Frame by Frame combines vérité, interviews and never-before-seen archival footage to showcase four Afghan photojournalists documenting their war-torn country. The documentary opens with photojournalist Massoud Hossaini rushing to cover another suicide bombing and segues into historical television and radio reports over a montage of compelling historical photographs. This sets the scene of the country’s complex […]

There is a fascinating story within the documentary Rock in the Red Zone, about musicians and artists under constant rocket attacks in a small town in Israel, but it gets a bit lost. American director Laura Bialis travels to the border town of Sderot, the target for homemade rockets called Quassams lobbed over from Gaza […]

Set amid the stark beauty of the Jordanian Desert, director Naji Abu Nowar’s noteworthy debut film is a coming-of-age story steeped in Bedouin culture and the events of 1916. World War I is raging, and the Ottoman Empire is in a state of upheaval. Arab factions wage a revolution, and Great Britain defends its rights […]

While you may not know his name, Don McCullin’s iconic photographs will be familiar to many. McCullin, produced and directed by siblings Jacqui Morris and David Morris, documents the career of the internationally known, and notoriously private, British photojournalist. With unprecedented access, Jacqui, his former camera assistant, captures Don reflecting on a career that spans […]

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: to come to terms with the past, as postwar Germany has consistently done regarding the Third Reich. True, right? Since the Nuremberg Trials, the country has cultivated an image of a contrite nation that accepted with alacrity its responsibility for genocide and that has conscientiously required historical education so future generations would learn from […]

Rock the Kasbah is an intermittently funny, frequently tedious slog burdened with a mediocre script that leaves some heavy lifting to a stellar cast and a first-rate director. Without Barry Levinson at the helm and Bill Murray at its center, it would have collapsed due to its lazy, haphazard plotting and annoying “this is my […]

There are very few actors with the charisma and sex appeal of Idris Elba, as witnessed five years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival. He made an appearance there to support his starring role in a British indie, Legacy. At the box office, filmgoers, most of them women, bought a ticket for a film whose […]

As the son of Turkish immigrants to Germany, writer/director Fatih Akin specifically cites Istanbul-born Elia Kazan’s America America (1963), with its bitter scenes of the Turks’ oppressive treatment of minorities during the end of Ottoman control, as inspiring him to more fully portray the devastation of the Armenian people during World War I. The Cut […]

“Why do you come like you want a war?” protagonist Augusta (indie-darling Brit Marling) asks her Union soldier attacker. He states that, after all the fighting he has done, it is impossible to stop. Set during the last days of the Civil War, The Keeping Room presents a distinctly revisionist Western, taking a feminist approach […]