Now and then you go to a movie and you find yourself cheering for the hero or heroine. You fall in love with a character (a dog for instance), and you leave the theater wondering why it all happened so fast because you want to be back in the darkness–living with those characters up on the screen one more time. . . or maybe two more times or maybe even forever. Woody Allen was on to some of that when he made The Purple Rose of Cairo–that idea of being transfixed by the cinema, of somehow making the leap through…
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Biutiful– beautiful, misspelled. But ‘beautiful’ barely begins to describe this breathtaking film, which will undoubtedly receive an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  It is not too much to say that within the film are all the components of life itself. The sublime and the profane, the worst and best of human behavior. . . . the hope and trust of  illegal immigrants working in an airless room, the raw pornography against the pounding disco beat of a nightclub where naked women swarm like snakes in a pit, the sweet happiness in the shining eyes of a child, the fragile beauty…
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Not so much a story as a study of a relationship, Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance (who bears a certain likeness to Ryan Gosling) excels in the powerful performances by its two stars–Michelle Williams, who received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in the film, and Gosling, whose fluid, heart-wrenching performance was ignored by the Academy.

There are little pieces of magic throughout the movie–including several scenes between Dean (Gosling), and his daughter Frankie, played convincingly by seven-year-old Faith Wyladyka. (Some of their moments together seem entirely unscripted.) But it is the scenes chronicling some of…
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Prince Albert, Duke of York (“Bertie”, as he was called by his family) was a man of privilege to be sure, but that didn’t mean he had it particularly easy. From the time he was a child, he was plagued with a debilitating speech impediment, which made him horribly self-conscious and uneasy in public situations. He was the target of his brother’s derision growing up, an unfortunate dynamic that continued into the brothers’ adult years. And then, taken completely off-guard, Bertie is thrown into the role of King of England when his brother Edward abdicates the throne in order to…
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By Francine Schwartz

Enjoying a movie requires a certain amount of suspension of belief. After all, we are glimpsing into the lives of characters we’ve just met. And we are given only two hours or so to grasp it all. When a movie works, we are drawn into the story to such an extent that the boundaries of time become meaningless. The missing pieces fall into place and we manage to forget that what we are watching is a representation of events and human interaction, and not the actuality. For those two hours in the dark, we are “there.”…
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By Francine Schwartz

Slice of life and riveting, Fish Tank takes you inside the grim life of a girl who lives in a rough housing project in England’s Essex. It’s a reality show—but not the kind you see on TV. This kind is the real stuff. And it’s poetry. Beautiful. Gritty. And incredibly sexy.

Not unlike a fish tank where the creatures that swim around can see out, but are trapped within, the housing project is inhabited by people with disenchanted lives—girls who swear with the same rapid-fire fluidity as their moms and dream only of performing on…
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By Francine Schwartz

From the moment the film begins, with the thumping soundtrack of a spaghetti Western going full blast and the words “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France …” superimposed on the screen, we know we’re in Tarantino country.

Film noir, Western, epic Hollywood, black comedy, you name it– Inglourious Basterds is Tarentino’s lovesong to the cinema.

An intricate fantasy of Jewish revenge against the Nazis, the story demonstrates the essence of what makes a movie a movie—situations and people looming larger than life on the screen. With Tarentino, everything is exaggerated—sometimes to the point…
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