Time for another Israeli film about how the terrible conflicts in that region are ultimately between well-intentioned people on both sides who just want to go about the business of being human, but can’t quite figure out how! Ah, yes, it’s an evergreen subject, but no matter how often we see Israeli filmmakers approach this […]

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind represented a major shift towards more polished, visually ambitious films from director Miyazaki Hayao; it even resulted in the creation of a brand new animation studio that would, in due course, become one of the most beloved companies in cinema history. But his next project released after Nausicaä […]

You’ve seen the story of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet before: a poor kid ends up in jail and meets a grizzled old mobster, who becomes mentor and teacher to the budding criminal; as a result, the kid becomes a tremendously successful crimelord himself. It’s the basic arc of essentially every gangster movie ever made, and […]

The pair of surreal children’s fantasies written by Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have been adapted for cinema and television as often as any other work of English literature I can name outside of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Yet, despite a tradition of adaptation stretching back […]

1973’s The Crazies isn’t exactly a “great” movie, expecially in comparison to director George A. Romero’s early and more famous story of rural Pennsylvanians trying to survive an onslaught of murderous subhumans (namely, Night of the Living Dead), but it is quite good. And most if its goodness comes from the tremendous specificity of its […]

If Roman Polanski never makes another film after The Ghost Writer, the very least we’ll be able to say about the man is this: he managed to end his career with a pretty crackerjack thriller, no masterpiece on the scale of Chinatown or Knife in the Water (and really, how could it be?), but a […]

In the late 1960s, manga artist Katō Kazuhiko, working under the nom de plume Monkey Punch, began writing a series titled (in English), Lupin III. This series told of the adventures of a gentleman thief named Arsène Lupin III, the grandson of Arsène Lupin, the hero of a series of French novels written by Maurice […]

One last toe-dip into the seas of platform-released prestige pictures, and life can move on to more interesting and important things – I am given to understand that a known pedophile has a thriller about the publishing industry that just opened this past weekend – but the last death rattle of Oscar season 2009 is […]