A long-form sitcom overly pleased with its own progressiveness, The Kids Are All Right charts the difficulties that arise when the kids of a lesbian couple seek out their sperm-donor father. Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a gay Oscar and Felix, and after almost two decades, their marriage has lost a spark…

Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani know their giallos, but Amer is little more than affected homage, a work that duplicates the style and hothouse psychosexual passions of its ‘70s predecessors with such self-consciousness that little unsettling emotion emerges. There’s no conventional story per se, as Cattet and Forzani’s tale offers up a triptych of…

Make-Out with Violence plays like a faux-Wes Anderson remake of The Virgin Suicides, if Kirsten Dunst’s ethereal beauty had turned into a zombie – or, perhaps more accurately, the film feels like the work of a Donnie Darko fan intent on crafting his very own Deadly Friend. Either way, those descriptions are infinitely more flattering…

Thanks to a vicious beating outside a bar by five men, Mark Hogencamp suffered such brain damage that he lost part of his memory and, temporarily, all his motor skills. As part of his rehabilitation from this devastating incident, Hogencamp took up art and began creating Marwencol, a 1/6th-scale model WWII Belgian town in his…

Despite a shift from the squared circle to the ballet stage, Black Swan functions as a direct companion piece to The Wrestler, delivering as it does another portrait by director Darren Aronofsky of self-mutilation carried out in service of a personal/professional dream, and one told via corresponding sequences, final image and Dardennes-inspired cinematography. Rather than…

The legend of Rapunzel gets a snarky, modernized CG update with Tangled, Disney’s 50th animated feature, in which the flaxen-haired princess (Mandy Moore) escapes captivity with the help of dashing rapscallion thief Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi). Stolen as an infant from her royal parents by Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), Rapunzel has been tricked by this…

“Is God all-powerful or good?” a man asks a priest midway through Lourdes, though Jessica Hausner’s stunning film offers up two more alternatives – is He neither or, like man himself, is he fickle and cruel? Such questions permeate this aesthetically and tonally controlled knockout, which focuses on Christine (Sylvie Testud), a young woman paralyzed…

The past is a villainous ghost haunting the living in October Country, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s intensely raw, empathetic non-fiction portrait of the Mosher clan, whose lives in rural upstate Mohawk Valley, New York have been, and continue to be, irretrievably affected by familial history. For the Moshers, what’s come before lives on today:…

An evocative, wide-ranging portrait of a community told via narrative-free montage, 45365 affords a window onto the world of directors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’ Sidney, Ohio hometown, whose zip code provides its title. Uninterested in conventional storytelling, this stunning debut documentary instead conveys truths about everyday routines, relationships, hardships, customs and crisis via…