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GERALD PEARY
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A decent little movie, but hardly a major one, from Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who, self-exiled, here shoots in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast.
Great cinema journalism, The Gatekeepers was the National Society of Film Critics' winner for Best Documentary of 2012.
It's the 60th anniversary of this pioneering American independent feature, which greatly influenced both cinema vérité documentarians and the French New Wave.
Daniel Edelstyn launched this film project after reading the spirited diary of his late grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, whose wealthy Jewish family split from Ukraine as the Bolsheviks were taking control.
What Robert Flaherty did with title cards in his silent Nanook of the North , Werner Herzog manages with declamatory voiceover in Happy People : romanticization of the austere, self-reliant lives of hunters and trappers in the icebound north.
Upwardly immobile
56 Up is still moving and philosophic, though not as exciting as earlier episodes, which had more drama.
Very veteran British actors nibble on the scenery in this pleasant, harmless adaptation of Ronald Harwood's 1999 middlebrow play set in a retirement home for ex-opera performers.
Although there is no narration or manipulative music track, Denis Côté's long-take documentary look at Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Quebec, screams out (quietly) on the side of animal rights.
Israeli filmmaker Chanoch Ze'evi is the probing interviewer behind this chilling, unsettling documentary.
In this brilliant Cold War political drama set in the GDR in 1980, a doctor, Barbara (the extraordinary Nina Hoss), is exiled from East Berlin to a provincial town by the Baltic Sea because she has requested to move to the West.
Rough justice
It wasn't the Mississippi Delta but enlightened, liberal New York City where, in 1989, five Harlem and Bronx teenage boys, black and Latino, were arrested, bullied by the police, and intimidated into making false confessions that they had raped and brutally injured a female jogger in Central Park.
Many in the audience rankled as Rick Alverson's The Comedy played in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Dream casting
The storyline of Anne Fontaine's French comedy is mainstream: a yuppie art dealer, Agathe (Isabelle Huppert), finds her condescending values challenged and her sexuality opened up by a crude but "natural" laborer (Benoît Poelvoorde).
Papist plot
Though one was an atheist and the other a churchgoer, both Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock were obsessed with their Catholicism.
Katie Dellamaggiore's sweet, winning documentary spends one year with the chess team at Intermediate School 318, an inner-city junior high in Brooklyn, where despite a 70 percent poverty rate, the kids, grades 6-9, routinely win national championships.
National Geographic photographer James Balog, acclaimed for his work on vanishing animal species, goes for even mightier concerns in this valiant documentary: to provide irrefutable visual evidence of the magnitude of man-made global warming.
Did the business-savvy Weinstein Brothers plan this project as a tax write-off? How else to explain the greenlighting of this soggy, monumentally morose excuse for a movie?
It's a far-fetched premise: two boys mixed up at birth, a Palestinian raised by an Israeli-army colonel and his French wife in Tel Aviv, a Jew brought up by a West Bank Muslim family who have had a son killed in the occupation.
American audiences will be delighted to see how the Grateful Dead helped pay for the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic team, including supplying tie-dyed T-shirts. But only Lithuanians will thrill to the movie's climax...
There are big names galore in this amalgam of short films — Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Kenneth Branagh, etc. — and the celebs are having a holiday good time, even when the stories aren't particularly distinguished.
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