by Richard von Busack
(Opens Mar 2 at the Summerfield Cinemas in Santa Rosa, California)
(unrated; 104 min.)
Fabrice Luchini is an ace farceur (Potiche, The Girl from Monaco, and beyond). He uses (and needs) everything he’s got …

By Richard von Busack
Pottersville:
a place full of bewildered people who don’t understand they’re all in the wrong movie. The razz of saxophones blare underneath the too-bright neon, and every dark alley has a lurker in …

By Richard von Busack
Happily, the brave and patriotic Navy SEALS who portray brave and patriotic Navy SEALS in Act of Valor aren’t the worst thing about a rotten movie. The way their roles are shaped, …

by Richard von Busack
(Plays Feb 21-23 in Palo Alto, California at the Stanford Theatre.)
Hamlet is famous for a scene of a conversation between a man and a skull. (The skull says nothing but it has …

By Richard von Busack
HAYAO MIYAZAKI is in his 70s now. He supervised and co-wrote The Secret World of Arrietty, a Japanese animated version of the children’s tale The Borrowers. Hiromasa Yonebayashi is credited as the …

by Richard von Busack
THE MOLDINESS of the 1950s musical plot of Chico & Rita is mitigated a little by stirring, even lavish, animated recreations of mid-20th-century Havana and New York City, as seen from convertible …

by Richard von Busack
ANOTHER BRILLIANT movie from the land of brilliant movies, Iran’s A Separation unfolds in layers, with a secret revealed in the last 20 minutes.
There isn’t a lead actor per se; the cast …

(Showtimes and tickets here)
By Richard von Busack
The heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen, African-Americans who fought and died for a nation that treated them as second-class citizens, will never be forgot. The movie Red Tails, however…forget …

by Richard von Busack
STEPHEN DALDRY’S film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ticket info here)  like Jonathan Safran Foer’s source novel, concerns a child’s act of denial about Sept. 11. He ultimately reverses time’s arrow through …

by Richard von Busack
AFTER THE American Civil War, politicians used to make hay by reminding the crowd of Confederate atrocities. “Waving the bloody shirt” was the expression. Whatever the Bosnian word for “shirt” is, director/writer …