Scott Foundas

In her broad outlines, the character of Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is also the father......

Click here for AFI Fest, A to W. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Foreign Language Film award has been no stranger to controversy in the last few years, from its snubbing of Italy’s Gomorrah and Romania’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days to the elaborate rule......

Click here for AFI Fest, A to W. They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but what about a free film festival? “We were looking to make a bold move,” says AFI Fest artistic director Rose Kuo. She wasn’t kidding: The American Film Institute’s decision to transform......

Click here for AFI Fest, A to W. If you’ve been reading the film pages of L.A. Weekly regularly this year, this won’t be the first time you’ve heard about director Maren Ade’s Everyone Else. Reporting from the Berlin Film Festival, where Ade’s sophomore feature — about a young German......

Click here for AFI Fest, A to W. “A Pedro Costa musical — now, what would that be like?” I asked in these pages two years ago when the Portuguese filmmaker, appearing at REDCAT for the first-ever Los Angeles retrospective of his work, unveiled a 12-minute preview of his in-progress......

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the title character of the pitch-black Chilean comedy The Maid, it’s closer to infernal torment. For more than 20 years, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) has worked as the hired help for an upper-class Santiago family, the Valdezes, whom she has served with the......

Tinkering with a sacred cultural totem can be riskier business than nuclear fission. Just ask Peter Sellars, the visionary stage director whose critically savaged recent Public Theater production of Othello — with its postracial casting, repurposed characters and a mumbling Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago — was considerably more compelling......

The title is a double entendre in An Education, the film version of British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about the crash course she received in the “university of life” while studying for her A-levels in early-1960s suburban London. So, too, is Danish director Lone Scherfig’s movie something of a deceptively......

Can there be cinema without film — or video? The answer is a resounding yes if you ask legendary avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, whose weeklong Los Angeles residency includes the belated local premiere of Jacobs’ “Nervous Magic Lantern” performance, an evening of strange and wondrous moving images conjured live by......

“After the cinema, nothing surprises you. Everything is possible.” So says the lovesick obsessive Georges Palet in a scene from Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass (Les herbes folles), which premiered this past May at the Cannes Film Festival, exactly 50 years after Resnais’ debut, Hiroshima Mon Amour, was hailed by Eric......