Scott Foundas

In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s......

The title of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town refers to the bleak, working-class neighborhood that lies in the shadow of London’s St. Pancras train station, where, in the fall of 2007, the Eurostar train company launched a new high-speed rail line to Paris. In an unconventional marketing move, Eurostar commissioned Meadows......

In the category of sudden and unexpected changes of scenery, the decision of filmmaking brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne to set their latest film, Lorna’s Silence, in the Belgian city of Liège, may be the biggest surprise since Woody Allen traded the Upper West Side for Europe. Beginning with their......

After devoting the first two films he directed, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandleresque movie star diagnosed with a rare......

The brief but striking filmography of Lucrecia Martel, whose three feature films are the subject of a weekend-long UCLA retrospective, has established the 42-year-old as one of the brightest lights of the generation of Argentine filmmakers who grew up during the decades of political and economic corruption and has taken......

Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering......

Was James Mason born with that voice? Were his first words spoken in that velvety, Yorkshire-accented purr; that voice of private amusement and secret schemes; a voice that might belong to a dirty-minded aristocrat or an aristocratically minded scoundrel? “I’m not what is called a civilized man,” says Mason as......

“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank robber–cum–folk hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a state of......

When director Jean-Jacques Beineix packed his bags, fired his agent and left Hollywood for his native Paris, he vowed never to return. “Which was not true, because I’m back!” he says with an impish grin on a recent afternoon in Santa Monica. The year of departure was 2004, and Beineix......

In its basic outline, this first feature from Arab-American writer-director Cherien Dabis sounds like a collection of hoary coming-to-America clichés: Upon arriving in suburban Illinois, Palestinian single mom Muna (the excellent Nisreen Faour) and her 16-year-old son Fadi (Melka Muallem) move in with Muna’s sister and soon encounter the face......