With a title like Margarita, with a Straw and a festive screening on Cinco de Mayo eve, you'd think this foreign import would be part of a Mexican muestra. But Margarita is the opening night...

  Where does poetic inspiration come from? Nadav Lapid's new film The Kindergarten Teacher wants to know. But something heavier is on its mind: the liabilities of that lyrical muse. We live in...

An ideal literary diet includes solid screen adaptations -- stories you can watch with the added spicings of another's imagination. Provided, of course, that the film serves up enough narrative...

What do "merchants of doubt" do? The question arises now that Robert Kenner has come out with Merchants of Doubt. Like his Oscar-nominated documentary, Food, Inc., this engrossing new exposé once...

Where does The Ballad of the Weeping Spring take place? The question hovers over Benny Toraty's Wild East fable, which may unfold in yesteryear's Levant, or perhaps just in fantasyland. Either way,...

  You've seen Sebastiaõ Salgado's photographs. A gold miners' strife in his native Brazil, genocide in Rwanda, war in Yugoslavia, famine in Ethiopia and incinerated oilfields in Kuwait -- his...

If your protagonist has to keep pressing her case in a dingy courtroom for five years, the world of your movie can get pretty claustrophobic. It's an acceptable risk of Gett: The Trial of Viviane...

  Don't go see Timbuktu expecting revival of Kismet. Abderrahmane Sissako's latest film offers a somewhat more subdued portrait of Mali's spiritual and intellectual capital, one where music is...

  Gabe Polsky's Red Army is a winning addition to the scorecard of sports-themed films -- like Moneyball and Foxcatcher -- for people who don't give a whit about sports. With dramatic flair and...

  Dick Pope's name may have been crapped up as he was nominated for an Academy Award, but there's nothing crappy about the reason for that nomination: his lensing of Mr. Turner. Click below for my...