Monthly Archives: January 2022

“How I Fell in Love with a Gangster” is a Polish “Blow,” “Mesrine” and “American Gangster,” all rolled into one — a mini-series or at least Scorsese-length picture about Poland’s “most renowned criminal of all time.” Nikodem “Nikoś” Skotarczak had … Continue reading →

Ukrainian filmmaker Kateryna Gornostai reaches for docu-drama reality with her debut feature film, “Stop-Zemlia,” a peek inside the lives of high school teens facing final exams and “the future” with childish obliviousness and adult concern and uncertainty. The ground covered, … Continue reading →

Rural Texas, 1979, maybe not the best place and time to film your X-rated feature film. I mean, where would you get your dailies processed? Not a state known for tolerance and they have lots of chainsaws down there. March … Continue reading →

“The House” may be the most delightfully strange project Netflix has ever put its money behind. They’re calling this Nexus Studios stop-motion animated tale a darker-than-dark “comedy series,” but don’t you believe it. It’s a warped anthology, with three separate … Continue reading →

“I’m Not in Love” is a forlorn, lovelorn and woebegone romantic comedy has little interest in going for laughs, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Here, there’s just not enough heart or story to make up the shortfall that the … Continue reading →

Get all teary-eyed, if you must. And not out of sympathy for the gratuitous crotch shots, either. Feb. 4.

Dark, twisted and a tad bizarre, the film adaptation of the French farce “Dear Mother” goes places no Hollywood production would dare. Any movie whose entire later acts concern the efforts of her self-absorbed son, his wife and his veterinarian … Continue reading →

You can see some of the themes and interests of future Oscar-nominated writer-director (“Minari”) Lee Isaac Chung in his debut feature, a quiet immersion in the open wound that is post-genocide Rwanda. A film festival darling of 2007, “Munyurangabo” takes … Continue reading →

The Brazilian lockdown drama “The Pink Cloud” can pretty much be reduced to the simplest mathematics of all. How much credit do you give this film, finished in 2019, for “anticipating” the pandemic and what life under a long lockdown … Continue reading →

Sentimental and sympathetically-acted, actor-director Chiwetel Ejiofor’s “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” immerses us in Third World subsistence farming and the struggle just to have enough to eat in poor, corrupt countries in the developing world. This Around the World … Continue reading →