For something completely different (though also written and directed by men), there's Irina Palm, which casts Marianne Faithfull as a self-described "frump" who dresses like a housecleaner but discov... 
Three women don head scarves and sunglasses, get in a convertible, and go on a road trip past big rigs and picturesque canyons. It may sound like Thelma and Louise from someone who can't count, but i... 
David Gordon Green helms Snow Angels, an upscale indie starring Sam Rockwell as a fractured soul trying to piece his life back together. Rockwell hounds his wife (Kate Beckinsale), who has dumped but... 
Don't do a double take if Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories puts you in mind of David Gordon Green. Green is a producer on the project, and DP Adam Stone helped to shoot three of Green's films. Writer-di... 
The standard-issue "indie bromance" Backseat develops a nice rapport between its leads, but feels more like four strung-together episodes a 1990s sitcom than a compelling reason for a film. Writer Jo... 
An improvisational poker-championship comedy in the vein of Christopher Guest's Best in Show sounds like a better idea than it is, but screenwriter Zak Penn (the X-Men films) does solid work in his s... 
Looking for something completely different? Why not try Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul, a lyrical set of interconnected, spiritual-minded fables? Filmed in Tunisia and Iran, the story... 
[A] pleasingly off-kilter domestic comedy. 
An enthralling bauble of many facets: part feminist thriller, part "howdunnit" mystery, and all good old-fashioned story. 
Honors the neuroses of high school while also holding out the hope every teen needs... 
Adam Carolla fans will feel they've died and gone to heaven...Unfortunately it all adds up to something more like a viral video than a full-fledged film. 
Our favorite Teutonic huckster presumes that prehistory means that anything narrative goes: hey, who can prove him wrong? 
Tries so hard to put a human face on the immigration issue that it ends up feeling as genuine as a plastic Halloween mask. 
An independent generation's struggle to be understood by parents, the ravenous hunger to be affirmed as a champion, and the phenomenal creativity, skill, and athleticism of breaking. 
Director Jacques Rivette, a contemporary of famous New Wave filmmakers Truffaut and Godard, turned 80 this month, and he celebrates with a new film in theaters. The Duchess of Langeais, adapted from... 
The gay romantic drama Shelter is rather ordinary (if a gay romantic drama can be called ordinary in today's political climate), especially in its filmic technique. But quietly and cumulatively, it s... 
It's telling that Sleepwalking is distributed by Overture Films, "a Starz company," as one can see it speedily arriving at its afterlife on cable and home video. Despite its best of intentions, this... 
In a way, Michael Haneke's Funny Games is the best-made bad movie you'll ever see, something equivalent to Stanley Kubrick directing Death Wish 6. With painstaking control, Haneke details a horrifyin... 
Writer-director Ira Sachs puts marriage under the ultimate strain in Married Life. Infidelity? That's nothing. Try a husband determined to kill his wife because it would be inhumane simply to dump he... 
Adapting the slim and charmingly quaint stories of Dr. Seuss into feature-length films has always been a dicey proposition, which makes the success of Horton Hears a Who all the sweeter. This loving... 
At 67, George A. Romero can still kick upstart film-school horror junkies to the curb with his restless intellect and artful vitality. It sounds like a joke, but it's a compliment: Romero comes up wi... 
Tunneling underground notwithstanding, a heist movie shouldn't feel this much like drudgery. 
An inspiring rebel yell from four girls unwilling to recede into the background as passive sacrifices to the MTV culture. 
Penelope, a gender swap on the old Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, casts Christina Ricci as an innerly beautiful rich girl literally cursed with a pig snout. Marriage to "one of her own kind" can re... 
The tripartite film The Signal borrows a conceit from J-horror—technology as a portal for evil—and puts it through the American indie horror wringer. The signal in question, sent by someo... 
One of this year's five Oscar-nominated foreign films, the Israeli entry Beaufort essays the last days of the 12th Century Beaufort Castle, a mountain stronghold in Southern Lebanon. Once held by the... 
Eastern Promises' unusually ambiguous character study makes for a different kind of crime drama, a striking if not entirely satisfying one. 
A study in isolation and, yes, paranoia...The mesmerizingly beautiful images--often in slo-mo--glide to evoke Alex's primary pursuit of skating. 
The Abu Ghraib controversy sparked a national debate on torture that has yet to calm. Were the horrors of Abu Ghraib the work of "a few bad apples" or a systematic, tacitly authorized approach to war... 
Sometimes all we want from a movie is a good time out, and that's exactly what Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights—Hollywood to the Heartland provides. The documentary... 
Playwright Martin McDonagh, an expert of sweaty crime dramas, takes his show on the road in his feature debut, In Bruges. McDonagh (who won an Oscar for his short film "Six Shooter") writes and direc... 
From director André Téchiné (Wild Reeds) comes this insinuating drama about an emotionally complicated web of "open relationships." Novelist Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart of 8 W... 
After these 97 minutes, resting in peace sounds pretty good. 
This Brazilian drama from writer-director Chico Teixeira moves to its own rhythm. The story of a wife (Carla Riba's Alice) and husband, their three troubled sons, and the undervalued (grand)mother wh... 
Sets the tone with an opening suite of scenes that put a kitty in danger. 
Were the film not so insistent on conventional payoffs, The Great Debaters could have been much more satisfying. As it is, it's a pleasant holiday film with a positive message. 
A Bizarro-world Frank Capra picture...Though the story deserves more weight...still a pleasing, unusually smart, consistently witty mass entertainment. 
Qualifies as a masterpiece of sensual cinema and poetic subjectivity. 
A profound and poignant requiem for our preferred human conditions. 
What might have made a nice short film becomes an annoying feature in James C. Strouse's Grace is Gone. John Cusack plays a war widower too screwed up to break the news of his wife's death in Iraq to... 