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Updated: 56 min 50 sec ago
Unspoken
Film Reviews: Talented Belgian writer-director Fien Troch engages in a difficult dramatic game with her second film, "Unspoken," and falls short of the mark. Intensely involved with the emotionally alienated and disoriented parents of a teenage girl who went missing four years earlier, Troch's work is so bundled in elliptical moments and scenes without context that it will test -- and break -- most viewers' patience.
The Home of Dark Butterflies (Tummien Perhosten Koti)
Film Reviews: Something feels lost in the bigscreen adaptation of Leena Lander's widely translated (albeit not into English) 1991 novel, "The Home of Dark Butterflies." Tale of troubled youth at an island-set reformatory is polished and intriguing, but whatever glue originally held the plot and characters together dissolves here, leaving the whole feeling variably underdeveloped, undermotivated or just unmoving.
Kanchivaram
Film Reviews: Hitting a sweet spot somewhere between Bollywood and earnest independent fare, South Indian writer-helmer Priyadarshan's poignant historical drama "Kanchivaram" offers the universal resonance of a tragic fairy tale. Mostly set in the two decades prior to Indian independence, plus a powerful 1948 coda, this compelling Tamil-language yarn about exploited silk weavers also provides a primer on the rigid social structures and traditions of the times and a fascinating analysis of the failure of communist ideology.
More Than a Game
Film Reviews: With superstar LeBron James as its point man and a big heart at its center, "More Than a Game" is about the boyz from the 'hood who made up the St. Vincent-St. Mary High School basketball team of Akron, Ohio, which launched James into the NBA and is a kind of classic of American sports history.
Two-Legged Horse
Film Reviews: The line between dramatizing physical abuse and causing genuine physical harm to actors looks to have been crossed in Samira Makhmalbaf's repellent "Two-Legged Horse." Written by Makhmalbaf's filmmaker father, Mohsen, as a blunt fable on the potential for humans to treat others like animals -- specifically, how a one-legged boy turns an older boy into a beast of burden -- the resulting film is designed to provoke outrage.
Tonight
Film Reviews: Idiosyncratic helmer Werner Schroeter's "Tonight" is about as impenetrable as a film can get while still retaining a semblance of narrative construction. It's easy to follow the protag attempting to secure passage out of a city about to be invaded, but the proliferation of baroque characters, bizarre asides and a scene bordering on kiddie porn turns Schroeter's normally intriguing, operatic visions into a head-scratching, tedious exercise.
