Screen
Deathly boredom
After six successful films in the Harry Potter franchise, the setup for the final showdown between Potter and his archenemy, Voldemort, should have been an easy winner. That’s why Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 proves such a disappointment...
Powerful pandemic picture
One of the most powerful — and frightening — film themes is global pandemics. Diseases already seem to spread without us fully understanding or being able to control them, and rapidly evolve to become resistant to our defenses. It's not much of a leap to see a very ...
Power play
Kalia Motley grew up in a world of nostalgia. Her mom was a connoisseur of vintage clothing and her dad a jazz musician. Through...
Bland, flavorless cheese
Sand dunes at sunset, summer lovin’ (had me a blast!), a third-act medical crisis and a clutch of letters designed to be read aloud in voice-over: Another month, another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance. This month’s is called The Last Song, starring Miley ...
Some humor, a little sex and a whole lot of humanity
In the 1970s, she was one of the dominant, and most provocative, Italian filmmakers. From behind her trademark white-framed glasses, Lina Wertmüller saw the...
Fight the power
From the late 1990s to the early years of the 21st century, some of the best in cinema came out of Iran. Populated with directors like Asghar Farhadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, Iran’s postmodern renaissance showed that nothing was safe ...
BW BIFF Picks 2013: ‘The New Public’
In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the high school graduation rate is 40 percent. The New Public, a documentary by Jyllian Gunther, tells the story of a small group of high school teachers and administrators who tackle that problem by opening a small ...
The geek shall inherit the Earth
Geeks are not found; they are made. This is the lesson Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a drifter in 1940s America, learns first hand at...
No-town music
At its worst, cinema verite is aimless pretense masquerading as artistic intent. At its best, it is Detropia, a documentary that adds soul to statistics, going inside the implosion of a once-proud city using a sprawling, haunting approach. That isn’t to say that ...
