Simple inquiry the premise of 'Stories We Tell,' an eloquent documentary

Truth is a tricky thing. Memories can falter, secrets are clung to, and there is more than one way to see an event, interpret its meaning. Wallace Stevens had 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. Rashomon's priest and woodcutter famously offered differing accounts of a woman's attack. Hey, eve…

Spirited lark 'Angels Share' keeps you rooting to end

You'll have to wait until it ends to see whether crime pays in Ken Loach's spirited caper "The Angels' Share." But it's a testament to the veteran British filmmaker's wily ways - and to his strong social (and socialist) conscience - that you'll find yourself rooting for his band of underclas…

'The Big Wedding': Unhappily ever after

"Marriage is like a phone call late at night," Robert De Niro says, in dulcet voice-over mode, at the outset of "The Big Wedding." "First comes the ring, and then you wake up."

Acting adds much to coming-of-age film

Elle Fanning is scary. Scarily good.

'On the Road' pulls over too soon

People have been trying to film Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," the talismanic Beat novel, just about since the day it was published in 1957.

The Loft to screen all Oscar-nominated shorts

Is the whole animated shorts world suddenly all about 'toons without words?

'Jason Statham steals this film

It would be great, one day, to see Jason Statham try his hand at a romance, or slapstick farce. He wouldn't have to change what he does - if he could, which seems doubtful. Somehow, the counterintuitive casting of the taciturn British action star - shaved dome, sinewy, snarling his lines as …

Oscar contender 'Sister' is an absolute must-see

A ski-lift gondola, rumbling up the side of a Swiss mountain, is the means by which Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), the 12-year-old boy at the center of Ursula Meier's dark fairy tale of a film, "Sister," gets to work.

Nothing wrong with 'Guilt Trip,' but nothing quite right, either

Maybe on paper - a cocktail napkin, perhaps, but certainly not the shooting script - "The Guilt Trip" seemed like a good idea. Take a geeky grown-up with no dating or mating skills and put him in a car for a cross-country road trip with his smothering, motor-mouth mom.

'Wuthering Heights' remake loses its way in gimmicks

O, the misery!

Holocaust film speaks to human endurance

Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness," nominated for a foreign-language Academy Award (it lost, to "A Separation"), is set in the city of Lvov, then part of Poland and now the Ukraine, in the midst of World War II. It's a harrowing Holocaust tale, but one that speaks to humankind's capacity to e…

Skillful 'Tyrannosaur' burns with intensity

Rage and ruin burn off the screen in "Tyrannosaur," a first-time directorial effort from Irish actor Paddy Considine in which Peter Mullan - veteran of many a Ken Loach pic - seethes with hate and self-hatred.

Shakespeare . . . er, rather . . . Goethe in love

The original German title of "Young Goethe in Love" is simply "Goethe!" Note the exclamation point, because director Philipp Stölzl's account of the love affair that set the great German author on the path to literary stardom is all about exuberance and exaggeration.

Crises, not flaws, says director

TORONTO - The lights came up after the gala screening of "The Descendants" (due to open in Tucson next week) at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and Alexander Payne and his star, George Clooney, trotted onto the stage - greeted by an especially rapturous standing ovation.

Plenty of clichés, no charisma

"Step Up 3D" is, in one significant respect, a step up.

Star has fun making 'Prince'

What's a dedicated thespian doing in sixth-century armor, leaping walled citadels in a $150 million Walt Disney sword-and-sandals saga adapted from a video game? "It's definitely a different type of movie than I've made before," says Jake Gyllenhaal, star of "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time."

Romanian cop stalks meaning of words

A police procedural that's less about criminal matters than it is about dialectics and existential quandaries, Corneliu Porumboiu's "Police, Adjective" is an anti-thriller in which little happens - there is plenty of talk, but even more silence.

'A Single Man' stylish to a fault

"A Single Man" is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness and loss - and mid-20th-century home design. Set in 1962 Los Angeles and starring Colin Firth as an English literature professor (he's English and he teaches literature), this meticulously crafted film has been adapted from …

Role in 'Goats' recalls Dude from 'Lebowski'

TORONTO - In "The Men Who Stare at Goats," Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, a military man who returns from Vietnam to embrace the '60s counterculture headlong - the whole Aquarian Age, flower power, altered states of consciousness thing.

Landing lead in Coen Bros. movie was a serious shock

He's in the ads and on the posters, standing upright on a roof, his arms elbowed out, fists on his waist, like some neurotic Clark Kent. There's a TV antenna behind him, and a lot of blue sky.

Engaging acting props up 'Lorna's Silence'

Since turning from documentaries to fiction in the mid-1990s, the Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have crafted a series of stunning if bleak dramas about Europe's outcasts: the unemployed, the homeless, an underclass of illegal immigrants, black marketeers, teenage h…

NC-17 Ang Lee film a rich thriller

In some ways, Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, and the film director's "Lust, Caution," adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, aren't so very different.

Pingpong farce is only so-so, scoring laughs haphazardly

"Welcome to the underbelly of pingpong," says the sage Chinese master — make that the blind sage Chinese master — in the latest merrily stupid sports comedy, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant's "Balls of Fury."

'La Vie en Rose' sure to create Oscar buzz

Most music biopics follow a familiar arc, and in some ways Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose" appears no different: a childhood of pain and poverty, false steps and shaky beginnings, a mentor or two, wild times on the road, discovery, debauchery, success, fame, death.

Russian horror sequel a wild and woolly ride

In "Day Watch," Timur Bekmambetov's wild and woolly sequel to his 2004 amok-in-Moscow vampire thriller "Night Watch," the forces of light and the forces of darkness are at it again.