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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“The only person standing in your way is you.”

Black Swan could have easily drowned in a whirlpool of overwrought adolescent melodrama, ala the Twilight series, but the film paddles its way through the murky depths of a sexy, terrifying psychological thriller centered around a girl’s obsession to become something she may or may not be — a ballet dancer encompassing the dichotomy of good and evil, innocence and lust, frailty and dominance. Never has such a simplistic story of desire been transformed — even transcended — into a truly suspenseful, horrifying, unflinching examination of the power and peril…
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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

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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Writer-director Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement” is a handsomely mounted bore, equally beautiful and unsatisfying.

The first third of the film is set in Merchant Ivory’s stolid version of England; everyone’s rich, beautiful and bored. Briony Tallis (Saorise Ronan), a precocious 12-year-old, wiles away her days on her family’s estate, writing plays and irritating the servants. Briony’s older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) lies around on a fainting couch, smoking and pouting, because the hunky gardener Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) has not responded to her advances. Will the spoiled, sullen Cecilia get to sleep with the handsome…
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In the Coen Brothers’ latest film, “No Country for Old Men,” a down on his luck hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and finds two million dollars. At long last, the destitute man thinks, fate has smiled upon me. However, by taking the money, he unwittingly becomes the target of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a relentless killer who sets out to find Moss and retrieve the money.

Fate’s a funny thing.

I went into “No Man” with some trepidation. Of late, the Coen Brothers’ movies have been nothing…
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In James Mangold’s stark new western “3:10 to Yuma,” Dan Evans (Christian Bale) and his son William (Logan Lerman) must transport a prisoner Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), the notorious leader of an outlaw gang, to a prison train in order to collect a reward and save the Evans family farm. Wade’s gang, led by Ben Foster’s prissy yet sadistic Prince, engage in a a scorched-earth campaign to get their boss back at all costs. Evans and Wades journey takes them across a grim, pre-PC Old West that more closely resembles a dry, lifeless moonscape than the green vistas of travelogue-style…
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