By many standards, the artist (Daniel Auteuil) is successful, an acclaimed painter in Paris and man of many mistresses; by those same lights, the gardener (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) leads a narrowly circumscribed small-town life. When the artist returns to that town and hires a hand to tend the yard of the house he inherited, he recognizes the gardener as his long-lost childhood companion in mischief...

Imagine the dryness in your mouth, the knot rising from your stomach and the stiffness of your tongue when knocking on a stranger’s door to tell them their son or daughter, husband or wife, is dead. Your starched green Army dress sends a signal. If the stranger is next of kin to someone in the service, they might already know the content of your message before you can say, “The secretary of the Army has asked me to inform...

Will Precious be this year’s Slumdog Millionaire and sweep the Academy Awards? It’s a daunting challenge indeed. However, both films came out of nowhere and were greeted with an enthusiastic response on the festival circuit. Precious won the Audience...

Weeks after their child fell from a window to his death on the sidewalk many floors below, the married couple returns home for the first time to their toy-strewn apartment. The wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the thin shadow of sorrow, clutching her bottle of antidepressants in a bony Edvard Munch hand. Glancing...

In the pair of emotionally contradictory images that open Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, swollen corpses surfacing on a moonlit river are followed without pause by grainy home video of a little girl playing in the surf. A line is drawn between those images soon enough. The little girl...

The romance of being a bad-to-the-bone rambling man had long since faded into a drab routine for the ’70s-era outlaw country singer called Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). When we first meet him in Crazy Heart, Blake is 57 and broke; he drinks whiskey like water and smokes like a dirty fireplace. Driving himself in a ’78 Silverado, he pulls into another desolate town for a bowling-alley gig he can barely finish...

The faces of missing children didn’t appear on milk cartons in 1973, the year of The Lovely Bones, and child molestation wasn’t a topic for tabloid television. In those days pedophilia was still the crime that dared not speak its name; it remained an anxious whisper...

For years, Scott Cooper plugged away in Hollywood as an actor. Stardom eluded him. Now, he has created quite a splash as the screenwriter and director of the critically acclaimed Crazy Heart. The film chronicles Bad Blake, a down-and-out country singer/songwriter. Once a rising force, he’s become encumbered with numerous ex-wives and a serious drinking problem...

With the many problems facing the world, a strong undercurrent of apocalyptic anxiety runs through contemporary culture. The Road is the recent masterpiece of apocalypse cinema and it’s a hard trail to follow for The Book of Eli. The landscape of both movies is strikingly...

Having recently celebrated its first birthday, Firestarter Films is quickly gaining notoriety, and a following, for its bimonthly film festivals. Filmmakers and film lovers flock to the forum to screen independent films of any format or style, be it stop-motion animation, 3-D, documentaries or highlight reels of feature-length narratives. From its inception in November 2008...

Is the future of filmmaking represented by two of my favorite movies from 2009? Embodying the computer-generated epic cinema of fantastic spectacle, Avatar is a movie too big to be enjoyed on an iPhone, while (500) Days of Summer is an artfully crafted, intimately scaled story suitable for a tiny screen. Could Netflix be the future for any movie that’s not an epic...

Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is also Heath Ledger’s last. After his death during the filming, a trio of actors, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell...

With carriages thundering over the cobblestones of Victorian London’s gas-lit streets, a dark backdrop of hard-edged computer generated surfaces, Sherlock Holmes is closer, visually, to Dark Knight than The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unlikely director Guy Ritchie, with the help of Robert Downey Jr. (Holmes) and Jude Law (Dr. Watson...

Queen Victoria was withdrawn and forbidding in old age, her name synonymous with the prevailing, late-19th-century posture of moral Puritanism and stuffy behavior. But in her youth she was regarded as a romantic figure, the storybook princess in a grand and tragic love story. The Young Victoria depicts that romance, the consuming passion between the beautiful queen and her handsome consort...

George Falconer awakens again from a nightmare in which the body of his longtime lover, Jim, appears on the roadside after the car wreck that killed him a few months earlier. Falconer was always the dour Englishman, an expatriate literature professor in Los Angeles, but Jim’s death pushed him into a deeper funk. Waking is a cold reminder that time...

Shortly before his death, director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) delivered the screenplay for Nine, the film adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway musical. The project was finally brought to the screen by director Rob Marshall, whose Oscar-winning Chicago was the most successful screen musical of recent years...

Most of us will never face a hangman on the gallows or stare into the rifle barrels of a firing squad. We’re more likely to meet the sort of postmodern executioner played by George Clooney in Up in the Air, a man who will carry out the orders to deprive us of our livelihood rather than our life. Sadly, for some of us, livelihood and life amount to almost the same thing...