition of Frank's The Americans runs through January 3. The photographer abandoned still photography after The Americans for filmmaking, yet those pictures remain icons. Like monuments, these icons are likely to outlast all of us.
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Abu Dhabi and Middle East Film Fests
 Abu Dhabi is a wealthy place. The Hamptons might as well be Bayonne, compared to the ambition of the capitol of the United Arab Emirates - and compared to the capital of the capitol of the United Arab Emirates. News from the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and the Middle East International Film Fest (MIEFF).
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Lebanon Shellshock and More
 Lebanon, the film, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and played at festivals in Toronto and New York. It is based on the wartime confusion and trauma of its director, Samuel Maoz, now 47, who was in a tank unit in the 1982 Israeli invasion.
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Clouzot's Inferno Still Hot
 The Inferno (L'Enfer) was to be Henri-Georges Clouzot's most ambitious film and the triumph of his career. It ended up being one of the great debacles whose story is now the subject of a documentary making film festival rounds.
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Toronto Film Festival Wrapup
 Precious, opening Nov. 20, wins the audience award. Bright Star by Jane Campion treats John Keats poetically. Director Drew Barrymore misses her screening. Plus: Steven Soderbergh's The Informant, Jason Reitman, Michael Moore, the Coens. A wrapup by David D'Arcy.
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City of Life and Death: Review
 Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, which premiered in Toronto, takes us back to the Japanese siege of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1938, which killed more than 300,000 Chinese.
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David D'Arcy on Toronto International Film Festival
 A first Adobeairstream podcast with film critic David D'Arcy on his picks for the first few days of the Toronto International Film Festival.
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Amreeka: A Review
Amreeka is the Arab word for America. In a more perfect world, this drama could take its topicality and humane treatment of the immigrant experience beyond the art circuit to the multiplexes. Read More >>
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Sundance Moves the Teepees
 New Mexico ranks 3d in US film production. And Gov. Bill Richardson and his old pal Robert Redford are now bringing Sundance Institute's Native American and Indigenous Programs, to produce Native American films and train Native American talent, to Los Luceros. Mary Cabot Wheelwright at Los Luceros
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Baader-Meinhof, The Gang That Shot Itself
 Baader-Meinhof Complex tracks the tiny Baader-Meinhof group whose deaths artist Gerhard Richter remembered in a monumental painting series. It opens opened in the US in late August.
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Extreme Tarantino, Inglourious Pitt
 Brad Pitt appears on the Daily Show talking about Inglourious Basterds. The Weinstein Bros. keep us from embedding the movie preview. Oh well, you can go their site directly from here. But come back for the review.
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Earth Day: Latest Environmento Doc
 It's been a good summer for environment documentaries, with The Cove and Food Inc. Robert Stone adds Earth Days, examining the early, and optimistic days of the environmental movement.
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One Julia Too Many
 If only Julie & Julia - written, produced and directed by Nora Ephron - had simply been a period comedy, we would have had a charming picture, with cooking tips.
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California Company Town
 California Company Town, a documentary incorporating archival radio and film shot in 16mm, screened at New York's Anthology Film Archive through July 30th.
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Boulder Filmmaker Looks at Dolphins
 The Cove is an eloquent plea for the defense of a slaughtered species. Louie Psihoyos of Boulder Colorado, a former National Geographic photographer (he took the image, right), made the film.
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Political Nasties at Sundance
 In the Loop premiered at Sundance, one of the best offerings in a mixed slate at the festival. As political farce it puts British satire to work.
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KVIFF 2009 in Czech Republic An Indie Feast
 KVIFF 2009, in the Czech Republic, marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.
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Bruno Offends Everybody
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The Hurt Locker
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An Afghan Star's Out
 Remember the saying that the revolution would not be televised? Wrong. In Afghan Star, Havana Marking's documentary, the promise of democracy in Kabul is on TV.
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Hilary Swank in Albuquerque
How do you find a cheap Brooklyn apartment? You build it in Albuquerque, where The Resident, starring Hilary Swank, is being shot.
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Whatever Works, Works
 Whatever Works is Woody Allen's best film in more than a decade. Echoes of Manhattan, Annie Hall and Broadway Danny Rose will lure back the US fans who deserted Allen in the last decade as the writer/director left New York (in his movies) for Paris, London and Barcelona. The story of an aging Jewish misfit meeting a youthful beauty takes much from Allen's Annie Hall template.
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The Danger’s On Your Plate
 It sounds too easy to describe Food Inc. (Dir., Robert Kenner, 2008, USA) as a movie that you might not be able to stomach, but that's just what it is, and more. Director Robert Kenner's collaboration with the authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) is not a feel-good movie.
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Rediscovering Seraphine
 Seraphine, directed and co-written by Martin Provost, won 7 Cesars in France, and seems to be on its way to winning over the American critics. Yolande Moreau as the ungainly artist lifts the film out of the ordinary. Much of her acting is without lines, no surprise for an actress who worked for years as a clown.
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Wendell Harris Jr. on Chameleon Street
 The filmaker who won Sundance in 1990 talks about life underground.
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Soderbergh
 Steven Soderbergh shot his new low-budget movie, The Girlfriend Experience, on a digital Red Camera. It melds epicurean pornography, the mainstream debut of adult film star Sasha Grey (who admires Jean-Luc Godard), and a story with stylistic panache and little sex onscreen.
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A jury of Roman Polanski's peers, led by director Werner Herzog, honored him for the film. But can accolades keep him out of prison?
"The Making of Western Myth," at MFA Boston from Feb. 11-28, recasts John Ford as an auteur who understood not just how to paint a cowboy, but also the plight of the Native Americans.
David D'Arcy reports on new films revisiting violent crimes that have even the stars running for the exit, and the theme of suicide recurring at the festival.
