Scott Foundas

Photo by Abbot Genser By the time Francis Coppola reassembled the Corleones for the final installment of his Godfather trilogy, the outcome, while entirely respectable — underrated, even — seemed less than essential; somewhere along the way, some of the vital energy and relevance had drained out of the thing......

CHANTAL AKERMAN’S first masterpiece came early in her career. In the Brussels-born filmmaker’s second feature-length production, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a steely Delphine Seyrig plays a middle-aged widow who, over the course of nearly three and a half hours of screen time, does her shopping,......

Photo by Philippe Antonello In the new film directed by Mel Gibson, a good man is arrested on trumped-up charges, flagellated nearly to death, then made to carry a heavy wooden cross to the place of execution as his captors continue to pummel his frail, bloodied body. All the while,......

Photo by Erik Aavatsmark The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known. —Werner Heisenberg The principle, and the comedy, of the wry Norwegian import Kitchen Stories is indeed that of uncertainty. Written and directed by one Bent Hamer (whose name gives apt indication as......

Photo courtesy International Film Festival, Rotterdam If you’d happened to pick up a copy of local newspaper de Volkskrant during the recent International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 21 through February 1), you’d have noticed a curious absence of all things Hollywood. No matter that the 33rd IFFR happened to occur......

Photo by Jack Gould When Andrey Zvyagintsev’s dark study of fathers and father figures, The Return, received its North American premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, it seemed a breath of fresh, yet rigorously classical, air. Here, in the midst of a festival dominated by the cinema’s “old masters”......

Osama, the narrative feature debut of Afghan writer-director Siddiq Barmak, presents us with a whopper of an opening scene. A blinding barrage of women in burkas parades through the streets of Taliban-ruled Kabul, demonstrating on behalf of the right to work. “Come see the revolution,” proclaims a Dickens-worthy street urchin,......

Courtesy ZIV Pictures When the snow settled and the dust cleared and the closing bell rang on the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, a movie with no stars and barely a peep of advance hype — in short, the kind of movie that was once a Sundance staple — walked off......

Sweat beads trickle down bare backs and stomachs as bodies in ill-fitting swimwear stretch out on lawn furniture or concrete slabs across a cramped suburban landscape of tract houses, overmanicured gardens and undersize swimming pools. Yes, the late-summer sun blazes down hard on the characters of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s......