Apartment, The

Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…

Edward Burns’s young career as a director has gone from promising (The Brothers McMullin) to flabby (She’s the One) to utterly self-indulgent and silly in his latest and, I hope, last film, No Looking Back. The big idea here is to take that over-familiar and by now thoroughly boring conceit of the 1950s (most recently…

The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman is a likeable little slacker film set in (or near) Santa Fe, but a little too top-heavy with talk — in particular philosophical talk — as many indy first films by would-be intellectuals tend to be. We mustn’t be too hard on them. And the idea is a…

You may enjoy it, but you will hate yourself afterwards.

The Dreamlife of Angels (in French La Vie Revée des Anges) by Érick Zonca is by far the best picture I have seen this year and one of the best I have ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I came staggering out of a movie, as I did out of this one, literally…

A film about monks whose own stillness and spaciousness reflects the immensities they spend their lives contemplating