Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing—Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin—but it is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt)…

CANNES, France—The jury has their awards, and I have mine. Sometimes they even coincide. Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s modest Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—the acme of no-budget, Buddhist-animist, faux-naïve magic realism—towered over a shockingly mediocre competition. (Distant runners-up were Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy and South Korean…

CANNES, France—Midway through the 63rd Cannes Film Festival it’s clear that, although the competition oozes glamour and Wall Street never sleeps, the action this year (even more than in the past) is to be found in its less prestigious shadow, the section with the untranslatable moniker, “Un Certain Regard.” The…

The great boundary-crosser of Iranian cinema, Bahman Ghobadi, purposefully steps over the line with No One Knows About Persian Cats—a quasi-documentary, highly unofficial panorama of Tehran’s tenacious underground music scene and a movie that has accrued additional urgency since its first public screening at Cannes last May. Ghobadi’s co-writer, journalist…

Sad, funny and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine was common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist—I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous antihero unless…

Better late than never—a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMDs in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something more than…

Though no one’s idea of an action film, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax feels less charmingly aimless than its radically slight precursors Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2006). Have Bujalski’s feckless characters joined the workaday world? As its title suggests, Beeswax has a mild buzz of business—and busy-ness. Set in…

Walt Disney mulled an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for decades before producing an animated feature in 1951, although by all accounts, he didn’t much care for the prim little protagonist, let alone her supporting cast of “weird characters.” One wonders what Uncle Walt would have made of his studio’s…

The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called “the German problem” while dodging the filmmaker’s own likability issues, it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt…

A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the ’00s loose on one of the decade’s prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s best-selling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath,…

The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis!—and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of the year’s…

The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his re-released movies but as a character in other people’s novels, plays and movies—notably Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate and unexpectedly enjoyable Me and…

The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem—in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror—was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long, dull slog. Fidelity to…

Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something—if only a terrible sensation of nothingness—that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their toddler because they were…

Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…

The secret is out. Warner Bros. waited to unwrap The Box until two days before its opening because, compared to its madcap predecessors—the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales—the new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas. A mysterious…

Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubblegum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…

Founded by self-described urban guerrillas Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction were the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army and righteous outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde combined—robbing banks, planting bombs, shooting cops and assassinating judges for the better part of the decade that followed the convulsions…

Set in the bucolic suburbs of early 19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic—but no less touching for that. Fanny…

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is consummate Hollywood entertainment—rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino—even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore the movie’s cinematic hyperliteracy. Tepidly…