> Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his […]

  MAYDAY:  The fantasy whatzit is a Sundance staple, and Mayday fits into that category.  (Paradise Hills was a recent example from a past festival.)  Ana (Grace Van Patten), short for Anastasia, is an ignored and abused waitress who finds herself swimming through a portal to what turns out to be an otherwise deserted island […]

  With The Silver-Linings Playbook and now Wayne Blair’s THE SAPPHIRES, Harvey Weinstein may have the feel-good part of the coming awards season locked down.  This slight but charming true story (or at least “inspired by” one) about an Australian singing group is like the happytime version of Dreamgirls. The story is set in 1968 Australia, a time when, […]

  Kate Barker-Froyland’s directing debut SONG ONE is so wispy and insubstantial that the bytes making up its digital images seem barely capable of adhering to a screen.  Clearly influenced by John Carney’s mini-musical Once, it makes Carney’s film look like an Andrew Lloyd-Webber spectacle by comparison. Barker-Froyland also wrote the minimal script, which almost exhausts its resources […]

  THEATER CAMP (Searchlight/Disney):  The odds are that a lot of people who’ll want to see a movie called Theater Camp are comfortable with the kind of ramshackle, hit-or-miss qualities associated with actual summer camp productions, and will likewise find plenty to enjoy in a movie that’s been made with more love and energy than […]

  THE SUNLIT NIGHT (no distrib):  The last thing one would have expected from the director of the genuinely scabrous Wetlands was a follow-up that seems to trying to meld NY Jewish comedy with the kind of enchanted romcom spirit of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.  But that’s what David Wnendt has given us, and the […]

  THE WONDER (Netflix – November 16):  In the time of Ireland’s Great Famine, 11-year-old Anna (Kila Lord Cassidy) claims to have survived for 4 months without eating even one bite of food.  Is she a miracle, possibly a saint in the making, or a sham?  The elders of her small town have the girl […]

  AFTER THE WEDDING (no distrib):  The Danish 2006 After the Wedding, which won that year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, was shot by director Suzanne Biers in the then-trendy Dogma style, heavy on pseudo-verite camerawork and lighting that imparted a sense of immediacy to the drama.  Bart Freundlich’s English-language remake dispenses with that style entirely.  […]