Laurent Cantet's THE CLASS (Entre les murs) won the prestigious Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes , earning praise for its lively portrayal of adolescents in a Parisian high school. The film, rather than create a stilted picture of youth, gives a startling vision of the real energy of thirteen...

The choice to sport tuxedos and see-through haute-couture dresses for a screening about dying children in the second poorest country in the world (Malawi) may seem at odds with the title-message of Madonna's new production, the documentary I Am Because We Are directed by erstwhile gardener Nathan Rissman -- but...

"This is an autobiography, isn't it?" I said to James Toback, director of Tyson, a new documentary about the infamous boxer. "It's not only about Mike Tyson, it's about you."

"You got it," said Toback.

Tyson and Toback had stood on stage the evening before, at the Cannes...

"You're pressing too hard," Wim Wenders counseled me, as I tried to take a picture of him. "If you press lightly and don't have the camera shake, it will come out fine."

I welcomed Wim Wender's...

I loved James Gray's new film, Two Lovers, not for the story -- which may, in the telling, seem banal -- but for the way it is told and the vision behind it. Leonard, a loser in Brooklyn, heir to a Jewish drycleaning business, falls in love with a sexy...

A squiggly black wet lamb squirms out of its mother's body, slimy with mucus. The camera captures this riveting moment of birth in the middle of the wide sandy landscape of the Kazakh steppe. Asa, the protagonist of Sergey Dvortsevoy's new film Tulpan, hugs the struggling lamb to his face...

Under false pretenses, I was corralled into the red-carpet pre-event to the Madonna/Sharon Stone gala charity event for AmfAR. All in favor of the event itself, which raises millions each year at Cannes for AIDS research (AmFAR's biggest fundraiser), but I was told that this would be a chance to...

Spike Lee presented an eight minute clip of his upcoming movie Miracle at St. Anna yesterday, to a handful of Italian journalists in a huge near-empty theater. "Your editor Barry Brown told me a lot about this movie," I said, finding Spike comfortably slouched in his seat under his black...

So far it is the only film at Cannes to have a "buzz": the animated Israeli film "Waltz with Balzar" about the horrors of the l982 occupation of Lebanon . The first scene stuns: in eerie blue monochrome, a man urgently tells a friend about a repetitive nightmare where...

My favorite at the festival: Simone de Vries' "Touch Me Someplace I Can Feel", featuring paraplegic John Callahan, who became a biting-humor cartoonist following his accident. Advertised in the program brochure as "a film on willpower", thankfully this doc is not that at all: it's about how the genius...

"Passion is no ordinary word"--the Graham Parker motto--is the first thing that comes to mind when meeting Dimitri Eipedes, the founder of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in Greece, now in its tenth year. Eipedes, a self-declared utopian, who has never forgotten the legacy of the 1960s, has...

"You're lying. You don't love your daughter. You just wanted her to keep away from men because you were rejected by men. You ruined her life, admit it, for your own selfish purposes. If you want to help her now, you can go kill yourself. No, that's not good enough....

Sometimes a film is just a pleasure. The consensus at Berlin was not to bother watching Justin Chadwick's "The Other Boleyn Girl," based on Philippa Gregory's eponymous novel, and I was so glad I snuck in anyway. The drama is clear and well-directed: the two Boleyn girls, Anne and Mary...

It is, perhaps, a necessary film: José Padilha's "Elite Squad," winner of the grand prize Golden Bear at the Berlinale, tells the story of the ongoing underground "war" between drug dealers in Brazils' favelas and Bope soldiers, the elite fighter squad of the Rio Military Police. We witness two...

Israeli director Amos Kollek premiered his new film Restless at the Berlinale this week, one that features an Israeli-New Yorker who has an ambivalent sense of his Israeli identity. Similarly, when Kollek speaks about his native country, he sounds full of contradictions, both uneasily defensive and fed up: "Critical...

It's an unusual way to watch a movie, but why not? I meditated during the screening of Majid Majidi's "The Song of Sparrows": breathing in and clearing the mind as I watched splendid images of the Iranian landscape rise to the screen and then subside, like moments in a...

Just saw the Abu Ghraib documentary by Errol Morris and it blew me away: the focussed concentration on the Abu Ghraib soldiers narrating those infamous pictures, each soldier framed alone on a wide-screen, calm and expressive. "Standard Operating Procedure" stunned from the first image of a sun setting on Abu...

Perfect stretched pink glossed smile, 3 second timed eyelash blinks, carefully widened eyes of surprise, a lighthearted toss of the head and a time-delayed sultry chuckle: everything about Madonna is controlled. I marveled at the one detail of nonchalance: her brown roots were showing in thin lines across her part,...

Updated response from the film's director at the bottom.

It starts off sexy: a vibrant drunk Tilda Swinton is looped in the arms of one man and then another, in a crazy dance under flashing bar lights to rock music. This energetic opening sets up the promise of Erick Zonca's...

In contrast: Irish director John Crowley's second film, "Boy A" was hardly as cinematographic as "There Will Be Blood", but certainly showed sensitivity. A boy violently murders another child, a little girl he meets on a secluded path, and later, as a young man, is haunted by his deed, fearing...