One day we’ll wake up and the sky will be green, the grass will be blue and dogs will walk humans on leashes as gleeful gnomes burble in frothy rivers of chocolate. If all that seems like a reasonable proposition, then maybe you’re ready ...

Lovingly crafted by Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), modern cinema’s DIY auteur, “L’Ecume des Jours” is a celebration of the nicely weird. Gondry has always loved and nurtured society’s attractive misfits, wonderful people who happen to be allergic to office cubicles ...

Robert Redford’s career as a director continues its “good liberal” phase, and he’s three for three now in films that feature a great cast, political relevance and a distinct inability to take off and soar. After Afghan War intrigue in “Lions for Lambs” and ...

Director: Yoichi Higashi Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) “E no Naka no Boku no Mura (Village of Dreams)” is now available in Japan as an English-subbed DVD. Based on the memoirs of identical-twin painters, this 1996 film depicts their early postwar childhoods with realism, ...

Director: Andrew Dominik Language: English Much like “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” director Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly” stars Brad Pitt and resembles a genre film (gangsters) while not delivering the thrills. Pitt plays a mob enforcer who has ...

Director: Hector Babenco Language: English, French, Portuguese, German (subtitled in Japanese) William Hurt plays homosexual convict Luis Molina, languishing in a South American prison, where he recounts romantic movie scenes to cell mate Valentin (Raul Julia), a leftist activist who begins to find consolation ...

In a drab building in central Scotland, one afternoon in the armpit of winter, an actor who looks a lot like nice-guy James McAvoy is persuading a room full of blokes to — I’m paraphrasing here — Xerox their cocks. “Come on!” he roars, ...

Actors see how directors do their job — and not a few imagine they can do it better. But the number of Japanese actors who move successfully into the director’s chair is small.

Even great directors can make turkeys, sometimes without much obvious change in their style or obsessions.

It’s hard to associate the uber-groomed, aquiline-profiled Jeremy Irons (“Damage,” “Die Hard: With a Vengeance”) with garbage. But in the documentary “Trashed,” which focuses on the problem of global waste, Irons wallows in it.

The 1970s are fondly remembered now as an insanely creative and risk-taking era for American cinema, and there’s one infamous film that is generally blamed for bringing it all to a crashing halt: “Heaven’s Gate.” Director Michael Cimino had cleaned up at the Oscars ...

Most zombie movies look at the undead and decide they’re a problem best solved with a bullet to the head. But director Jonathan Levine gives us “Warm Bodies,” which suggests that when World War Z comes, all you’ll need is love. R. (Nicholas Hoult) ...