12.27.2011

Any preconceptions one might have about cigar-chomping, gold-chain-bedecked, commerce-above-art Hollywood producers go right out the window early in your first conversation with Dede Gardner. Gardner,...

This was certainly a banner year for the premier film festival in America, the Sundance Film Festival, as over 40 films from the festival were sold. Sundance 2011 also premiered year-end favorites...

Loving French Film Does Not Make You A Bad Person In certain corners, admitting a fondness for French film is tantamount to saying you’ll only eat caviar for breakfast, or that you can’t leave the...

If, while watching writer/director Cameron Crowe’s latest project, you should happen to forget the name of what you’re seeing, the film will happily remind you, three times. Twice via a precocious...

It’s actually somewhat amazing that The Adventures of Tintin marks the first big screen treatment of the immensely popular comic book character in nearly 40 years (and, really, the first one of note...

Yugoslavia’s Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992: A Muslim artist puts down her brush, kisses her sister’s baby goodbye and goes out for a night on...

Meryl Streep isn’t exactly always a bridesmaid, never a bride. She has won two Academy Awards. But she’s also been nominated 16 times—more than anybody else, ever—and the last time she took home an...

Trine 2’s December release sets it in-between two epic open-world games, the single-player Skyrim and the massively multi-player Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s a timing coincidence, of course, but...

“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury intoned on Queen’s soundtrack to the 1986 movie Highlander. He had a point. After a while, life has got to become awfully repetitive for an immortal, a...

San Diego rockers The Donkeys—featuring the likes of Timothy DeNardo, Jessie Gulati, Anthony Lukens and Sam Sprague—stopped by our offices a few months ago while on tour with The Hold Steady. Before...

Don’t let Quiet Company and their suit-and-tie dress code give you the wrong impression about these Austin musicians, who were one of the most fun-loving bands we filmed and recorded at DeLuna. After...

David Ramirez is on a mission to play until he dies. Like most musicians, the Austin-based singer-songwriter got the itch to become a musician while “initially just wanting to be a writer.” His...

Nicole Atkins was among a group of 30-plus artists who played Paste’s Party in Austin during this past March’s SXSW. Watch the New Jersey-based singer-songwriter lead her backing band The Black Sea as...

Kathryn Calder is no stranger to critical acclaim. After beginning her career with Canadian indie hit The New Pornographers by filling in for Neko Case for live performance, she became a permanent...

Rich Aucoin continues to win over a new batch of unsuspecting individuals in whatever-sized venue he can get his hands on, be it the Plush Palace (a glorified den) or Hangout Music Fest (a major music...

Only a true visionary like Steven Spielberg could take a simple story about a horse and transform it into a grandiose work of cinema. Though not the acclaimed filmmaker’s greatest feat, War Horse is a...

Half of making a great documentary is finding a great subject, and Richard Press has absolutely done that in this affectionate treatment of the New York Times‘ irresistibly charming octogenarian...

A daring, perfectly cast comedy, this mannered story of a day in the lives of well-to-do Americans might only have been brought to us by a French-German-Spanish-Polish production. Shot in Paris and in...

This simple story of a lovestruck high schooler remains one of the more captivating documentaries of the year. Director Robert Greene’s unique perspective as Kati’s step brother is partly responsible,...

Radnor’s tale of seven young New Yorkers searching for love and self-acceptance probably won’t win much praise among elements of the film crowd who require their films to lay bare the darkness and...

It’s been a strained twelve years since everyone’s favorite felt misfits played the music, lit the lights or set foot on the big screen. Purchased by Disney in 2004, the Muppets have spent most of the...

Franklin J. Schaffner’s original Planet of the Apes is more highly regarded now than it was back in 1968. And even though the special effects and the...

Sometimes film’s power lies in its simple, straightforward ability to let people tell their stories. We Were Here, a documentary about the AIDS epidemic’s decimation of the San Francisco gay...

Romanian director Radu Muntean’s clinical study of an extramarital affair has far fewer scenes than the average film. But each of those scenes is packed with telling details and mounting turmoil....

Most every journalist, at one point in is his or her life, has envisioned a gig at the New York Times. And why not? Playing the righteous defender of free press against the villainy of government...

Movies adapting real-life stories for the big screen always have a tough choice in how accurately they depict events. Hollywood usually chooses to heighten things and, although we accept that they’re...

Since his breakthrough feature, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, every one of Errol Morris’ features has essentially been about searching for the truth. It’s been a wide-ranging exploration, one that’s been...

It would be easy to label Kinyarwanda as Crash meets Hotel Rwanda. Like Crash, it tells six stories of seemingly unrelated characters whose lives eventually intertwine. Like Hotel Rwanda, it centers...

At first, the plot of Bellflower seems seems to follow a familiar path: Boy is romantically frustrated, meets cute girl, goes on a quirky date and falls in love; girl breaks boy’s heart, and buddy...

It’s hard enough being a teenager in Iran these days, especially if you’re fascinated by Western culture, rock ’n’ roll, techno, designer drugs, sex, alcohol, and movies like Milk. If you also happen...

3-D skeptics might have to rethink their stance after witnessing Werner Herzog’s stunning tour of the oldest cave drawings ever found. The director ventured into a cave that had been sealed for...

The synopsis of Another Earth sounds misleadingly sci-fi heavy: Scientists suddenly discover a second Earth whose unusual orbit has hidden it from view behind the sun all this time, and soon learn...

It’s always kind of sad to hear adults tell teenagers to enjoy high school because it’s the best time of one’s life. If that’s the case, math nerds, band geeks and, well, basically anyone who isn’t a...

Into the Abyss, the latest work from acclaimed documentarian Werner Herzog, lives up to its weighty title. The captivating film takes us into the endless depths of the human soul as it explores life,...

The most surprising thing about Rango is how much Johnny Depp disappears into the character of a nameless pet chameleon who creates his identity when his terrarium falls out of the back of a car into...

2011 has been quite the year for alien movies. From the B-grade Battle of Los Angeles, to the Spielbergian Super 8, to the underwhelming Cowboys and Aliens, the invasion stories keep on coming. Attack...

Art reclaiming and responding to tragedy is the central theme of Lech Majewski’s unearthly feature The Mill and the Cross, one that seems particularly appropriate right after the 10th anniversary of...

During the early 1970s, there was a group in Houston that was acclaimed by some as the greatest funk band in the world. Amazingly enough, it was made up of high-school students, the Kashmere High...

Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist opens—in a nod, perhaps, to the OSS 117 French spy spoofs he made with actor Jean Dujardin—on a silent action movie in progress. As the hero escapes his torturers on...

Late-era Woody has been an interesting phenomenon to watch, as his occasional hits (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and stupefying misses (Scoop) come hard on each other’s heels. This year’s offering in his...

It’s safe to say you haven’t encountered a film character like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s title character in Spencer Susser’s fantastic Hesher. He loves pornography, heavy metal, trespassing, arson, and...

The largest dead space on earth is the Atacama desert in Chile, a place so desolate that not even insects or retiles live in the zero-humidity environment. Acclaimed Chilean documentarian Patricio...

Steeped in the monochrome color palette and noir soundtrack of 1970s espionage cinema, Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carré’s classic...

While Takashi Miike’s name here in the United States will forever by synonymous with his ultra-violent pictures like Ichi the Killer and Audition, at this point he’s worked in pretty much every genre...

Many critics, including our own, were unimpressed with Alexander Payne’s latest. But we found it a compelling, compassionate, wry story of grief, betrayal and family. George Clooney has seldom been...

Project Nim is the fascinating and exquisitely executed new documentary by the makers of Man on Wire, Paste’s documentary of the decade. In Man on Wire, director James Marsh recounted French tightrope...

While Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s previous films, Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), took linear (albeit drifting and dreamlike) forms,...

Oliver wanted to continue the conversation. So he did, well after Hal had died. Hal came out of the closet at age 75 when his wife of 44 years was taken by cancer. Oliver, Hal’s son, accepted the...

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s thrill ride, Drive, is designed to flood its viewers with a surge of emotions—a daring rip current, pulsating in ears and pounding in chests. Ryan Gosling’s...

Divorce in the big city is never pretty, especially when that city is Tehran in director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. Simin (Leila Hatami) desperately wants to leave Iran, even if it means divorce....

Steve James is justly deified for Hoop Dreams, which no less an authority than Roger Ebert declared the greatest documentary of all time. The Academy famously snubbed it, denying it even a nomination...

Take Shelter, the new film by Jeff Nichols, opens with an ominous dream. Though the exact cause of the threat is veiled, its manifestations are not—the wind blows, a massive storm front approaches and...

Terrence Malick’s sixth film in 42 years is, without a doubt, the most ambitious film that will come out this year. In two-and-a-half hours, the writer/director tackles every big question about God...