Futuristic 'Never Let Me Go' is a haunting, exquisite mortality play

There are no owls or talking paintings at Hailsham, a coed boarding school deep in the English countryside, but the eager, fresh-faced children in their neat school uniforms, chanting their morning greeting to the headmistress, are as happy in their idyllic setting as any Hogwarts student. But the children of Hailsham exist in an altered reality as strange as the Harry Potter universe, and the rendering of their world and their destiny is a matter of exquisite craftsmanship in Never Let Me Go, a soulful, deeply moving, utterly pitch-perfect romantic drama from director Mark Romanek.

It can be noodles of fun, but this Coen reboot doesn’t always stay at a boil

One thing A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop has going for it is that it comes from Zhang Yimou. He’s the spirited director who gave the world House of Flying Daggers and was also the lead director for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. That’s the good news for this clever remake of the Coen Brothers’ noir hit Blood Simple, which came out in 1984 and put the filmmaking siblings on the map. The bad news—if you can call it that—is that audiences may walk away from Yimou’s picture disheartened when they really shouldn’t be. Chances are, they’ll compare the two films—too much.

Food, love, identity blend in tasty, but uneven 'Soul Kitchen'
It takes a healthy appetite for slapstick to digest Soul Kitchen. This multicultural comic confection about a foundering restaurant in a shabby neighborhood in Hamburg, Germany, draws much of its humor from such material as pratfalls at a funeral, a popped vest button that lands in the wrong place, and a character who keeps throwing out his back, forcing him to scuttle about like Quasimodo. Still, beneath the fizzy froth of physical gags simmers a more tender-hearted tale of food, love, and identity, with a protagonist teetering at the axis between them all.

'Mademoiselle Chambon" explores sensuousness of longing
Not all the French hang out in the bistro, sipping cognac and discussing arty things. What's interesting right away about Mademoiselle Chambon—literally, from the very first image—is the thoughtful way it sets up a working-class milieu. Jean (Vincent Lindon), a construction worker, spends his days ripping out drywall and mortaring bricks. His wife, Anne-Marie (Aure Atika) works on an assembly line. When they help their little boy, Jeremy, with his grammar homework, they are as mystified as he is about the test questions, but the three of them gamely work their way through the lesson together and come up with the correct answer.

Family courage trumps political cover-up in excellent 'Tillman Story'
Imagine that you are a Gold Star mother. Because your son was a famous athlete before he enlisted, his death prompts a media frenzy during which you and your shell-shocked family are required to act out your private anguish on the public stage while an A-List roster of high-ranking military leaders, politicians, and pundits embroider the tale of your son's heroics in battle. But only weeks later, details begin to emerge that expose the official Army report as an obscene pack of lies. And even as you delve deeper into the unsavory truth, the military labors to spin the death of your beloved child into a “recruitment poster."

Woman takes unexpected inner journey in 'Cairo Time'
There's not much eating in Cairo Time. Praying is done only in the distance, and never by the main character. And as for love— well, that's a subtle, nuanced, indefinable thing in Ruba Nadda's meditative romantic drama about an American woman trying to come to grips with her life in an exotic location halfway around the globe.

The storyline may bear a superficial resemblance to a certain Julia Roberts movie, but the inner journey taken by Nadda's heroine is unintentional, and infused with a kind of seductive languor that's the antithesis of a typical Hollywood-style narrative. This works both for and against the film to some degree: much of the drama unfolding in the heroine's psyche is internalized and unspoken, yet a steady kind of tension builds toward what we hope will be the expression of her gradually altering outlook.

It's the perfect antidote to a muggy summer evening: wave after wave of crystal-clear, turquoise walls of water towering some 20 feet up into the sky, then crashing down again in an explosion of surf, like shattering diamonds. These are the true stars of Dana Brown's latest surf documentary, Highwater, the gigantic, justly fabled waves off the North Shore of Oahu. Every so often you might notice a tiny human silhouette maneuvering a board under the curl or plowing over a crest, but mostly it's the natural spectacle of the thundering waves themselves, more than the people trying to ride them, that deserve the accolade "awesome."

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