Girls Can Play

By Elise Nakhnikian Sunshine Cleaning is so pleased with its own smug noncomformity and sometimes strenuous quirkiness, you’d think it woul...

By Elise Nakhnikian Why don’t we have more screwball comedies these days? It was during the Great Depression that they first flowered in Hol...

I bought this poster in a used bookstore in Corpus Christi in the early '80s. It may have been the best 5 dollars I...

By Elise Nakhnikian Crammed full of shock-and-awe music, Glock-toting SWAT teams, Road Warrior -lite car chases, and Darth Vader-looking ali...

By Elise Nakhnikian Based on a novel about the camorra, a criminal underground that apparently has a pretty effective stranglehold on Naples...

“My basic thought in life is that suppression is not that bad. It might help you live your life,” said Ari Folman at a Q...

By Elise Nakhnikian James Gray's latest and perhaps best feature, Two Lovers, is a clear-eyed, unromantic movie about romance. (His fir...

By Elise Nakhnikian French writer-director Laurent Cantet is one of the best filmmakers alive. Working in the tradition of Robe...

By Elise Nakhnikian At the end of The International , Interpol investigator Lou Salinger (Clive Owen) draws a bead on bad-guy Jonas Skarssen...

By Elise Nakhnikian From the needle-thin metal fingers that rip apart a rag doll and sew it back together over the opening credits to the fl...

By Elise Nakhnikian There's a limit to how many Americans will watch a four-hour movie shot mainly in Spanish, so th...

On the DVD commentary for Groundhog Day (1993), director Harold Ramis rather grumpily allows as how Bill Murray said it was...

By Elise Nakhnikian The story arc in Last Chance Harvey is as old as the setting sun, but it’s a pretty sunset, thanks to the grace and ski...

By Elise Nakhnikian Like AMC’s Mad Men, Revolutionary Road is set in Eisenhower-era Manhattan and the surrounding suburbs, where bright you...

By Elise Nakhnikian Darren Aronofsky’s latest movie, The Wrestler, appeals to the part of us that gawks at car wrecks. Only this o...

By Elise Nakhnikian “Are you really saying the President can do something illegal ?” David Frost (Michael Sheen) asks Richard Nixon (Frank L...

By Elise Nakhnikian 2008 was a good year for women i...

By Elise Nakhnikian When it comes to telling the story of a real person’s life, it takes a great fiction film to beat a good documentary. An...