CINEFEST 2011 IS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY. CLICK HERE FOR OUR FESTIVAL PREVIEW! RECOMMENDED: We know it’s crazy, but it could be true: The remake of the Dudley Moore classic Arthur, starring Russell Brand, may actually be, in some ways, better than the original. And we say this as devout original-Arthur fans. Why, you ask; but how? [...]

RECOMMENDED: Juliette Binoche nabbed Best Actress at Cannes for her work in Certified Copy, but that’s not why I’m recommending it this week. I’m recommending it because I’m man-struating and it seems like the most lovely thing in the world to sit in one of the Ritzes this weekend in a theater full of old [...]

RECOMMENDED: We can’t say if Heartbeats has substance, but one thing is for sure: Xavier Dolan‘s writer/director/star turn has style for miles. And after making the festival circuit for a while — if the trailer looks familiar to you, that’s because it played at the Philadelphia Film Festival last fall — Heartbeats is now seeing [...]

RECOMMENDED: Well, first off, you’re probably not going to the movies this weekend, but if you were, wouldn’t it be great to sneak some beers in and hot box on the way over with your friends like you used to do back in the day? If you somehow manage this, A) call me, and B), [...]

RECOMMENDED: Boasting a screenplay by Paul Laverty — whose film The Wind That Shakes the Barley might just have been the greatest movie ever made about Ireland — comes Even The Rain, another film about the oppression of a nation for centuries at the hands of imperialist forces. This time, though, the struggle is Bolivia, [...]

RECOMMENDED: Real talk: It is our sincere belief that Paul Giamatti has been doing a quite but rugged form of penance ever since Sideways, the results of which have slowly but surely put him way back in the black. He was about as fine as an actor can be John Adams a few years back, [...]

RECOMMENDED: Another Year is the latest from that serial-monogamist-of-the-talky-English-movie vibe Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies, Topsy Turvy), and it stars regulars Jim Broadbent (Topsy Turvy, When Did You Last See Your Father) and Ruth Sheen (High Hopes). Broadbent and Sheen play — and the movie is about — one of those anchor [...]

RECOMMENDED, IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO HAS NEVER BEEN UPTIGHT ABOUT ADMITTING YOUR LOVE FOR THE 2000s ROCK BAND THE STROKES: I know that Black Swan will put me in a bad space mentally. I have no desire to see Christian Bale impersonate a cracked-out dreamer because, shit, I just moved out [...]

Even before the shift toward “truthiness” in media, Andrew Jarecki showed interest in the murky relationship between fact and fiction. His directorial debut was Capturing The Friedmans, an accidental documentary that ushered in the era of titular, voyeuristic self-filming. David Friedman was New York City’s most revered party clown, and all was right in his [...]

RECOMMENDED: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, of course, is the third and final installment of film adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books — all of them, moody, long-ish and deeply Scandanavian. Not to be That Guy, but soak this up before the American adaptations come along, what with their George Clooneys and chick-from-Twilights. [...]

RECOMMENDED: As we mentioned earlier this week, It’s Kind of a Funny Story stars Zach Galifianakis as a mental patient in a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest update for the Judd Apatow/Bucket Brigade generation. It looks not so bad. ALSO NEW IN THE THEATERS: Life As We Know It, part of God’s great plan [...]

RECOMMENDED: Well, out of the box, we can say this: Jesse Eisenberg has completely nailed that mildly Asperger’s-entitled-fuck thing that’s always made us wanna smack Mark Zuckerberg. But is Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Network based on anything more than a hammed-up version of how you and me and everyone we know came to be unrepentant [...]

RECOMMENDED: See that headline? ACTUAL PIECE OF DIALOG FROM THE ABOVE MOVIE. At this point, most of you know that Oliver Stone is a chronic “intellectual” masturbator whose carbon footprint will now never be justifiable in any way with the art it has left, like a dead lizard skin, upon the Earth. What you don’t [...]

RECOMMENDED: A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop is acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou‘s adaptation of Blood Simple, the directorial debut by the Coen Brothers. Yimou, however, takes the film’s basic gist — a screwball noir about a cuckolded husband who engages a bounty hunter to rub out his wife and her lover — [...]

RECOMMENDED: Pardon us for being a little late to the game on Mesrine, director Jean-François Richet’s two-part epic about French gangster Jacques Mesrine, which has already been playing for a week or two. Both parts are currently playing at Ritz Five, and if you find yourself with five idle hours to spare this weekend, we [...]

RECOMMENDED: Set inside a tank during the First Lebanon War in 1982, Israeli writer/director Samuel Maoz‘s uncompromising Lebanon takes viewers into combat from the perspective of four young soldiers and their periscope; it took home the Leone d’Oro at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. ALSO NEW IN THE THEATERS: Globetrotting, Italian-woman-dating George Clooney is eager [...]

RECOMMENDED: When Turkish director Fatih Akin was finished shooting his fourth feature, Head On, in 2004 at the age of 30, he was financially wiped out. In a panic to get paid for something, Akin, along with friend and actor Adam Bousdoukos, quickly wrote a light-hearted comedy that roughly paralleled Adam’s life in the restaurant [...]

RECOMMENDED: Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray star in the grand old yarn that is Get Low, which could have also been titled What Happens When The World’s Most Interesting Man Wants To Die (Sort Of) had the Dos Equis guy not gotten there first. ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: The Expendables, an unintentionally Tropic [...]

The Other Guys stars Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson in a smash-em-up, slapstick cop romp. By default and nothing else at all, it’s probably the best movie opening this week. Sorry! ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: Or maybe we spoke too soon: The Concert is one of those Ritz films old [...]

RECOMMENDED: Groan all you want about the seeming monopoly that the “Bucket Brigade” – the sprawling wack pack of Judd Apatow and all who sail in him — has asserted over the world of comedy films; when these films connect, they’re some of the most unlikely yet absolute movie magic going these days. And even [...]