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GERALD PEARY

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Review: Step Up to the Plate

Paul Lacoste's French documentary
It's a corny American title for Paul Lacoste's French documentary, Entre les Bras , about the father-and-son chefs, Michel and Sébastien Bras, behind a Michelin three-star restaurant in the L'Aubrac region of France.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 18, 2012

Review: Detropia

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady 's documentary
Detropia is word play for "dystopia," and that's the overview here of the crumbling, crime-ridden, largely unemployed phantom of a Michigan city, which has lost half its population since 1955.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 11, 2012

Review: Little White Lies

Guillaume Canet's follow-up to Tell No One
Filmmaker Guillaume Canet's follow-up to his very popular noir Tell No One is an old-fashioned, enjoyable, The Big Chill -style romp by the seaside.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 11, 2012

Review: Samsara

Random images
There's no harm in coming in from the sun and contemplating the 99 minutes of Samsara 's random images from 25 countries around the world.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 04, 2012

Review: The Inbetweeners

Based on the popular British telly series
Based on a popular British telly series and directed by Ben Palmer, The Inbetweeners sends its four randy, clumsy, post-high-school twits on a journey to the hedonistic vacation resort of Malia on the Mediterranean island of Crete.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 04, 2012

Review: Compliance

Behind the Milgram experiments
Filmmaker Craig Zobel ( Great World of Sound ) takes an infamous 2004 rape case — in which a caller claiming to be a cop talked a McDonald's manager and later her fiance into assaulting a teenage worker — and uses this as a basis of a thoroughly disturbing, sometimes mean-spirited indie narrative film.

By: GERALD PEARY | August 31, 2012

Review: The Imposter

Bart Layton's documentary
The premise of Bart Layton's documentary is sublimely preposterous.

By: GERALD PEARY | August 29, 2012

Review: A Cat In Paris

Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's French cartoon
Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's nicely hand-drawn and colored French cartoon was a 2012 Academy Award nomination for best animated film.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 26, 2012

Review: Whore's Glory

Painted ladies
Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger takes his camera into three pitiable spots where there is open prostitution, and where painted ladies, desperate for a living wage, service the most craven clientele.

By: GERALD PEARY | June 12, 2012

Review: Nobody Else But You

Nothing special
A dried-up French crime novelist (Jean-Paul Rouve) finds sudden inspiration for a new mystery in the true-life story of a TV weathergirl (Sophie Quinton).

By: GERALD PEARY | June 05, 2012

Review: Elena

Domestic servitude
Andrei Zvyagintsev's film, a Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2011, becomes more than a domestic melodrama: a grim, effective allegory of the daily whirl in Putinland.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 30, 2012

Review: I Wish

The estrangement of two brothers
Two elementary school brothers living in southern Japan are forced to live in different cities due to the estrangement of their parents.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 22, 2012

Review: Surviving Progress

How mankind has gone wrong
Despite prestigious talking heads like Margaret Atwood, Jane Goodall, and Stephen Hawking, there is nothing new here beyond what every conscientious liberal already knows is wrong with the world.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 15, 2012

Review: Headhunters

Slick entertainment
Roger (Aksel Hennie) is an Oslo yuppie with a gorgeous, blonde wife, a top-drawer job as a corporate headhunter, and a lucrative side employment stealing fancy paintings.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 08, 2012

Review: Elles

Dubious and exploitative
How did the Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska dupe the classy Juliette Binoche to participate in such a dubious, exploitative film?

By: GERALD PEARY | May 08, 2012

Review: This Is Not A Film

Artistic provocation
It can't be a film, because the acclaimed director Jafar Panahi ( The Circle , etc.) has been ordered not to make any by the Iranian theocrats who have also sentenced the dissident filmmaker to an upcoming jail sentence.

By: GERALD PEARY | May 01, 2012

Review: Turn Me On, Dammit

High school alienation
In the nowhere Norwegian mountain town of Skoddeheimen, Alma, 15, is bored with her surroundings, alienated from her mom, and so horny that she pays for a telephone sex service.

By: GERALD PEARY | April 24, 2012

Review: Monsieur Lazhar

Subtle, wise, and beautifully rendered
A Montreal elementary school is traumatized by a suicide in the classroom of a popular instructor.

By: GERALD PEARY | April 18, 2012

Review: Hipsters

Nice try, Russian musical
The first Russian musical in half a century, Valery Todorovsky's Hipsters gets rubles for trying, but what's on screen is thin and obvious, the characters one-dimensional, the musical numbers and satire vapid.

By: GERALD PEARY | April 10, 2012

Review: The Dish & the Spoon

Chance indie encounters
Dumped by her husband, an enraged young woman, Rose (Greta Gerwig), drives around coastal towns in the Delaware winter swearing revenge against her straying spouse and an ill fate for the gal who lured him away.

By: GERALD PEARY | April 10, 2012

Review: The Kid with a Bike

Warmth in juvenile delinquency
This Grand Prix winner at Cannes 2011 is among the best films by Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

By: GERALD PEARY | April 03, 2012

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