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GERALD PEARY
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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.
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.
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.
Dubious and exploitative
How did the Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska dupe the classy Juliette Binoche to participate in such a dubious, exploitative 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.
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.
Subtle, wise, and beautifully rendered
A Montreal elementary school is traumatized by a suicide in the classroom of a popular instructor.
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.
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.
Warmth in juvenile delinquency
This Grand Prix winner at Cannes 2011 is among the best films by Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Wacky humor mixed with melancholy
The Salt of Life deftly sprinkles wacky humor in with the melancholy, and Di Gregorio is a winning talent, both as the amusing star actor and as the film's co-writer and director.
Joshua Marston's thoughtful, subtle feature
American filmmaker Joshua Marston ( Maria Full of Grace ) traveled to Albania to write and direct this thoughtful, subtle feature about the victims of a blood feud, with an all-Albanian ensemble.
Charles Evans Jr.'s muckraking documentary
Much of the first half of Charles Evans Jr.'s muckraking documentary is annoyingly gimmicky, relying on unneeded graphics, animation, and imitation-Errol-Morris effects to tell the tale of a Philip Morris scientist, Victor DeNoble, who became a key government witness against his old employer.
Standouts
One film stands out among the Animated Shorts, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby's Wild Life .
The Oscar nominees for Live Action Shorts come down to five conventional narratives.
The Oscar nominees for Live Action Shorts come down to five conventional narratives.
Gender identity crisis
Lesbianism doesn't exist as a cogent category in 19th century Ireland, which could explain why Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close), a woman disguised for years as a man and employed as a Dublin waiter, has no personal understanding of who she is, her identity, or what she feels.
Magic realism and Chekhovian melancholy
This is probably the only film we'll encounter about the Merja culture of West Central Russia, a Finno-Ugric tribe in which even the most modernized people pay allegiance to ancient customs.
The real-life story of a young marine
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Hell and Back Again offers a potent documentary correlative to the narrative of The Hurt Locker .
A veritable, old-fashioned story
War Horse is corny, sentimental, overlong, but also spectacular at times, even stirring.
Xavier Durringer's recreation of the rise of Sarkozy
Xavier Durringer's dramatized recreation of the rise of France's Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency is generally fair-minded and ambiguous.
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