'Baghdad in My Shadow': Film Review

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

When disconsolate lovers light up a post-coital cigarette amid tousled bedclothes in a French New Wave film, the source of their angsty ennui is often, in some way or other, l’amour.

When disconsolate lovers light up a post-coital cigarette amid tousled bedclothes in a French New Wave film, the source of their angsty ennui is often, in some way or other, l’amour.

Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” won the best international film prize at the 92nd annual Academy Awards on Sunday night, making history as the first Korean film to do so.

South Korean dark comedy Parasite has been named international film of the year at the 35th Independent Spirit Awards.

For nearly everyone involved in Cane River, on both sides of the camera, the indie feature turned out to be one of their few movie credits. That's particularly true, and sadly so, for writer-director Horace B.

Landlocked by South Africa on all sides, the kingdom of Lesotho is a place of high skies, wide landscapes and narrow prospects for its two million inhabitants: a set of dimensions somehow captured in every exquisitely constructed, square-cut frame of “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born

Sixty years. That’s how long a Louisiana judge sentenced Rob Richardson to serve for armed bank robbery. Garrett Bradley covers more than a third of that term in “Time,” and the cumulative impact — boiled down into an open-minded and deeply empathetic 81 minutes — will almost certainly rewire how Americans think about the prison-industrial complex.

Seamlessly meshing classic scary movie tropes with the more profound horror of real-world conflict zones, His House represents a harrowing but bracingly creative feature debut for British writer-director Remi Weekes.

The green sea turtle receives its giant-screen close-up in the strikingly photographedTurtle Odyssey 3D, which follows a well-traveled educational/inspirational template for Imax nature films.

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas capitol building to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up.

Fresh out of Harvard, 23-year-old director Lance Oppenheim quickly dispenses with any facile or reductive ideas about aging gracefully in his first feature-length documentary,Some Kind of Heaven, a look inside the nation’s largest retirement community.A so-called “fountain of youth,” as one resident describes it in the darkly upbeat film, Central Florida's The Villages is home to over 130,000 residents who can choose to fill their ample free time with thousands of activities, everything from

Those nostalgic for the fond portraits of eccentric Americana in Errol Morris’ early work — and pretty much everyone else — will be delighted by “Some Kind of Heaven.” Lance Oppenheim’s first feature is a peek at life in The Villages, an increasingly vast Central Florida retirement community where those who can afford it spend their twilight years “being on vacation every day.”

Opening on what appears to be the verge of its titular act, Robert Machoian’s “The Killing of Two Lovers” then steadily pulls back from what sounds like a noirish potboiler of marital infidelity and rage. Instead, his economical drama is really about the pain of marital separation, particularly when one party is pulling toward divorce and the other toward reconciliation, as is so often the case.

It took four movies before Lee Isaac Chung was ready to tell the kind of story first-timers so often rush to share straight out of the gate. Not a coming-of-age movie so much as a deeply personal and lovingly poetic rendering of his Korean American childhood — specifically, how it felt for his immigrant family to adjust to life in small-town Arkansas — “Minari” benefits from the maturity and perspective Chung brings to the project.

Most immigration stories are similar in a broad sense but distinctive in the details, which is certainly the case withMinari.A rare look at a Korean family trying to adapt and make a go of it in, of all places, 1980s Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical feature is warmly observant, gently humorous in the vein of Ozu and not shy about the awful strain the struggle places on the adults in the family.

Back home in Bogota, teen brothers Carly and Mateo — played by siblings (and Disney Channel veterans) Mateo and Moisés Arias — are metal-blasting, skateboard-riding punks, and reluctant partners in crime. Carly, the sensible one, can’t prevent Mateo from dynamiting a dollhouse.

The battle lines of territorial masculinity are drawn with compelling psychological complexity in Summer White, in which a 13-year-old boy impatient to become a man grows increasingly hostile to the presence of his single mother's new partner in their lives. Mexican director Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson establishes a domestic situation of almost unhealthy mutual emotional dependency and then ruptures it with the arrival of an outsider whose kindness and generosity make him even more of a threat.

The faces in Saudi Runaway are blurred, with one exception: the documentary's subject and (cameraphone) cinematographer.