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The Concert, at least initially, is a goofy farce with a moderately ridiculous premise. A janitor working at the Bolshoi in Moscow, who himself was once its celebrated–and politically discredited–conductor (Alexeï Guskov), intercepts a fax from Paris inviting the orchestra to fill in for the L.A. Philharmonic, which has canceled. He [...]

This isn’t a real review–I’m just writing to bring a movie to your attention: Burning Palms. I previewed this movie–a collection of five stories–over the weekend, and it was good. Really good. Here’s my caveat, though: It is dark. Very black humor. The themes may be disturbing to some, including rape and [...]

Remember back circa 2004, when Jude Law seemed to be in every other movie that came out? Well, this year it’s proven the same with Natalie Portman (Black Swan, No Strings Attached, Your Highness, Thor, etc.). This time, in The Other Woman, she’s playing the second wife of a successful New York lawyer (Scott Cohen) [...]

Blue Valentine is now out on DVD. I worked with the writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, and one of its editors, Jimmy Helton, here at the Video Station circa 1997. It was great to work alongside of them, and in those days, Derek was a young guy working on his first big project, Brother [...]

The Illusionist isn’t just the long-awaited second feature from Sylvain Chomet, the French animator who made 2003’s charmingly grotesque, hauntingly comic Triplets of Belleville. It’s also, in a sense, a new film from the great mime artist turned genius director Jacques Tati (Playtime, Mon Oncle), who died in 1982. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical script Tati [...]

Jolene is one of those little independent movies that introduces us to a new star without really being a great film itself. It’s certainly not unwatchable–it’s shot fairly well and it has an engaging enough cast–but it kind of drifts from scene to scene without any strong momentum. The title character [...]

With few exceptions, the films that tackle historical periods and their figures best are those that attack their subjects a bit obliquely. When asked to summon a cinematic image of D-Day, for instance, most might think first of Saving Private Ryan, which merely uses Omaha Beach as the visceral prologue [...]

I don’t have kids, so I can only imagine what it would feel like to suddenly lose one. Rabbit Hole, a pretty-looking piece of Oscar bait starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, means to show us such pain, but doesn’t wholly succeed.

In 1940, in the middle of a Siberian winter, a group of prisoners escape a Soviet labour camp. Only barbed wire to cut through, then losing guards in whiteout conditions and pine forest. They dared this with a few survival skills and scraps of food to sustain them, knowing that staying [...]

Any of you who are old enough (like me) to remember the heyday of record stores, especially of Tower Records, may remember a classical music recording that was one of the first true crossover phenomenons – A Feather on the Breath of God, by Hildegard von Bingen. At the time, it [...]