Deepa Mehta's diverting, noble attempt to wrangle Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children to the screen (it played at Cinequest this year) is ultimately worth a look, thanks to the power of a book able to look after itself. Rushdie did the script, and the results are what you would expect when a novelist adapts his own work: a preservation of narration above all. » Read More

A novel of riches, of self-made men and the attempt to grasp a single, pure image of the past, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has been previously thrice-filmed for the big screen. (There's also an unauthorized version titled Citizen Kane.) "His determination to have my company bordered on violence," said Nick Carraway of Tom Buchanan, and that sums up the shaping of the new Baz Luhrmann version. » Read More

God spelled backward is "dog." I was 16 when I first heard this non-koan, popularized by Sky Saxon of L.A. band the Seeds. Is it about the circle of life (we're all in it together, from the Prince of Peace to Prince the Irish setter)? Is it just good old useful blasphemy: This world is supervised by a backward dog? I never saw Father Yod, the L.A. guru who coined this saying; however, I did, on a Monday evening, take a breathing session officiated by one of his 13 wives. » Read More

First dazzling, then dazing: Iron Man 3 is what they call in the tavern industry "overservice." Leaving it, you can anticipate that you'll hurt in the morning. The problem is the pen of director/co-writer Shane Black, demonstrating the mockingbird qualities of his best movie, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and his witty, even nastily witty, handling of situations seemingly necessary in any saga. The plucky little kid rescuing our hero says his dad isn't there because he went out for a scratcher ticket. » Read More

William Friedkin, exponent of the boldest decade in the history of the movies, comes to San Jose with a 35mm print of his best film for a free screening. The director's follow-up to his best-known film, The Exorcist (1974), sounds like another tale of the supernatural, but it wasn't quite. » Read More

Better than it looks, the Quebec little-movie-that-could Starbuck isn't a disgrace to the cinema that produced Denys Arcand. Underneath some Big Lebowski riffs (such as the regular bathtub waterboarding of the hero by debt collectors), there's a warm if too fuzzy emphasis on the brotherhood of humanity, in which diversity is part of the spice of life. » Read More

The commercial French films of today may not be breaking any aesthetic or narrative boundaries, but they still play well to a dwindling crowd unnerved by mayhem and loudness of American movies. They give respite. They haven't changed much in 50 years. Films such as the new Renoir are what Godard and Truffaut were railing about, but ultimately, they survived the French New Wave. » Read More

This man (Ryan Gosling) and this woman (Eva Mendes) were never properly introduced to the characters they're playing. I'm misquoting They Live By Night, the much-imitated Nicholas Ray film about the lower-depths life. The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance's frustrating follow-up to Blue Valentine, seeks to capture a working-class world with gleams, diffused camerawork and a wobbling soundtrack of beyond-eclectic music—for instance, a heavenly but avant-garde choral group (the Threshold Singers?) accompanies a cop entering a police station. » Read More

Exasperatingly beautiful, Terrence Malick's lesser followup to his monumental The Tree of Life continues that great film's indirect, simple storytelling. In To the Wonder, Malick conceives of the friction between a man and a woman as an alchemical conflict of air vs. earth. The film is a woman's version of that line in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place: Marina (Olga Kurylenko) is born when Neil (Ben Affleck) kisses her, her life taking place between the emergence of the Eurostar from the dark Chunnel and a final departure down the darkening corridor of a jet bridge at the airport. » Read More

Tis not folly to be Wiseau. Tommy Wiseau, star and director of The Room, comes to San Jose this weekend with his co-star, Walnut Creek-raised Greg Sestero. This cult film has played for two straight years at Camera 3—a good track record, but there are cities where the film has played for four or even 10 years. The Room is a very unusual indie movie. It's mumblecore and melodrama wrapped into one big burrito. It's a love story in a cinematic culture that pigeonholes such films as chick flicks. » Read More

The best European cinema-and Beyond the Hills by Cristian Mungiu is firmly in that category-is a slippery realm. You can start out watching a film feeling morally certain and then learn you don't have firm ground to stand on. The complexities multiply. The proverbial everyone has his or her proverbial reasons. » Read More

In 1963, Umi (voiced by Sara Bolger), a high school girl from the green outskirts of Yokohama, deals with life, working hard in the kitchen of her grandmother's boarding house. Her father was killed under circumstances that were probably more deeply explained in the original—this dubbed version of the feature-length cartoon From Up on Poppy Hill, co-written by master animator Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son, Goro, has a taste of expurgation, which makes the ending confusing to Westerners. » Read More

Dr. Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss), late of Berlin, arrives at a hospital in a backwater near the Baltic coast. The title character of Barbara is a handsome, cold woman at the end of her 30s, a blonde with a domed forehead and the rigid posture of an ex-ballet dancer. She's a seether. » Read More

The decision not to hang Emperor Hirohito for war crimes now seems—nearly 70 years later—the right choice to the general public. Emperor is based on an apparently untranslated book by Shiro Okamoto. Under ineffectual direction by Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring), it exists mainly as a chance to see Tommy Lee Jones playing Gen. Douglas MacArthur during his days as the "gaijin shogun." » Read More

The mystery of Alfred Hitchcock was recently explored by a pair of biopics that fell somewhere between the amusing and the libelous. Those who swear that the cinema of the last century refuses to die were glad to have it remembered under any circumstances. Still, Hitchcock remains completely relevant—a relevance that doesn't depend on Hitchcock or The Girl, or the Bates Motel TV show or even the Rifftrax version of Birdemic!, an infamous South Bay-made travesty of The Birds. » Read More

Numerous twists make Side Effects a film about which the less said, the better: the one scene the celeb reporters have been talking about spoils the impact. Stephen Soderbergh's allegedly last movie has a witty, plausible subject. This Scientologist's dream date plays on the shudders you get seeing cartoony advertisements on television and billboards for antidepressants. » Read More

It is likely that Sylvester Stallone, now in his mid-60s, has killed more people onscreen than anyone else in the history of cinema. The question of how this carnage has affected him morally is played with and then discarded completely in Bullet to the Head. The victims don't matter—they all deserved it. Stallone's physical erosion looks oddly authentic; Stallone's plastic surgery makes him appear as if he has had the tar beaten out of him for 30 years. » Read More