Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

Invincible, Werner Herzog‘s first narrative feature following a decade of documentaries, opens with a realist eye on a busy shtetl marketplace in 1932 Poland. Under a gray spring sky, cheery Jewish vendors weigh vegetables and sharpen axes, while sober elders discuss the Scriptures, and Zishe Breitbart, a blacksmith, sits amid......

”We make a point not to be too, you know, Teutonically deep,“ says Margit Kleinman before bursting into a characteristically cheerful laugh in her bright Miracle Mile office. Kleinman is referring to the potential pitfalls of her duties as program coordinator at the Goethe Institut Inter Nationes Los Angeles, one......

The good news? Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones is eons better than Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace. The bad news? It’s still not very good. Set 10 years after the events in Episode I, Attack of the Clones picks up -- once the......

At the 1956 Cannes film festival, 35-year-old Satyajit Ray‘s debut film, the masterpiece Pather Panchali, won a Special Jury prize for Best Human Document and caused a sensation with its spare, lyrical portrayal of rural Indian life. In the 36 years that followed, until his death in 1992, the writer-director......

Director Justin Lin waits quietly in the lobby of the 1,270-seat Eccles Theater, the largest of the Sundance venues. It‘s approaching noon on the first Saturday of the Sundance Film Festival, and in about 15 minutes, the 30-year-old director’s second feature, Better Luck Tomorrow, one of the 17 entries in......

There’s nothing like ruin for inspiration. After Mexican moviemaking collapsed in the wholesale economic crisis of the last decade, the country’s cinema necessarily found itself dependent on those whose drive to make movies superseded the lack of means. Now, as new production companies emerge from the ashes, supplementing the state......

Given the mounting heap of large-scale movie disappointments -- the ill-used brainchildren of dead and dull men in A.I., the shells of dead fads in Planet of the Apes, the deadly reruns of Rush Hour 2‘s tepid action -- the release of Rat Race has been marked by an almost......

Filmmaker Kirby Dick was in the midst of making his bracingly intimate 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist when he was struck by how much he enjoyed incorporating the footage taken by Sheree Rose, Flanagan‘s partner in life and art. ”She has a real on-the-spot,......

As the story goes, a reporter once told Cary Grant, ”Everybody would like to be Cary Grant,“ to which the star famously replied, ”So would I.“ The rejoinder could have issued from any number of Grant’s smooth screen charmers, but it confirmed what the actor himself had made so easy......

“All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people,” says Alexander Bullock (Eugene Pallette) in Gregory La Cava’s 1936 screwball beauty My Man Godfrey. Bullock, the beleaguered patriarch of an addled Fifth Avenue family, is referring to a pack of millionaires at......