Nadine Labaki's follow-up to her soft-focus Franco-Lebanese film Caramel, asks the question Where Do We Go Now? The story begins and ends with a walk to the cemetery of a small Lebanese mountain hamlet. The women have come to tend the graves and to ornament the tombs with jars of weedy wildflowers. One side of the dirt path is Christian, and the other, Moslem. » Read More

Sacha Baron Cohen's resemblance to an elongated Charlie Chaplin may be a key to The Dictator; he's a funny figure but a chilly one. The Dictator also borrows from Chaplin's A King in New York, with its hereditary monarch stranded in the city. And Cohen has, as critic Robert Warshow wrote of Chaplin, a cold heart visible in the most genial moments—never more so than with his newest character. » Read More

Among California's great unsolved mysteries: an attempted murder on May 24, 1990, occurring not 40 miles from this valley. Earth First! advocate Judi Bari and her fellow passenger Darryl Cherney were seriously injured in a car bombing. They were a pair of guitar- and fiddle-playing activists, in the middle of a huge protest against what Cherney describes today as the "cut and run" savaging of the North Coast redwoods. » Read More

If The Avengers featured British pensioners, it would be The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Senior citizens deserve this reward; they're good and faithful moviegoers. Based on Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a summit for British thespians as several distinguished elders meet in a story held together by a peeling retirement hotel in Jaipur, a Raj-era ruin. » Read More

It doesn't live fast, but Tim Burton's Dark Shadows leaves a beautiful corpse. The clown-white makeup on the haunted Collins family alone gives this pulseless reboot of the TV show the look of something the mortician pumped up and propped up. Seth Grahame-Smith's wretched script bypasses everything that gave the Hawthorne-ish soap opera its memorable style. » Read More

Joss Whedon's simply colossal The Avengers applauds the beauty of cooperation. Not so stupid, considering what the lack of it is doing to our republic. At a remote S.H.I.E.L.D. laboratory, scientists try to harness the "tesseract': the glowing blue cosmic cube that fell from far Asgard to Earth. Problem: 'We don't have a harness.' » Read More

The Hunter is based on Sydney novelist Julia Leigh's tale of a nefarious corporation seeking the mythical creature in hopes of discovering secrets it can exploit. The dubious plot works, thanks to Willem Dafoe's particular urgency as the mysterious Martin David, the hunter hired to find and shoot the tiger. » Read More

Likely you've heard the Tolstoy parable about how when a person goes to heaven, God checks their hands for calluses to see if they've worked hard for a living. Wei Te-Sheng's massive and ultra-violent epic Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale tells a version of this fable. It's a story of the Seediq indigenous people of the highlands of Taiwan. » Read More

Has the world suffered enough from pirates? In one of the best jokes in The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a crewmember observes, 'You can't just say 'arrr' and make everything better.' This sweet, winning and delightfully funny new full-length stop-action cartoon might be hard to sell. Perhaps the film will have a guaranteed audience from families who remember how good Aardman Animations is from Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and others. » Read More

THE Farrelly Brothers' take on the deathless Three Stooges is like the steak that went through the transporter in David Cronenberg's The Fly-it looks right, it smells right, but there's something internally weird about the project after traveling through the dimensions. It could have been a monstrosity. An updating or a "reinvention' must have been threatened during this property's trip through decades of development hell. » Read More

The fine documentary Marley by Kevin MacDonald includes a scene that sums up that mystery. Marley had a half-sister named Constance, who never knew him personally. Given an MP3 player and headphones, Constance is asked to listen to Marley's 1970 song 'Cornerstone.' Constance knew the song but not the subject, about how Bob Marley was rejected by his father's side of the family. » Read More

Take some no-name young actors and imprison them in some rural spider trap. Then cut up a few of them, while the rest stew in their juices, waiting their turn. A formula for box-office success, as well as popular ennui, but The Cabin in the Woods, a collaboration by director Drew Goddard (of Cloverfield) and co-writer Joss Whedon, has produced one very witty attack on the genre. » Read More

What Jiro Ono looks for is a sound: an exhalation of satisfaction that his customers make. The documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi touches on sturdier questions: Can perfection be obtained and is happiness really only be found in trying to pursue it? » Read More

Mastroiannian calm and equanimity: star/director/producer Gianni Di Gregorio has it, and that correct, old-worldly style sells comic material some would find a little creepy. Di Gregorio's follow-up to Mid-August Lunch is The Salt of Life, in which a Roman retiree (Di Gregorio, billed as 'Gianni') seeks a young mistress, or at least is open to the possibility. » Read More

My taste for English desperation might have come from all that rock music I soaked up-and the stoic pessimism underneath it. It's such a savory counterpoint to the go-getter spirit they try to whack into American children. Few have illuminated that desperation as well as director Terence Davies in his classic 1988 film Distant Voices, Still Lives. Davies' first feature in 11 years is The Deep Blue Sea. » Read More

In the much-anticipated The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss, a coal miner's daughter in a future Appalachia, located in the cryptically labeled District 12. As mandated by the Treaty of the Treason, it's time for the 74th Annual Hunger Games. Two dozen 12-17-year-olds are made to hunt and kill each other in a camera-laden bio-dome, complete with poisonous plants and genetically engineered animals. » Read More

Andrew Erwin and his brother, Jon, who photographed, co-wrote and produced October Baby, were inspired to make the film by the activism of Gianna Jessen. Jessen claims that she was aborted at seven months via saline injection and survived. After this, Jessen naturally had terrific health issues, redefined for the purposes of this fictional film as some unexplained "hip surgery" Hannah (Rachel Hendrix) once endured. » Read More

Some critics have been working this point very hard, so note that Audrey Tautou's pixieishness isn't all there is to Delicacy. The film does come out of the gate very badly, when it seems as if all it's going to be about is the bland happiness of a Parisian couple. The man and woman play that game of not knowing each other at a bar, before sauntering off together. » Read More

The obvious tactic is to compare the recent Star Wars movies to the new John Carter. Just as obvious is the observation that John Carter is the better movie by a few light years: It's rip-snorting stuff. John Carter is based on A Princess of Mars (1912), the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 11 blood and thunder novels about the planet we call Mars, known to its indigenous creatures as Barsoom. » Read More

The Persian expression for moonshine is "dog sweat," the illicit booze they still drink in Iran, despite "the committee," that ever-prying morality police. On Thursday (Feb. 23) at Camera 3, director Hossein Keshavarz will screen his feature film Dog Sweat, about a group of young people in Teheran. » Read More

In the 1970s, French director Jean Rollin (1938–2010) created a unique niche for himself with a series of vampire films that yoke genre exploitation to art-house techniques. Redemption Films and Kino Lorber's new release of five Rollin films should lift the director out of his narrow cult following. » Read More

Hayao Miyazaki is in his 70s now. He supervised and co-wrote The Secret World of Arrietty, a Japanese animated version of the children's tale The Borrowers. Hiromasa Yonebayashi is credited as the director, but it seems like an elder man's movie—slow, contemplative and ringed with loss. » Read More

The moldiness of the 1950s musical plot of Chico & Rita is mitigated a little by stirring, even lavish, animated recreations of mid-20th-century Havana and New York City, as seen from convertible roadsters and motorcycle sidecars. » Read More