An Academy Award winner for Best Foreign-Language Film and winner of five Golden Lola Awards (the German Oscars), Nowhere in Africa recounts the true story of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in Kenya. Although beautifully shot and acted, the film is hampered by…

The number of boring, uninspired studio pictures hitting today’s multiplexes is getting depressing. To add insult to injury, many of these mind-numbing creations come from formerly — and presumably still — talented writers, directors, and actors. Last week saw Hollywood Homicide, a tired — and what’s, worse, lazy — buddy-buddy/cop/action…

The emotional, even healing, power of music is only one of the themes that interests acclaimed Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) in his beautiful new film, Together. Other, equally important concerns include father-son relationships and the way China, in its headlong pursuit of modernization, is abandoning…

If you have never heard of Lizzie McGuire, you are not a female child between the ages of six and fourteen; nor are you a parent with a female child between those ages. For the uninitiated, then, Lizzie is the eponymous heroine of the three-year-old, wildly popular Disney Channel TV…

It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as Raising Victor Vargas, a coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett, which first premiered here at the Miami International Film Festival. The surprise isn’t in the plot — that would be too easy…

Ever since Amores Perros burst onto the international scene two years ago, Latin American cinema has been experiencing one of the most fertile periods in its history. Encompassing such works as Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Walter Salles’s Behind the Sun, these socially conscious, frequently brutal portraits of…

Four of the top ten films I saw this year don’t actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in ’03, but I also make…

Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…

Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…

Merchant Ivory productions — Howard’s End and A Room With a View being two of the most notable — are famous for their almost tactile sense of time and place. The company’s latest effort, The Mystic Masseur, which was not directed by the team’s customary director, James Ivory, but by…

It took the creative giants behind MIIB (a.k.a. Men in Black II) five years to come up with a disappointingly flat and uninspired sequel that not only treads familiar ground but does so with far less pizzazz than the original. It took the forces behind Stuart Little 2 a mere…

Think of it as Todd Solondz light — loads of dysfunction but, thankfully, none of the perversion. In fact despite deep-seated neuroses, occasionally inappropriate behavior, and a propensity for unhealthy relationships, the four females who are the Marks family are a fairly benevolent lot. As observed by writer-director Nicole Holofcener,…

Quick! Name a brilliant mathematician at one of the country’s leading academic institutions who, despite obvious emotional problems that keep him on the edge of a nervous breakdown, is enlisted by his government to decipher seemingly impenetrable military communications that the enemy sends to its operatives around the world. If…

An eighteenth-century battle of the sexes, Triumph of Love contains a radiant performance by Mira Sorvino as a princess whose complicated scheme to win the man she loves finds her juggling three suitors at once, all while disguised as a man. “I’m losing track of my own plot,” she giddily…

Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala), captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…

To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…

The mere presence of wide-eyed French gamine Audrey Tautou, star of the art-house hit Amelie, may be enough to get people into theaters to see Happenstance, which was made and released in France before the Amelie phenomenon swept the Gallic nation but is only now getting its American release. Viewers…

The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello Awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…

Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…

Chalk up another one for George Dubya. A few weeks ago the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way…

The Twentieth Century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause — acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality that they seem to cross an invisible threshold of decency, morality, and understanding. The My Lai massacre of 1968,…

Watching this film is like watching a donkey being beaten for 90 minutes, so egregiously is the titular character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more unacceptable…