'Blood and Money': Film Review

Sharon Liese's documentary follows the contrasting trajectories of four transgender children in Kansas City with engrossing, sometimes surprising results.

This year's Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was scheduled to take place last week, was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 may well have been the only force capable of preventing an Indian American competitor from winning the contest for the 13th year in a row.

Murderous escaped cons are no match for the wrath of a 13-year-old girl in this over-the-top yet effectively taut thriller.

This time it’s personal as Lynn Chen puts Asian actresses front and center in her winning conclusion to the 'Surrogate Valentine' trilogy.

It's too little too late in this tedious biopic of Anglo-Irish modernist designer Eileen Gray and her antagonist Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

A young New York homeless woman is the focus of Andrew Wonder's confident, intriguing narrative debut feature.

A portrait of a struggling New Yorker who bites every hand that tries to feed her, Andrew Wonder's Feral follows a homeless woman (Annapurna Sriram) who splits her time between the streets and the filthy nest she has made for herself deep within the city's subway tunnels.

You’ve seen Kevin James play a Queens delivery man, a mall cop, a retired cop, a biology teacher turned MMA fighter, a zookeeper (in Zookeeper), the president of the United States, an animated Frankenstein, and a straight firefighter pretending that he’s gay. But it’s fairly certain that you’ve never quite seen him as he is in Becky, a stylish and very gory home-invasion thriller from the directing duo of Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott.

Is there a more distressing vision to torment your COVID lockdown dreams than a blocked toilet? Well, yes, if the blockage is caused by the bloody, half-dead body of a hairless, razor-toothed bat with what looks unsettlingly like an umbilical cord attached.

On their way to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, four kids charm while demystifying the reign of South Asian contenders.

Inventive and infectious, TT The Artist's head-turning debut fuses the forms of documentary and music video to honor Baltimore's vibrant social fabric.

Dehumanizing power dynamics underscore Prateek Vats’ enjoyable debut about a guy ill-suited to his new job as monkey chaser in Delhi.

Liz Marshall's smooth, accessible documentary may change some minds as it unpacks the specifics of the slaughter-free "clean meat" movement.

Milkwatertakes its title from "The Consecrating Mother" by Anne Sexton, the Pulitzer-winning mid-20th century American poet who wrote with stark confessional candor about the intimate physical and emotional experience of womanhood. That makes it natural to expect a singular focus in Morgan Ingari's likable first feature about a directionless young woman who impulsively decides to become a surrogate for an older gay man she barely knows.

The helmer of HBO's 'Los Espookys' delivers a serious, sensitive look at Monterrey's Cholombiano subculture through the eyes of an endangered cumbia dancer.

In a genre heavy on outright gastroporn, Abby Ainsworth's polished documentary on Spain's celebrated Mugaritz restaurant inspires more curiosity than hunger.

Don Millar's documentary about Fernando Botero, one of the world's most popular living artists (the most popular, if you believe the film), proves similar to the many artworks it displays.

The phrase “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” which has often (and perhaps erroneously) been attributed to American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a familiar saying by about 1920. And it makes perfect sense that the phrase roughly coincides with the dawn of cinema, because filmmakers have been cinematically paraphrasing it for much of the last 100 years.

Andrew Patterson’s retro sci-fi thriller “The Vast of Night” has the look and feel of a restored 1950s Cadillac. There are certain aspects that appear new, but your first impression of the car is of its original time and era, a place that seems both modern yet quaintly of the past.

In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Bill Buford movingly recounts the kind of romantic apprenticeship most aspiring chefs imagine when they hear the word "stage": Having moved to Lyon to absorb French food culture, the American humbly offered himself as a student hoping to learn from the crusty character who made the town's best bread. A skill was passed from master to learner, a friendship developed, and a new evangelist for the region's traditions was born.