The short form would be that John Woo rediscovered himself in returning to China, but that really doesn't capture what's going on. Woo made his name with such beautiful, dynamic, and surprisingly thoughtful urban crime films as Hard Boiled and The Killer -- pop culture with soul -- then made...

Richard Curtis had a death in the family. I'd flown in to London to do the interviews for my Pirate Radio coverage, and the director was at the top of my list. Some things, though, take precedence over spending fifteen minutes with a dumpy New York journalist, and for Curtis,...

So here's what I did on my class trip to London: shoot a video featuring people on the street discussing whether they preferred Pirate Radio or The Boat That Rocked as the title of the latest Richard Curtis film; interview some of the stars of the film itself; and...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the poster for Turning Green lies. It showcases Tim Hutton, Colm Meaney, and Allesandro Nivola, but while they're prominent figures in the film, it ain't about them. Off in the lower right, with his back turned towards the camera, there's...

Ti West sure digs his retro. In The Roost -- his tidy little horror film about a group of travelers threatened by some really nasty bats -- he added a wraparound featuring Tom Noonan in tacky butler drag, holding forth in front of a cardboard set as host of a...

You could probably forge a good, absurdist, dark comedy out of a government where racial identity can be declared and reversed by official decree, and white parents whose child's skin is, because of a genetic quirk, darker than theirs struggle to get their kid designated Caucasian. I can imagine Terry...

"Lars von Trier doesn't like to fly." "Lars von Trier isn't going to talk to a lot of press." Yeah, yeah; yadda-yadda. But just because he isn't talking to us doesn't mean we can't talk about him, particularly about his childhood. I have it on good authority that he refused...

You're going to have to trust me on this one: I am a romantic. Once is one of my favorite films; I teared up at both Up and Mary and Max (animated characters struggling for their small bit of happiness just hit some special spot in me). But when you're...

So I figured, while I'm in London interviewing some of the people involved with Pirate
Radio -- Richard Curtis' film about those intrepid souls who in the 60's brought the UK their daily dose of rock when the BBC was loathe to -- why not try a little...

New York Magazine's David Edelstein pretty much called it: About midway through, you could be forgiven for worrying if The Maid was teetering on the precipice of going the full, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle route -- a concern that's only enhanced when a stray cat turns up that...

You wanna talk extreme? Charles Bronson, ne Michael Peterson, has spent thirty-four of his fifty-six years of life in incarceration of one form or another -- most of that time has been in solitary confinement. The system has been violent to him, but he's been violent back, and an anti-authoritarian...

To be clear, I've got nothing against sports films that exult in good sportsmanship and the triumph of the underdog and the sheer joy of human competition. The Natural? Sure. Bad News Bears? No prob. The Mighty Ducks? Let's not go crazy, now.

But to be honest, I'm more favorably...

Okay, so I think we all have something we can now say about ill-advised wars. France, though, learned its lesson 50 years ago. A lot of lives (some 500,000, both soldier and civilian) were lost in trying keep Algiers from declaring its independence, but the battle, which ran from 1954...

A TV writer tries his hand at a feature film. His friend reads the script, thinks it's an ungodly mess of muddled symbolism and Freud 101 anxieties. "Be honest," the writer says.

This is the way friendships end, and mean, funny films about the deaths of such friendships are born.

So last week we had Bright Star, in which 19th century Fanny Brawne came into her own through her gifts as a seamstress. And now we have Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel, in which Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel... well... "comes into her own" is putting it mildly. She frackin' defined an...

Let's forget about narrative for now, shall we? Let's not focus on narrative, let's live in the moment. And let's consider a documentary focused on isolated pieces of time, how those pieces can be compiled into a portrait of life as it is lived around the world.

Michael Almereyda is...

Guess I'm going to have to reevaluate my opinion of The Piano. I was one of those backlash guys, one of the ones who read all the effulgent praise about the film, the stuff elevating it to hitherto unknown heights as a stunning, sensuous cinematic event, and anticipated an experience...