AltWeeklies Wire
Searching for the self-sufficient soul of basketball in the local semipro circuitnew
In the Tobacco Road Basketball League it's clear that the players and their love of the game is the answer.
Renoir the painter and Renoir the filmmakernew
Renoir, a ravishing and sensuous imagining of one summer late in the life of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, makes the great painter's work matter again by putting an aging man's passions into an emotional and historical context.
Battered but unbowed, Mike Daisey brings his new show to Durhamnew
American Utopias—which tackles Burning Man, Disney World and Zuccotti Park, the locus of Occupy Wall Street—is an outgrowth of Daisey's long interest in mythmaking and totemic objects.
Tags: Mike Daisey
Django Unchainednew
Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, is a pulp fantasy of the antebellum South in which a black man avenges slavery by killing a lot of white people.
Surviving sobriety in Smashednew
A less naïve viewer (than myself) might readily see Smashed for what it is: a vehicle for an ambitious young talent to escape the straitjacket of typecasting. This is Mary Elizabeth Winstead's movie, and she's a charmer.
Documenting The Other Dream Team, from Lithuanianew
What was little understood in the aftermath of the U.S. basketball team's defeat at the 1988 Olympics was that the top players on the winning Soviet team were not Russian, but Lithuanian.
A writer with power in Ruby Sparksnew
The amusing but ultimately tepid comedy Ruby Sparks has a provocative and potentially harrowing premise.
Hyper-violent, soul-suckingly awful Savagesnew
Savages was clearly assembled by a committee charged with synthesizing the hippest films about crime and Mexico of the last generation.
Remarkably insipid Hysteria recounts the invention of the vibratornew
What could have been a quirky and entertaining tale of Victorian London plus vibrators instead turns into 90 minutes of predictable plot lines and flat characters.
Tags: Hysteria, Vibrator Inventor
An Algerian immigrant teaches Canadian children in Monsieur Lazharnew
The film is a tale of healing—for the children, who despite their material comfort are suffering from emotional neglect, and for Lazhar, who is applying for political asylum after suffering a terrible trauma in Algeria.
Tags: Monsieur Lazhar
Whit Stillman returns with Damsels in Distressnew
When Stillman's first film appeared in 1990, he was hailed as New York's WASP answer to Woody Allen. His movies reflect a conservative New England sensibility, of private schools, good manners, and unfashionable social and political opinions argued eloquently and amusingly.
The Kid With a Bike is a moving tale from the great Dardenne brothersnew
While I'm grateful for any opportunity to see a film by les Dardennes, this latest makes me wonder if they've become risk-averse.
Strikingly similar stories from Israel and Japan in Footnote and Jiro Dreams of Sushinew
One is a fiction feature from Israel; the other is a documentary about a Tokyo sushi chef. The dissimilarities end there. Both films feature an aging father and a middle-aged son, and both depict the lifelong obsession of the older man and the pitfalls of passing the torch to his heir.
Tags: Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Polish film In Darkness Digs Deeper into WWII anti-Semitismnew
In Darkness is an unhappy portrait of humanity flailing about in the sewers, and things didn't get much worse than Poland and Ukraine in 1943: Virtually all of the 200,000 Jews in the vicinity of Lvov were annihilated.
The human beast in Bullhead and Thin Icenew
The Belgian crime drama Bullhead, which was among this year's foreign film Oscar nominees, is as clumsy and misshapen as its unfortunate protagonist, a bulked-up cattle farmer and gangster named Jacky Vanmarsenille.
