Lots to enjoy this week but first thing's first: get out and VOTE! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: November 6, 2012.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): **** 1/2

Was John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) the most unlikely Hollywood film to ever be nominated for – let alone win – the Oscar for Best Picture? A cursory scroll through the Best Picture Wikipedia entry seems to make it a definite outlier (I don’t really care enough about the Oscars to dig too deep into proving this hypothesis).

Continue Reading Sunday Bloody Sunday (Criterion)

Political comedies, copy dramas, time travel, and more - get yourself into a cinematic frame of mind with these week's new releases! 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 30, 2012.

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): ****

Foreign Parts (directed by the team of Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki) has all the makings of a groan-inducing activist documentary along the lines of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden or (worse) a ghoulish voyeur’s-eye-view of extreme poverty in America. Instead, Paravel/Sniadecki have pulled off the rare verite documentary that manages a formal grace and doesn’t patronize or fetishize its subjects.

Continue Reading Foreign Parts

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 23, 2012.

Romance is in the Autumn air, and this week's releases are packed with titles that will warm, delight, and break your heart all at once. The full list, inside. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 16, 2012.

On the heels of Columbus Day, we're in the exploratory mood with this week's ecclectic slate of new releases. The full list, plus lots more upcoming releases, is after the jump. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 9, 2012.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of five): **** 1/2

This could be the most important documentary of the year. Forget that: of the decade. You might say that it goes against conventional wisdom, except that what it goes against isn't wisdom, really: just conventional, follow-the-leader, lemming-like behavior in the quest for a feel-good quick fix. In any case, the film is going to be extremely unpopular among the powers-that-be in the corporate and medical world.

Continue Reading Pink Ribbons, Inc.

Space Nazis, cults, vampires, and rogue cops: this week's new DVDs are varied and action packed. Check it all out after the jump. 

Continue Reading New and Coming Releases: October 2, 2012.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of five): ***

What's in a name -- or more to the point, in a title? The original French title of Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature (after the OK All Is Forgiven and the much better Father of My Children), Goodbye First Love, is the much simpler Un amour de jeunesse, which translates to "Young Love," or maybe "A Love in Youth." The point of this talented writer/filmmaker's latest movie -- if I am anywhere close to understanding it -- concerns how difficult it is for her heroine, Camille, to actually bid good-bye to this first love. Instead she allows herself to become utterly obsessed with it and its vessel, the hunky young man named Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who keeps telling her, by word and deed, to cool it. 

Continue Reading Goodbye First Love