Alice Winocour’s debut marks a very suitable case for treatment By Doug Strassler We first meet Augustine - a kitchen servant, the title character of director-writer Alice Winocour’s impressive debut feature – in the middle of a major fit while working a very highbrow dinner. It’s a convulsion so severe I expected her character to die. 
The French film is part social commentary, part unabashed soap opera It’s always nice to see a work of art that values the art of creation – particularly the act of observant writing. Such is the case with In the House, the latest satire-cum-thriller from French auteur François Ozon. Adapting Juan Mayorga’s play, House is 
Jackie Robinson and Hollywood make history again We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations 
Room 237 lets nerds shine Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect 
Misery finds plenty of company in ‘The Silence’ The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The 
Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy In answer to the above question, “pickaninny” would be a viable option. Nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, from the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, has become the youngest person ever nominated for a lead-actor Academy Award but not because her untrained performance is extraordinary acting; it’s 
Documentary ‘Fracknation’ debates ‘Gasland,’ ‘Promised Land’ and the greenshirts—and wins. By Gregory Solman In Fracknation, Irish investigative journalist Phelim McAleer finds a combustible metaphor for the contrived controversy of hydraulic fracturing in the footage of the Sautner family hustlers of Pennsylvania. McAleer couldn’t politely interview the couple without Craig threatening a lawsuit (apparently emboldened by the radical National 
‘Yossi’ sequel catches up with an international sad sack At 34 years of age, Yossi may have a promising career going as a Tel Aviv cardiologist, but when it comes to matters of the heart for himself, the man is in stasis, a lonely heart who can be seen in Eytan Fox’s Yossi downloading porn 
