Noel Murray

Il Futuro is a playful, soulful movie, affecting because it’s populated by lost children who can somehow sense they’re in a movie, and that in a movie, the only future is The End.

Has about a dozen layers of in-joke, and up to the eighth or ninth layer, they mostly work.

Remember My Name still works magnificently as a tragicomic character sketch.

Aquarela is first and foremost a spectacle. When the Apocalyptica music is cranked up high, and the screen’s awash in dazzlingly sharp, hypnotically swirling images of cresting waves, viewers could certainly take a moment to contemplate the importance of water to our global ecosystem. Or they could just drink it in.

A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.

In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, Fox practices with his specially engineered rifle (which has been built into a pair of crutches), and as he takes his shots at a practice melon, he keeps tweaking the aim. It all looks very cool, until Fox finishes his adjustments, and fires a bullet that makes this stand-in for de Gaulle’s head explode.

The result is a movie that's poignant, bittersweet, and true.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

It has a cumulative power, as Trobisch focuses on the small details, looking closely at a woman who doesn’t want to be defined by the thoughtlessly inhumane thing someone else chose to do.

West has a lot on his mind with this film; and he’s ultimately less interested in explaining everything happening onscreen than in free-associating about the complicated, lifelong relationship between children and their parents. But Gaffigan’s everyman presence and seeker’s soul make him a great vessel for big ideas.

On its own merits, though, West Of Memphis is a well-assembled, well-argued documentary that shows how America's advocacy model of trial law can lead to government representatives spinning stories they know are probably untrue, then using their authority to stand strong against any alternate theory, no matter how many millions of people believe it.

Aside from the corny title, Anthony Baxter's You've Been Trumped is a fine, powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, using old-fashioned vérité techniques - and more than a little audience manipulation - to show how political influence and media savvy help the wealthy exert their will.

Too much of Dear Mr. Watterson is taken up by Schroeder and an array of non-professional C&H-lovers offering vague praise, with little to no real analysis—aesthetic, historical, or cultural.

Even viewers who know nothing about soccer can enjoy how Rocha captures the beauty of a communal event through editing and shot selection alone.

Even if Eat Drink Man Woman had no plot, it’d be a pleasure to watch.

The movie is sometimes quiet and poky to a fault; a few cheap pulp thrills might’ve made it feel more vital from start to finish. But Kurosawa and co-screenwriter Ryusuke Hamaguchi do gradually build tension and intrigue across Wife Of A Spy’s two hours, while also openly confronting a dark chapter of Japanese history.

While Jonestown lacks the power of revelation, it's a first-rate piece of journalism, as fascinating and thorough as any magazine article.

The new English track is predictably clumsy, but the story and images overcome it.

While The Fire That Took Her offers a broader perspective on these kinds of cases, Gillespie always brings everything back to Malinowski and her family, who led full lives before one reckless moment of cruelty changed everything.

From the jump, She's Gotta Have It announced that it wasn't going to define black life in terms of crime and poverty, just as it wasn't going to bind independent filmmaking to moribund realism.

Photographic Memory is less wry and more melancholy than McElwee's earlier documentaries; it's a lot like his superb 2003 film "Bright Leaves," which was also concerned with family history and the shifting meaning of images.

If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.