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I’m not really sure how genre fans will respond to “Amelia’s Children,” a Portuguese horror comedy about a suspicious wife, her clueless husband, and his creepy family. “Amelia’s Children” is funny, but the jokes are usually on its characters and their Freudian anxieties. It’s the quasi-gothic scenario that’s amusing here, and it’s as fraught as […]

Watching “Outlaw Posse,” you get the sense that writer-director Mario Van Peebles was asked to create a list of his favorite Westerns and then adapted that list into a screenplay. Throughout the film, there are any number of homages (and even the occasional outright lift) to such favorites of the genre as “The Wild Bunch,”

There’s a wonderful scene in Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater’s sprightly comic docudrama “Bernie,” about a murder in the town of Carthage, Texas, where a man in a diner explains that Texas is actually five states, then pithily summarizes each one. A version of that sensibility animates series “God Save Texas,” now on Max. Inspired by

A broken system validates itself in “Article 20,” a Chinese New Year legal thriller that also happens to be a domestic farce and, oh yeah, the latest movie directed by mainland hitmaker Zhang Yimou. Only a filmmaker as hawkish, conflicted, and masterful as Zhang (“Hero,” “Full River Red”) could have sutured together the malformed parts

Society often ignores those living on its fringes. Thankfully, there are cinematic works like Henry Nelson’s sensitive and perceptive feature debut “Asleep in My Palm” to delicately give them their due visibility. Patiently paced despite running at a compact 89 minutes and full of observant details inside the off-the-grid lives of a father and daughter,

Writer-director Noora Niasari’s debut feature, “Shayda,” is a personal meta-fiction based on her own childhood, marked by a fraught parental dynamic and endless uncertainty, but also fierce, unshakeable motherly love. “Shayda”’s titular character (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi) has escaped her abusive husband in Iran and fled to safety in Melbourne with her young daughter,

The shots are unreal. We fly behind and next to a bee in the jungle. We see lust on a young bonobo’s face. We watch lions and hyenas fight over a carcass in the middle of the night. National Geographic’s “Queens” delivers the nature documentary goods, and while watching it, I couldn’t stop wondering how

There is a terrific scene late in the powerful and old-fashioned epic “Cabrini,” on the eponymous Italian Catholic missionary nun who not only founded a peerless orphanage in New York at the turn of the 20th century (and gave her name to Hudson Heights’ serene Cabrini Boulevard in Manhattan), but also resolutely built a worldwide

“The Arc of Oblivion” is a documentary about a lot of things, including the futility of its own existence. Writer-director Ian Cheney, who also narrates, presents himself as, basically, a hoarder, mainly of hard drives containing photos, video and audio of various things in his life, some of them undeniably important and others that fall

“Do you need a reason to be unhappy,” asks Carol (Sarah Gadon) in Meredith Hama-Brown’s effective character study “Seagrass,” the story of how grief often begets other repressed emotions and possibly even tragedies. There’s something fascinating in that question in that it gets at how often depression can be like a snake eating its tail