In “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning gut-punch about pop icon Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent in biographical docs “Senna” and “Diego Maradona” too), the British director employs an emotional rhythm by which his subject’s tragic end seems foredestined right from the start. Perhaps “2073,” his new hybrid docufiction is a natural expansion of that […]

There’s an enormous amount to describe, but very little to actually say about Kevin Costner’s bedraggled “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2,” the second of a planned four installments in his sprawling, multistranded western, that plays, after “Chapter 1″‘s muted reception in Cannes, out of competition on the final day of Venice. Doubling down […]

Porn king Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s bubbly, shallow “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct multimedia adult-entertainment enterprise, a really sweet guy.  Moreover, the film insists, his vision for pornography was similarly wholesome: a means to liberate prudish late-20th century Italian society by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it […]

Though doubtless a crucial aspect of many of the most dramatic occurrences in human history, letter-writing is not the most cinematic of activities. And so it unfortunately proves once again in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s “Sicilian Letters,” a heavily fictionalized riff on a real-life mafia tale, which sets up a battle of wits between […]

With head bowed, over clasped hands, Italian director Maura Delpero’s quietly breathtaking “Vermiglio” unfolds from tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow, into a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps. Far away, the Second World War is ending — an earthshaking event felt […]

Walter Salles’ deeply poignant “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian director’s return to his homeland and to the filmmaking form that yielded his Oscar-nominated “Central Station,” begins where maybe every movie set in Rio de Janeiro should: at the beach. A stray dog disturbs a game of volleyball. Girls dab Coca-cola onto their skin as tanning […]

Erratic, prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Pulse,” “Cure”) has, at his best, a peculiar genius for finding strangeness — often malevolence — gathering like dust in the shadowy corners of banal modern life. With “Cloud,” which has just been announced as Japan’s International Oscar submission, the filmmaker gives that impulse a compellingly enigmatic update, turning […]

1918 in Italy was, a title reminds us, “the year of victory.” Yet the first images in Gianni Amelio’s WWI-set “Battleground” are anything but triumphal: a pile of bloodied soldiers’ bodies glinting wetly in the moonlight; a scavenger pilfering the wallets of the dead; a blanket thrown over a survivor whose gibbering shellshock makes him […]