Wendy R. Weinstein

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

Lars and the Real Girl is a sweet, soulfully acted fairy tale about a social misfit and the town that loves him. Director Craig Gillespie (Mr. Woodcock) and a gifted cast treat Nancy Oliver’s delicate screenplay with the same respect the characters treat Lars’ unusual new girlfriend, and therein...

THE 11TH HOUR

This densely detailed documentary sets forth the no longer radical proposition that we are poisoning our planet and ourselves to death. Less imaginatively structured than An Inconvenient Truth and therefore less likely to reach the unconverted, it is still a treasure trove of fascinating facts...

MY BEST FRIEND

Director Patrice Leconte (Intimate Strangers, Ridicule), along with co-screenwriter Jérôme Tonnerre, takes what could have been a slight, predictable odd-couple buddy picture and find surprising depths of feeling in My Best Friend. They are helped immeasurably by their two leads: veteran French...

KNOCKED UP

Knocked Up arrives just in time for summer, when everyone needs a good R-rated romantic comedy, except perhaps the kids, who would enjoy it if they could get in. The two children in the film, Iris and Maude Apatow (the director's daughters) steal all their scenes, and epitomize the knowing yet...

CLIMATES

We first see Isa, the dissatisfied middle-aged professor in the new Turkish film Climates, snapping shots of Aegean ruins in the blazing sun. Like the isolated white pillars, Isa is damaged, but still standing, and in the person of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, also the film's writer-director, none the...

NATHALIE

Nathalie is a surprisingly unsexy movie about sex. It's even more surprising considering its gorgeous cast: Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart and Gérard Depardieu. To be fair, its subject is a woman's pursuit of desire in the midst of a long marriage, and director Anne Fontaine and her co-writer...

L'ENFANT (THE CHILD)

In L'Enfant (The Child), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's latest film, two children have a baby. True, the mother is 18 and the father 20, but both appear to have the emotional maturity of 10-year-olds, at best. When Sonia (Déborah François) returns home with her newborn, she discovers her...

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD

"If you follow every dream, you might get lost," sings Neil Young on his new album, Prairie Wind. Fortunately, Young and his friend Jonathan Demme followed their dream to make a concert film together and the result is cause for jubilation. This soulful and utterly exhilarating movie, filmed in...

BEE SEASON

Watching Scott McGehee and David Siegel's Bee Season entails watching yourself watch Bee Season. And that is not good. Somehow, the directors fail to transport the viewer fully into the characters' world, so you're left observing how this scene works or that doesn't. At its best, the movie...

YES

Sally Potter (Orlando) takes a risk in her latest film by having her actors speak in verse. She has said the form of iambic pentameter came naturally to her as she began this screenplay in the wake of 9/11. The idea was to heighten ordinary speech, to "naturalize" big ideas. "In the end," says...