Godfrey Cheshire

Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Nigerian illegally living in London, works two jobs. When we first see him, he’s hustling customers for his mini-cab. Come sundown, he dons a spiffy red uniform and works the desk at a classy hotel. Sent one night to check on a clogged toilet in a guest room, he kneels, wraps […]

In Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides, a documentary opening this weekend, we follow Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy as he builds sculptures out of anything that nature allows him–ice, rocks, bracken, twigs–and then watches as nature itself undoes his handiwork. A bearded, gentle-voiced craftsman who might be played by Ian Holm in a fictional rendition of […]

Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a middle-class Long Island family in which two members, a father and his teenage son, are accused of sexually molesting numerous boys, honors the first rule of documentary filmmaking: Find a fascinating subject. Multi-faceted and many-layered, Friedmans tackles a real-life case that’s so complex and volatile that […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is, as he famously promised (and we never doubted), back. But the cyborg assassin-from-the-future is no longer quite the lean, mean avatar of punk fashion he was in 1984’s Terminator. Almost 20 years on, Ah-noldt looks as chunky and stolid as, well, a future governor of California. Who said the future wasn’t […]

For anyone who views modernist cinema from a geographic perspective, the developments of the last 15 years must look curious indeed. For decades, the essential template for the “art film” was fundamentally European. From the rise of the Italian Neorealists in the late ’40s, through the catalytic innovations of the French New Wave and related […]

In an intriguing coincidence, the two most compelling foreign-language films to open in the Triangle recently concern the former Soviet Union and its connections to Europe. Apart from their exceptional quality, however, these movies are almost exact opposites. Unlike Alexander Sukorov’s ravishing Russian Ark, a Russian-made film that looks at Europe from the vantage point […]

The Real Cancun “will be a huge money-maker. Every 15-year-old in the country will want to see it because of what it offers–pornography,” said a critic friend over dinner, adding, “I find that horrible. I don’t object to pornography per se, understand. I object to pornography because it drives out art. It will do that […]

Are you interested in beauty, or only its representation? — from Russian Ark Conceivably the most brilliant and important foreign-language film that will play the Triangle this year, Alexander Sukorov’s Russian Ark contains innumerable marvels, yet its primary fascination can be easily described: It is the first feature in movie history to be comprised of […]

The best American film I’ve seen this year, David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls, reminds us that, in movies as elsewhere, the simplest things are the hardest to pull off. Take love stories. The pattern couldn’t be simpler. Boy meets girl, complications ensue, love triumphs (or doesn’t). But when was the last time you […]