By Justin Marble
March 2–4, “Children of Invention” at the Brattle: Young filmmaker Tze Chun’s first feature was shot on location in Boston and focuses on a single mother with two small children struggling to make ends meet. When she doesn’t return home one night from her con-artist-esque job, it falls to the older [...]

“Avatar” is beautiful and otherworldly, but the film is so grounded in down-to-earth concepts that it restricts the viewer’s imagination rather than broadening it. An infinitely better and more complex recent space opera, “Mass Effect 2,” comes in the form of a video game. Is it art? Yes.
By Justin Marble
Over the centuries the [...]

It’s easy, and popular, to write director Wes Anderson off as a hipster who offers nothing beyond quirk and the occasional funny line. But his films are really American versions of the French New Wave.
by Justin Marble
“He redeemed himself.”
“Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind [...]

Filled with great insights, musical and other, Phil Grabsky’s wonderful documentary on Beethoven depicts “a man of huge intellect and huge heart.”
In Search of Beethoven, a documentary by Phil Grabsky (UK, 2009, 139 min).
At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Wednesday Jan. 13 at 3:05 pm, Thursday January 14 at 5:10 pm., [...]

By Helen Epstein
“Broken Embraces” at Kendall Square and Embassy Cinemas
1: Pedro Almodovar, one of the most interesting directorial sensibilities of our time, whose films probe our infinite varieties of experience in love and work
2: Penelope Cruz, an original who also incarnates the best of the many movie stars — American and European — who [...]

By Justin Marble
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By Justin Marble
“The Beaches of Agnes” At the Coolidge Corner Cinema
If a motif exists in Agnes Varda’s sprawling new documentary, “The Beaches of Agnes,” it may just be the art of walking backwards. The 81-year-old director, famous among the art house crowd for French New Wave films like “Cleo from 5 to 7,” has a [...]

By Justin Marble
October 1 through 3: Classic Cinema at Museum of Fine Arts: This weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts is showing two classic pieces of cinema. First up is Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” his reworking of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in feudal Japan. Then it’s Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” a 1969 Western that [...]

Robert Siegel has an undeniable talent for capturing the desperation and despair of his downtrodden character, but the director never tells us why he is plumbing the lower depths of America’s mania for sports.
Big Fan, directed by Robert Siegel, showing at Kendall Square Cinema.
Reviewed by Justin Marble
Like Robert Siegel’s first script, “The Wrestler,” his [...]

by Justin Marble
Beeswax, directed by Andrew Bujalski, showing at Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Boston native Andrew Bujalski’s third feature film, “Beeswax,” does not reel off the trials and tribulations of superheroes, pirates, serial killers, or giant transforming robots. There’s no killer shark, no Godzilla, no guns, and no aliens. Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts do not star [...]