The most outwardly “normal” lives can sometimes provide the finest dramatic material. Characters with impossibly lofty morals or blindingly effulgent personalities are often brimming with pretense -- and it’s...

Read the synopsis of Spanish director Manuel Martín Cuenca’s latest film, Caníbal (Cannibal), and you’ll probably think to yourself, ‘Well, at least it won’t be boring.’ After all, it’s about a salacious...

The event that plunged humankind into World War I -- the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria -- took place exactly 100 years ago, on June 28, 1914. While the outbreak of the Great War may seem unrelated...

What does it mean to be alive? To be dead? And what happens when gruesome circumstances arise to entwine these questions? These are the issues at the throbbing center of Marco Bellocchio’s newest...

“In vino veritas” means “there is truth in wine.” And sometimes, there is. The rest of the time, wine -- or any alcohol, for that matter -- leads to bluster, empty impulsivity, and posturing. The wine in the...

When Jillian Schlesinger came across the story of a fearless Dutch sailor named Laura Dekker, she knew she’d found a subject worthy of her first feature film. But Schlesinger never would have read Dekker’s name...

Thirteen-year-olds have big dreams, but how many of them actively pursue — and realize — those dreams? How many can function for more than a day or two without a hand to hold or a friend to steer them...

The Last Safari is a film about photographs. As such, it’s a film about how history interacts with the present and how consciousness needs memory to survive.

Africa. You read the word and a mesh of timeworn images pours into your head: An exhausted woman clutching her emaciated child, a dusty, crammed refugee camp in Somalia, the horror of Rwanda — starvation,...

Neill Blomkamp’s first film, District 9, was an intriguing resuscitation of the increasingly stagnant alien invasion genre. It presented the aliens as mere commoners — prawns, as they’re derisively called...