Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” had the misfortune of having opened in local cinemas just before March 11, 2011. After the trauma of a real-life tsunami hitting Japan, few were in the mood to see a Hollywood special-effects version of the same. It’s been over two ...

Imagine Jean-Luc Godard four decades ago, when he was still in the thrall of his leading actresses, like a 10-year-old boy in love with his teacher. Then imagine him as a Korean director, and what you get is Hong Sang Soo and his latest ...

Baz Luhrmann does justice to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most intriguing creation: Jay Gatsby, the man referred to in the book title as “The Great.” As far as adaptations go, Luhrmann’s version beats the 1974 version that starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow hands down. ...

Harmony Korine started his career back in 1995 by writing the screenplay for youths-behaving-badly movie “Kids,” and some two decades later he’s still playing the same card. “Spring Breakers” is set amid the annual college-student migration to Florida during spring vacation, where drunken public ...

Director: Yasujiro Ozu Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Released last week is a new digitally remastered version of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic 1953 family drama “Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story),” voted the best film ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound magazine directors’ poll. Issued ...

Director: Various Language: English The much-awaited TV series (and incidentally Barack Obama’s favorite) “Homeland” is finally available for sale/rental in Japan. Starring Claire Danes as driven CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis as her nemesis Nicholas Brody, “Homeland” packs in dirty dealings in ...

Director: Bruce Robinson Language: English Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Rum Diary” was based on his time as a hack journalist in Puerto Rico in 1960, and it mixes his hard-drinking, hard-living struggle with a clear-eyed look at the rapacious development of the island by ...

Some people avoid violent films, while others watch little else. Professional movie reviewers, who may see hundreds of films annually, cannot afford to be so picky. If you are covering the Cannes Film Festival competition, as I did one year for the Screen International ...

Woody Allen rarely laughs, least of all at his own jokes. But in his latest, “To Rome With Love,” in which he acts as well as directs, he breaks down from time to time to suppress a giggle and the movie gets an almost ...

In a recent interview, Steven Soderbergh complained that critics are “too easily fooled.” “Their reading of filmmaking is too superficial,” he added. While I am as much a fan of deep insight as the next guy, I am also perfectly happy to be fooled. ...

This latest bit of Hollywood “propatainment,” “Olympus Has Fallen,” is basically “Die Hard” in the White House, with Gerard Butler’s disgraced former Secret Service agent trying to save the president (Aaron Eckhart) from a team of crack North Korean commandos who plan to pry ...

Adocumentary that will chill you to the bone, “Tous Cobayes?” by French filmmaker Jean-Paul Jaud addresses the enormous risks posed by GMO food, much of which is manufactured and distributed by the kingpin of the franken-food industry: Monsanto. In the last decade, GMO has ...