'Cane River': Film Review

Although it's a film about intellectuals that builds on and incorporates China’s past, Jia Zhangke’s Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue(Yi zhi you dao hai shui bian lan) frequently reverts to a series of up-close, revealing shots of ordinary people going about their lives in the provinces.

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.

There’s a monster terrorizing screenwriter/co-director Jeremy Gardner’s protagonist in “After Midnight,” and he doesn’t know why, what it is or where it came from. After 83 minutes, we still don’t know, either, but at least it has become clear this is one of those films that “defies categorization” by identifying with a marketable genre it’s nonetheless not really interested in.

This Valentine's Day, there's certain to be the usual flood of candy and flowers. But at your local movie theater, there's something increasingly rare: A soulful and adult romantic drama in “The Photograph.”

Watching “The Photograph” is like looking through a friend’s old photo album — it’s not as exciting as your friend thinks it is.

With nearly all of China's 70,000 movie theaters still weeks — if not months — awayfrom reopening, many in the Beijing film industry have begun to hope for government bailouts as the only means of keeping their businesses afloat.The cinema sector, to be sure, is just one of many areas of the enormous Chinese economy that has been hard hit by the novel coronavirus pneumonia, now officially known as COVID-19.

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

A leisurely, somewhat hazy travelogue compared to the piercing political indictments of his acclaimed prior “We Come as Friends” and Oscar-nominated “Darwin’s Nightmare,” Austrian documentarian Hubert Sauper’s new “Epicentro” looks at Cuba on the brink of colossal transition, as the old Communist system is in its apparent death throes, and free-market capitalism waits in the wings. It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking.

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.

To open with an establishing drone shot has become something of a cliché for lower-budget films looking to create a sense of scale inexpensively, but in Argentinian director Verónica Chen’s fifth narrative feature “High Tide,” the choice feels unusually apt. The camera glides frictionlessly over an opaque turquoise sea, breakers foaming at its edges, and into a darkened beachside forest in which sits a large, modern, architect-designed house.

Shares in China's leading film studios took an immediate dive Monday moments after the country's stock markets resumed trading after the long Chinese New Year holiday.

We can, we must, we will...find out more about Navarro College's elite cheerleaders. At least, if Andy Cohen gets his way.

“The Last Shift,” a fast-food tragedy written and directed by Andrew Cohn, is a gut punch with a side of anguish. In this wonderfully sad small-town drama, the ever-empathetic Richard Jenkins plays Stan, a former high school athlete who took the graveyard shift at local chain Oscar’s Chicken and Fish in 1971 and never left.

It's easy to see why documentary and TV director Andrew Cohn's first narrative feature, The Last Shift, was at one time considered as a project for Alexander Payne, who remains on board as executive producer. Empathy for aging men navigating complicated crossroads in their unfulfilled lives has often shaped Payne's films and very much applies to the terminal under-achiever played here with characteristic dimension and heart by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Sultry music swells as the camera swoons over a young couple in a tender nighttime embrace. The 1950s residential New York City street is carefully rain-slicked and lined with shiny classic cars: an obvious stage set.

The largest film studio on the planet, China’s Hengdian World Studios, has announced it will shut down indefinitely, as productions in other parts of the country also announce they are closing up shop in light of the worsening coronavirus epidemic. 

There’s mannered, there’s manic, and then there’s the malfunctioning pinball-machine delirium that Ben Whishaw brings to “Surge”: a blinking, buzzing, flashing clatter of hyper-accelerated impulses, chicken-fried synapses and staggered hypnic jerks that never culminate in sleep.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.