Full of false leads and meandering shifts of focus, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's story of a missing child initially appears to be a straight-up thriller. Here is a young couple with their child Little Bo, being filmed in the park by Bo's overbearing grandmother. Here they are at home, miserable…

There is a disconcertingly ambivalent tone to Sicilian Letters, a very handsomely presented game of cop cats and mafioso mice flying the RAI quality-drama banner. On the one hand, there is the mob movie's requisite number of murders, betrayals, overnight widows and irredeemably corrupt public officials…

It was Adolf Hitler's name that became synonymous with evil, but his Italian counterpart — Benito Mussolini, named for a Mexican revolutionary leader by his staunchly Socialist father — was arguably the more enduring brand. Any populist politician today owes a good deal to the Mussolini playbook, brought…

There are two kinds of pornography, according to movie mythology. One kind is sordid, exploitative, and supported by shady money and even shadier characters. Then there is the cuddly, family kind, as fluffy and innocently randy as a burrow full of bunnies, that flourished on video before the horrible…

There is a sense-memory of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven when Harvest begins; we are in the midst of a wheatfield, the ripe ears above us, the blue sky glimpsed between the stalks. Caleb Landry Jones appears, caressing a butterfly. Then he bites off a piece of mossy wood, chews experimentally and spits…

Along with his fondness for red cars, absurd sexual encounters and earthy Spanish matriarchs, Pedro Almodóvar has a much more melancholy special subject that keeps cropping up in his otherwise dynamic films: the fact of death. Long before making The Room Next Door, his first English-language feature, he…

As the title might suggest, Walter Salles' first dramatic feature in 12 years is ultimately a celebration of Brazil — not only of the resilience of its liberalism under tyrannical rulers, but of its sunlight, its carnival spirit and the delicious blue of the sea that rolls onto Rio de Janeiro's broad…

At various junctures in the sweeping slice of political Americana that is The Order, a man will produce a small red-covered paperback called The Turner Diaries, which at first glance, is a boys’ own adventure about a man who sets out to live in the mountains like Daniel Boone. It is, in fact, a book aimed…

There is the faint sound of a callback to Francois Truffaut in Venice Film Festival competition title And Their Children After Them (Leurs Enfants Après Eux), a sunlit story of three teenagers set in a moribund French steel town in the 1990s. Check, for example, those fundamental French subjects: first…

Everything is about to rot in the state of Denmark. The sea is rising, water is starting to bubble out of the ground and a decision has been made: the entire country is going to be dismantled and turned into a wind farm, its six million inhabitants sent to whichever country will accept…

Yoshii (Masaki Suda) sells stuff. Any stuff, as long as it's piled high — in a digital sense — and selling cheap, but not nearly as cheap as what he paid for it. The first thing we see him buy is a pile of "miracle therapy machines" at a knockdown price casually extorted from the people who claim to make…

No director working today has a greater command of the medium than the Chilean maestro Pablo Larraín, whose previous achievements in the generally unloved biopic genre — Jackie and Spencer — are now joined by his sweeping reimagining of the last days of Maria Callas. Every element in Maria speaks of that…