AMC Loews Village 7

57,000 Kilometers Between Us

**** (Four stars)
While her mother and stepfather post idealized video blogs on their family website, alienated teenager Nat explores two online “relationships.” The first,...

A Powerful Noise

**** (Four stars)
Director Tom Capello’s documentary gives you a reality check and moody cinema experience in one fell swoop by peeking into the lives of three women...

Algeria, Unspoken Stories

***** (Five stars)
This film is actually the third chapter in a documentary series by director Jean-Pierre Lledo recounting memories of Algeria's war of independence. Despite my...

All Truisms (short film program)

This is a short film program assembled for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. It celebrates "generosity of spirit and communal connection," and includes the films...

An Omar Broadway Film

*** (Three stars)
This film centers on Broadway, the eponymous Northern State Prisoner, as he documents the violent abuse of his maximum-security gang unit with a contraband...

Head Wind

**** (Four stars)
A quintessential study of technology democratizing information, this movie follows the Iranian government's vain attempts to control information flow among its...

Bachna Ae Haseeno

A light comedy that takes a surprisingly effective turn for the melodramatic, this Bollywood romance follows video-game designer Raj (Kapoor), a goofy charmer with a history of running when things...

Baghdad High

***** (Five stars)
What one might expect to be a somber documentary about the hardships of growing up in Iraq is instead an energizing and intimate glimpse into the lives of...

Baghead

Austin has produced both the gentle Richard Linklater and Tobe Hooper, the inspired filmmaker who convinced a couple dozen students to trek with him into the furnace-hot scrub to make...

Ball Don't Lie

** (Two stars)
To understand this streetball narrative’s all-too-cozy relationship with sports-movie clichés, one needn’t look further than its protagonist, “Sticky,” a...

Bangkok Dangerous

Nicolas Cage stars a hit man who develops a crisis of conscience in the Pang brothers' remake of their 1999 film.

Bart Got a Room

It’s ticktock ticktock for Danny as the prom approaches, and he still doesn’t have a date. With the help of his plain-Jane best friend and...

Before the Rains

***** (Five stars)
This love story is set against civil unrest in India in 1937. Henry, a charismatic Brit, and Sajani, his sultry love interest, try to forge a romance but are...

Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

The asterisk is totally intentional: a sly reference to Barry Bonds and the other athletes whose on-field achievements must compete with their alleged off-field juicing. Kolia LitscherDawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie say, in a publicity statement for their Tribeca...

Fighter

**** (Four stars)
Aicha, a girl of traditional Turkish heritage, joins an elite coed kung fu team in her family's adopted city of Copenhagen. This move exposes her not only to...

Finding Amanda

*** (Three stars)
Taylor Merdon (Matthew Broderick) is an L.A. comedy writer and recovering addict who's...

Fire Under the Snow

*** (Three stars)
Recently, the massive protests in the Tibetan city of Lhasa and along the Olympic torch route have put that region’s oppression by China back in the news....

Football Under Cover

*** (Three stars)
Appropriately codirected by an Iranian and a German, this breezy, empowerment-oriented documentary chronicles the struggles faced by both sides after a...

From Within

* (One star)
Welcome to Grovestown, your typical Bible-thumping backwater with a typically sordid history. Years before, you see, an angry evangelical mob burned a pagan mother...

Going on 13

**** (Four stars)
This thoughtful documentary by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Jeff...

Fermat's Room

***** (Five stars)
A Spanish whodunit story that will keep you on the edge of your seat and wanting more, Fermat’s Room is a bit like the game of Clue;...

Lake City

***** (Five stars)
A family drama set in the South, Lake City is blessed with a cast seemingly intent on rising to the caliber of its lead, the impeccable...

A Story of the Red Hills

*** (Three stars)
Felai is a lame mute whose disability so incenses his father that, as the film opens, the man is dragging his son to the edge of their village, intent on...

Let the Right One In

*** (Three stars)
Set in the stark, snow-filled landscape of a working-class suburb of Stockholm in 1982, Let the Right One In immediately sets a haunting,...

Life in Flight

** (Two stars)
This movie, despite the name, just does not fly. Patrick Wilson, Amy Smart and New York City itself are all interesting enough elements, but first-time director...

Lioness

**** (Four stars)
“Team Lioness,” the five women profiled in Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’s documentary, would be shining examples of all-American soldiers, except for...

Lost Indulgence

*** (3 stars)
Tragedy strikes Xian Chuen’s family when the taxicab his father drives suspiciously careens off the road and plunges into a river. Surviving this accident is his...

Lou Reed's Berlin

A theater in Film Forum has been sound-checked by Lou Reed himself; he asked for “louder,” we’re told. And louder it is—also chunkier and, somehow, more downtown and...

Love, Pain & Vice Versa

**** (Four stars)
Mexican director Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa aims high with his feature debut, a dreamy thriller that evokes both the psychological suspense of Alfred Hitchcock and...

Mamma Mia!

Throughout the screening of ‘Mamma Mia!’ I kept clocking the security guard in the corner. What was he thinking, I wondered, as Pierce BrosnanYoon...

Milosevic on Trial

**** (Four stars)
At the beginning of 2002, Slobodan Milosevic went on trial at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity, genocide and other pleasantries of the...

Mister Lonely

Korine’s first film since Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) is a comedy touched with self-reflective poignancy. His sloppy, madcap plot begins in Paris with a sad Michael Jackson impersonator (Luna) who...

My Life Inside

***** (Five stars)
Instead of fixating on the topic of illegal immigrants working for low wages in America, this documentary focuses on a side of the alien experience we don't...

My Marlon and Brando

** (Two stars)
More documentary than feature film, My Marlon and Brando tells the true-life story of Turkish actress Ayca Damgaci (who plays herself) and...

Newcastle

***** (Five stars)
Surf films, like Westerns, are experiencing a renaissance. The best of the lot are unquestionably from Australia (animated penguin flick Surf’s...

Nuthouse (short film program)

*** (Three stars)
With a title like "Nuthouse" and a tagline announcing this program's pledge of “ surprising you, scaring you or just plain creeping you out,” you...

The Objective

* (One star)
Daniel Myrick is no novice when it comes to low-budget films. In 1999, he cowrote and codirected the sleeper hit The Blair Witch Project, about...

Off the Beaten Path (short film program)
This is a short film program assembled for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Devoted to faraway places—both foreign and domestic—and unpredictable stories, this collection includes...

Old Man Bebo

**** (Four stars)
The enlightening narrative behind this profile of 90-year-old Cuban-music patriarch Bebo Valdés unspools slowly. What begins as a fairly conventional career...

Paraiso Travel

**** (Four stars)
This film tells the story of a young couple, Marlon and Reina, who travel to the United States from Colombia in hopes of a better life. In the chaos of their...

Ping Pong Playa
A sports-movie send-up in extreme miniature (budget- and otherwise), Ping Pong Playa has all the stock genre ingredients: an underachieving protagonist, nerdy minions and...

Playing

**** (Four stars)
The idea behind the Brazilian Playing sounds pretty brilliant. Women are asked to tell an important story from their lives on camera, then...

Playing for Change: Peace Through Music

***** (Five stars)
In New York, the background cacophony of the everyday makes for a pretty rowdy personal soundtrack. However, there are a handful of times when it pays not to...

A Portrait of Diego: The Revolutionary Gaze

*** (Three stars)
Disclaimer: I knew nothing about Diego Rivera going into this film, except that he was married to Frida Kahlo and was a painter. This documentary centers on...

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

**** (Four stars)
This movie is about the role that the women of Liberia—under the banner of the Christian Women's Peace Initiative—played in ousting the brutal dictatorship...

A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy

Since a certain presidential hopeful has earned copious Kennedy comparisons, now is the perfect time to get an eyeful of the real deal. Vérité legend Robert Drew...

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

To be completely honest, this is an experimental film about grave sites. But the longer you watch John Gianvito’s...

Quiet Chaos

*** (Three stars)
This Italian effort examines the grieving process of Pietro, a middle-aged man who has just lost his wife. Driving the plot forward are Pietro's guilt that he...

Redbelt

After tortuous screeds on Hollywood doublespeak, the present state of self-hating Judaism and his own abdication of “brain-dead” liberalism, David MametTom KalinBlake Lively’s gossip girl far eclipses Nina Paley's autobiographical adventure is imaginative and funny. Hilariously folksy...

Somers Town

***** (Five stars)
This entertaining film documents a young British runaway’s unusual friendship with a shy Polish boy in London. The main characters, Tomo and Marek, provide...

Split Second (short film program)

**** (Four stars)
This series of short films explores how everyday people must confront situations that will inevitably change their lives forever. From a ten-year-old...

SqueezeBox!

The go-to event for all rock-loving homos, gender benders and their fellow travelers (no matter where they fell on the Kinsey scale), SqueezeBox! raged on from 1994 to 2001, despite Rudy...

Strangers

**** (Four stars)
Two travelers, Eyal (Liron Levo) and Rana (Lubna Azabal), lock eyes in a subway car and, in a hypercheesy rom-com trope, accidentally switch bags. When they...

Sick Nurses

Terra

When the last remaining humans exhaust Earth's resources, an alien girl on the idyllic planet Terra must fight the earthlings who want to inhabit...

The 27 Club

**** (Four stars)
The "27 club" of the film's title refers to the list of musicians who have died at age 27, including Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. To...

The Aquarium

**** (Four stars)
This sixth the feature by Cairo-born director Yousry Nasrallah is a lot like the...

The Auteur

** (Two stars)
I think most people (at least most guys) have enjoyed the droll game of inventing porn titles for famous films—Forest Humps! The Jizz Singer! Hannah...

The Cottage
Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams’ follow-up to ‘London to Brighton’ is, by his own admission, a film of two...

The Dying Breed

** (Two stars)
In lieu of review, I’ve recapped a conversation with a friend summing up my impressions:

Friend: Hey, bro,...

Couscous
Set in the French port of Sète, director Abdel Kechiche’s ‘Couscous’ is a rich and quietly surprising portrait of that town’s French-Tunisian community. Basically an ensemble piece, it...

The Wild Man of the Navidad

*** (Three stars)
The moonshine-addled, gun-horny rednecks of Sublime, Texas, have a problem. They’ve got themselves a monster who just won’t be consistent: It attacks by...

Theater of War

The chance to peep in on Meryl Streep’s creative process is reason enough to check out this revelatory documentary on the Public Theater’s 2006 production of Mother...

This Is Not a Robbery

**** (Four stars)
This documentary tells the true story of J.L. Rountree, a Texas man who took to robbing banks in the final years of his life. A millionaire in his youth,...

Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon

*** (Three stars)
With more than 6,000 years of history to draw from, Chinese filmmakers never have to look far for a rich source of material. In Three Kingdoms:...

Worlds Apart

**** (Four stars)
Best known for getting doors closed in their faces, Jehovah’s Witnesses are in the spotlight of this complex Danish drama directed by Andy Abrahams...

The Universe of Keith Haring

**** (Four stars)
Christina Clausen’s earnest hagiography traces the eponymous street artist’s creative trajectory with the kind of broad strokes used in Haring’s simple...

The Wackness

**** (Four stars)
Set in New York in the summer of 1994, The Wackness is writer-director Jonathan Levine