Capital New York

Real-life variations on the theme of family: 'The Good Life,' 'Donor Unknown,' 'Gone'

Three very different documentaries at the Tribeca Film Festival deal with the concept of family, which is often in the news these days in the context of efforts by regressive groups to define what "family" means. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Cairo Exit': The movie that outlasted Hosni Mubarak

Considering the fact that Egyptians are freshly off toppling their long-entrenched government, Egyptian-American director Hesham Issawi's Cairo Exit may be the most timely film in the entire Tribeca Film Festival. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'The Trip': The discontent of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, made hysterically funny

Michael Winterbottom is one of those directors who resists easy classification. He's not known for making one type of film, and he leaps from genre to genre, sometimes in the same year. From period pieces like Jude and Tristam Shandy, to films that take on current-day issues (Welcome to Sarajevo, The Road to Guantanamo and A Mighty Heart), to smaller comedies and dramas (Wonderland, 24 Hour Party People) Winterbottom is not content to stay put. He also apparently never sleeps, coming out with a film a year since the mid-90s. In 2010, first we had his The Killer Inside Me, based on Jim Thompson's bleak pulp novel, a stylish moody thriller with a creepy sociopathic performance from Casey Affleck, set in a nowhere town in West Texas. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Flowers of Evil': A movie about Twitter cross-talk that deserves our undivided attention

Much of the current conversation about social media and technology, in the world at large and in cinema, focuses on how it supposedly isolates us, and keeps us glued to our BlackBerries or iPhones and disengaged with the world around us. A manipulative documentary like Catfish, then, shows what we already know: There are crazy people out there ready to use this new ecosystem to take advantage of the good nature of others. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Rabies': Israel makes its slasher-film debut, to laughter and applause

A brother and a sister with a dark secret are fleeing their past through the forest. Four nubile teens on their way to a tennis match (the girls in little white tennis skirts, the boys in white sweaters) go into the forest to pee, and get separated. A forest ranger does his rounds, accompanied by his friendly dog. None of these people are connected to one another, but they all are about to encounter the monster that lurks here. And this monster will infect them all, as the title, Rabies, suggests. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'In a Better World': What do children know about bullying that adults don't?

In In a Better World, the latest film by Danish director Susanne Bier, two young boys sit on top of a towering silo, their legs dangling over the edge, a hair-raising image of the fragility of life and the recklessness of youth. The two boys are friends of a sort, a friendship emerging from the shared experience of being bullied at school. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

On taking too many liberties with 'Jane Eyre' (and too few with Michael Fassbender)

Apparently, it's not hard to make a Jane Eyre movie. But it's hard to make a good one.

The classic book, by Charlotte Brontë, has a creepy, supernatural element that translates awkwardly to the big screen. Film-makers either throw up their hands at some point and say to themselves, Oh, what the hell, let’s just pretend Charlotte Bronte is Jane Austen and have everyone rattle their tea cups and step daintily over cobblestones, or they pour on the gloom so heavily that Mr. Rochester becomes a King Lear-like figure, and the unfettered eroticism of the book is lost More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Certified Copy' may look like something you've seen before, but it isn't

In Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, his first film shot outside of his native Iran, a middle-aged couple named James and, simply, “She” (William Shimell and Juliette Binoche) drive around the beautiful landscape of Tuscany. They talk about art, they talk about wine. They talk about the act of “seeing”: How do we perceive things? An ugly man is a prince to the wife who loves him. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Cold Weather': A deep indie that is not plot-resistant; a 'love letter' to Portland that is actually awesome

“I’m gonna be a detective someday.”

“You mean like C.S.I. and shit?”

“I don’t really want to do C.S.I. I want to be more like Sherlock Holmes.”

“Sherlock Holmes? ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,' and all that shit?”

“Yeah!” More

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By Sheila O'Malley

See 'The African Queen' with a crowd; marvel at Hepburn's pallor

The African Queen (1951), directed by John Huston, has endured as a classic with audiences who love the humorous sparring between the two middle-aged leads (Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart), the adventurous obstacle-ridden plot involving a perilous trip down a river in “German East Africa” in a battered riverboat at the dawn of WWI, and the loopy happy ending with Hepburn and Bogart swimming off happily through Lake Tanganyika after exploding a German warship only minutes following their marriage, and moments away from being executed. The entire thing is preposterous, and it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. More

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By Sheila O'Malley