The slow-burning indie thriller The Fixer opens on a woman speaking intense Polish, while a naked man strapped to a wheel rolls slowly away behind her. As the camera rises, we realize that this is a play being performed for a tiny audience in a small-town theatre – most of them obviously perplexed by what’s happening in front of them. Then the camera hones in on the face of Osman (Dominic Rains), his face gradually splitting into an ecstatic, fascinated grin.
Patricia Highsmith’s novels have been the go-to for complex, urbane thrillers since Alfred Hitchcock made the first Strangers on a Train adaptation in 1951. A Kind of Murder is the latest in the Highsmith subgenre - it's based on the novel The Blunderer from 1954, and directed by Andy Goddard from a screenplay by Susan Boyd.
The Last Laugh, a documentary by director and cinematographer Ferne Pearlstein, reveals, dissects, and discusses the subject of taboo humor in general and the Holocaust in particular. Pearlstein gathers together interviews with numerous comedians, writers, producers, and activists, including several Holocaust survivors, to present their perspective on what can be joked about and what cannot and where, if anywhere, comedy must draw the line.
Contrary to popular opinion, most critics don’t go into a film hoping to hate it. Actually, we hope to love it. Probably no one knows quite so well as film critics that sense of joy that comes from seeing a really good film, must less a truly great one. So it’s actually very hard to exit a film with the assured knowledge that you’re going to write a bad review, not because you wanted to hate the film, but because the film was just so damned hate-able.
Karl Mueller's Rebirth is one hate-able film.
My Scientology Movie seeks more to understand Scientology, its inner workings, and what its members are searching for than it does to “catch” Scientology out. Theroux’s gentle, non-judgmental style means that the subject more or less gets to speak for itself, whenever it cares to speak. That the Church of Scientology obviously views Theroux, Rathbun, and everyone involved in the production as dangerous and “suppressive” people who should be threatened and hounded says a lot more about Scientology than anything else could. My Scientology Movie is a fascinating and oddly unbiased look at one of the world’s more bizarre and secretive religions.
Coming from the producers and director of Food, Inc. and the executive producer of Last Days of Vietnam, Command and Control is based on the book of the same name by Eric Schlosser, who also acts as an occasional narrator of the film. Command and Control chronicles two historical events: the nuclear arms race and nuclear accidents in America, and their relationship to the near-catastrophe of the “Damascus Accident.”
Youth In Oregon tells the story of Raymond Engersoll (Frank Langella), a former doctor who lives with his wife Estelle (Mary Kay Place) in the home of their daughter Kate Gleason (Christina Applegate) and her family. On the day of his eightieth birthday, Raymond receives the news that he will have to undergo another heart operation, one from which he’s unlikely to emerge, but without the operation, he will certainly die.
Writer/director Christopher Smith’s Detour has all the hallmarks of a noir thriller: law student and basically nice guy Harper (Tye Sheridan) falls into the bad company of Johnny (Emory Cohen) and his stripper girlfriend Cherry (Bel Powley) during a drunken binge at a bar. Harper’s mother is in a coma after a car accident and he believes that his stepfather Vincent (Stephen Moyer) is responsible. Seeing a chance for some quick cash, Johnny offers a deal: for $20,000 he’ll drive with Harper to Vegas and knock off Vincent. Harper agrees, but wakes up the next morning with Johnny banging on his door and has a quick change of heart. Johnny won’t take no for an answer, so off Harper goes on a road trip to either kill his stepfather, or find a way out of his predicament. But nothing, as the cliché goes, is what it seems.
The Man Who Knew Infinity seeks to tell a unique and, for me at least, relatively unknown story about a mathematics prodigy who faces discrimination and homesickness in his quest to prove his own theorems. Its subject is Srinivasa Ramanujen, perhaps one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th Century, whose work shaped the future of the discipline and whose theorems still confound mathematicians to this day.
We’ve heard a lot about the crisis of education in America – about poverty, about the dropout rate, about prohibitive testing measures, about charter schools and teacher salaries and the slow decline of American education having any sort of claim to intellectual ascendancy. And while politicians can shout that no child should be left behind, they still are, they have been, and they will be. But there are some children who have now become adults and who, for a multitude of reasons, long to finish their education. Night School, a documentary from Andrew Cohn, seeks to tell at least a few of their stories.
