Godfrey Cheshire

A documentary that had this reviewer wondering if it was a real or faux doc until the very end. Turns out it’s real, but the suspicion that it might be otherwise is a tribute both to the debuting filmmakers’ skills in shaping their story and that story’s innate dramatic power.

Gibney made his film without the cooperation of Jobs’ wife and their children or Apple, and thus his account doesn’t have either the authorized angle or wealth of insider-ish detail of Walter Isaacson’s capacious biography.

While Westwood is certainly a remarkable personal and cultural figure in many senses, it’s too bad she’s not more willing to discuss the genesis of punk, since it’s likely to remain the primary thing she’s known for.

The result is a film that feels less like a lecture than a provocative X-ray of current American political realities.

If there’s a note of reflexive nostalgia in the proceedings, that inevitably has to do not just with the man at the film’s center but with the era that produced him, a time when magazine and print journalism could take writers and make instant celebrities and hugely influential cultural figures out of them. That day is long gone, but Radical Wolfe makes a strong case that it’s well worth remembering.

The film has a lot going for it. Besides the gorgeous, burnished look supplied by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, Cooper gets a range of fine performances from a topnotch cast.

A Borrowed Identity commendably avoids polemics in order to provide a textured portrait of a young man going through a set of personal transitions against the background of ongoing cultural flux that reflects a larger, collective identity crisis. Its evocation of the historical period feels carefully honed and resonant.

One thing that’s notable about Front Cover — and that sets it apart from Ang Lee’s nominally similar “The Wedding Banquet” — is that, though set in New York, its perspective and espoused values are finally more Chinese than American.

The film certainly registers the dynamics between old and young, haves and have-nots—struggles that characterize societies far beyond Brazil.

One of the film’s advantages over the book is that it brings in the testimonies of many other people — from friends and fellow ex-hustlers to Hollywood historians and insiders — all of whom support Scotty’s veracity while adding additional perspectives of their own.

Nowhere in the film is its subject, Cenk Uygur, the founder and main mouthpiece of a YouTube show titled The Young Turks (TYT), called a journalist, but he does function as such, even if his game is commenting on the news rather than doing reportorial spadework.

The movie, then, is not just a niche film but a film for a niche of a niche. Rather than being ideal for people who know a bit about French cinema and want to know more, it’s best suited to people who know a considerable amount about French cinema (and culture) of the early sound era and want to delve deeper.

Using skillful, involving storytelling and beautifully executed rotoscoped photography, director Ali Soozandeh creates a world of intersecting urban miseries and challenges.

Both Reagan lovers and Reagan haters will find enough in the film to bolster their perspectives. Even more remarkably, it’s almost entirely snark-free.

Petroni, in any case, is a skilled storyteller with a strong visual sense.

The Bad Kids is interesting enough in what it shows us to spark interest in what it leaves un-shown. In its case, the information supplied by a few well-chosen talking heads could have given it additional clarity and appeal.

Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda’s film, on the other hand, narrates a true-life crime but fails to provide an element that might’ve lifted it above tasteful art-house ordinariness—an engaging point of view.

Paris 05:59,’s charms are likely slight enough, and its raunch raunchy enough, to keep it from becoming one of those rare exceptions.

The kind of lush historical drama that Hollywood might have made in the 1930s but these days unsurprisingly owes its existence to foreign producers and, most especially, a renowned literary source.

Shock and Awe reminds us all of this, and of the American media’s shameful complicity in fomenting an unjustified and vastly destructive war.

From Afar, in any case, is built on reticence.

Setting up a political drama in stereotypical black-hat/white-hat fashion results in enjoyably cartoonish villains like flamboyant gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (deliciously played by Helen Mirren) and the usual blacklist martyrs, but it also deprives the story of the nuance and complexity for which it cries out.

An action espionage tale vaguely in the Jason Bourne mold, MI-5 does indeed play like a TV spin-off, but one in which the filmmakers said to their team, “Listen up, all! We’re now doing the cinema version. What can we do to make it cinematic?”

For most of its 80-minute length, The Pearl Button meditates lyrically on water and its effects on humankind. Then it makes a sharp turn into evoking the horrors of the Pinochet regime, a transition that feels awkward and rather forced, diluting the film’s ultimate impact.

Older audiences are likely to find the film less amusing than risible.

Though Sean Penn executive-produced the film and voices its spare narration, the doc has a very generic tone, so much so that it might seem to belong on TV rather than in theaters.

It is a movie for golf enthusiasts, pure and simple.

It’s a fairly familiar critique of patriarchy from a humanist and feminist perspective, but one put across with some very impressive filmmaking skills by a first-time director.

[A] well-intentioned but only partly satisfying film.

While the mix doesn’t always cohere, the film boasts moments and scenes that rank with Duvall’s best work.

The story’s ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard’s sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography.

Having such a small number of characters, like the limitations caused by budgetary constraints, might sound like a recipe for creative claustrophobia, but Gentry turns these givens to his advantage, almost as if using Synchronicity to articulate a less-is-more filmmaking philosophy.

Curiously, there’s virtually no mention of religion in the film. For that matter, politics creep into the tale only obliquely, and later. It appears we’re meant to understand that the band’s music and Farah’s lyrics have an edge of protest, but this is registered only as a very general sort of frustration and discontent.

As inherently astonishing and powerful as this little-known episode is, it has not been well-served by Ross’ lumpy, ill-conceived script, which ends up wasting Matthew McConaughey’s terrific lead performance and other strong acting contributions.

The Confessions might remind viewers of films ranging from “The Name of the Rose” to Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth.” But Roberto Andó’s film disappointingly ends up being too flat-footed script-wise to deliver on either its dramatic or thematic promises.

While Salles’ portrait gives a very incomplete account of the man and his art, it pays tribute to a filmmaker who remains among the medium’s foremost and most fascinating creators.

It contains nothing to offend, but nothing to surprise or inspire, either.

A film so obedient to current academic fashions in both politics and cinema aesthetics that it ends up feeling both contrived and a bit dishonest.

A curious, ultimately unsatisfying romantic comedy about two sisters in love with the same man.

With a road movie story that aims toward simplistic and rather formulaic romantic wish-fulfillment, it offers some interesting scenery, but its main attraction is another estimable performance by the talented Garcia.

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning “Life of Pi,” made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

Van Dormael’s film was pure torture from first to last, about as mirthless a comedy as I ever hope to see.

Thankfully, the film does get better in its second half. Not a lot better, but enough to justify one’s continuing attention.

What comes across as genuine in the film, and might also help explain its origins, is its air of melancholy and loneliness.

Sworn Virgin is not the first film to give the impression that, in current European art cinema, religion is the one subject that dare not speak its name.

The latest example of what I call an emperor’s-new-clothes film is Neon Bull.

Alexandre Moors’ film is also so lacking in anything new or compelling to say — either emotional or political — about its subject that it ends up a rather dispiriting slog of a movie.

One of those paint-by-numbers romcoms that feels like you might have seen it a dozen times before.

Is it a real film, or a feature that uses the porn milieu to turn out a piece of softcore titillation that’s halfway between porn and actual drama? No doubt some of the film’s makers and defenders would argue for the former.

For fans of the genial, garrulous Gold, of Los Angeles culture or of films about food, City of Gold will easily merit four stars and its 90-minute length. For those less enamored of those subjects, its claim on any stars will be qualified by some serious questions about its cinematic worth.

By this time in his life, Fischer (who was Jewish) was already into the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that marred his public persona long after his days in the sports limelight had waned. While Zwick and company do nothing to explain this bizarre mania, Pawn Sacrifice definitely conjures the feeling of it, thanks in large part to the movie's greatest asset: Maguire's edgy, charismatic performance.

A documentary that offers some fascinating if glancing insights into a rich and timely subject but ends up being more frustrating than enlightening.

Though the film’s lachrymose gist is conveyed with subtlety and insight into the rigors of loneliness and mortality, it is lachrymose nonetheless. Fans of “Eleanor Rigby,” in any case, should not miss it.

Features some of the worst post-synching seen in any recent movie. If Eisenstein, the consummate craftsman, would have regretted Greenaway’s penchant for pointless and overdone circular tracking shots, he surely would have groaned at how the actors’ lips here and the words they speak are so often on different timetables.

Its narrative and visual approach almost suggests a compendium of the clichés one should avoid in a film like this.

A more accurate title for the low-budget indie Civil War drama would be, “Man (Sing.) Goes to Battle. Eventually. Sort of. For a While. Then Leaves. Other Man Stays Home.” But to avoid that marquee-buster, here’s the concise version: “Mumblecore Civil War.”

These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra’s most feverish populist nightmares.

There is a real seed of dramatic possibility in Hannah, but Pallaoro smothers it beneath the lacquer of the film’s fastidiously mannered minimalism.

Of the many things that make A Brilliant Young Mind unsatisfying, arguably the most salient is that the assertion of its title defies dramatization. Nathan is brilliant? Well, if he were a footballer or a spelling-bee champ, we could see his skill as it evolved and played out.

From first till last, this tale of a hard-boiled bounty hunter helping a Scottish lad on his quest to find the woman he loves, who’s on the lam in the old West, is a tissue of creaky contrivances and outright absurdities.

The film misses the chance to offer an original artistic or sociopolitical take on the 1969 riots that sparked the U.S. gay rights movement.

“A good movie is never too long, and a bad movie can never be too short.” That famous quote from Roger Ebert helps me explain why the Canadian indie comedy Sundowners, though it runs only 97 minutes, felt to me like it lasted 14 hours. Longer than “Lawrence of Arabia.” Longer than “Shoah.”

A drama in which belief is reduced to well-meaning but inert treacle.

The result is another vacuous melodrama/thriller that doesn’t lay a glove on the era’s historical complexities.

A rather terrible comedy-satire, bears the DNA of at least two strains of terrible films.

In the annals of historical biopics, Jonathan Teplitzsky’s Churchill stands out as a uniquely awful and tedious caricature of a fascinating subject.