The “jukebox musical” has been around on the big screen for a while now — ranging from 1978′s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to 2008′s “Mamma Mia!” — and they all face the same existential problem: how to shoehorn a fistful of well-known ...

I met Iranian director Jafar Panahi back in 1996, shortly before his debut feature film “The White Balloon” picked up the Gold Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival — one of many prizes that film garnered. My interview has been lost to the ...

Director: Olivier Marchal Running time: 102 minute Language: French (subtitled in Japanese) This film-noir gangland saga by actor-turned-director Olivier Marchal looks at real-life French gangster Edmond “Momon” Vidal, whose Lyon-based gang pulled off a string of daring heists in the 1970s. The film finds ...

Sacha Baron Cohen is back, and after skewering white-boy hip-hop poseurs (Ali G), unwittingly offensive “foreigners” (Borat) and ridiculously camp gay fashionistas (Bruno), his newest target is a timely one: pompous, pampered, preening Middle Eastern tyrants. If anything, his new film “The Dictator” is ...

You say you want a revolution? Well, there are two ways to go about it, with the flowers or the guns, and this week cinema offers us a case study in extremes. On the one hand is “Marley,” a well-researched documentary exploring the life ...

My high school English teacher once assigned an essay on Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She was pushing the idea that the novel was one big Jesus allegory, with its hero McMurphy dying for the salvation of the other patients, but ...

I saw the best actors of my generation destroyed by B-movie superhero madness, slumming crummy costumed, dragging themselves through the digital streets of universe Marvel, looking for a super-size paycheck, empty-headed hipsters burning for the ancient mythic connection to the star-system dynamo in the ...

This is going to sound crazy, but I have this memory … It’s faded, like so many from the acid-house era, but I can clearly see Arnold Schwarzenegger playing this blue-collar kinda guy who comes home one day and finds his loving and beautiful ...

Just last week this column trotted out the movie industry’s defense — post-Colorado “Batman” shootings — that films don’t influence actual behavior. Now along comes “7 Días en La Habana (7 Days in Havana),” a raucous compendium film that features scene after simmering scene ...

Jean-Jacques Beineix, the director of “Diva” and “Betty Blue,” once told me that “when fiction and reality collide, you have a problem.” Beineix was talking about his 1992 film “IP5,” in which beloved French actor Yves Montand dies from a heart attack in the ...