John Petrakis

It is evident from the lush opening credits, which recall the stylish script of postwar European cinema or the 1950s American melodramas of Douglas Sirk, that the Italian film I Am Love is...

When Pandora opens the box that contains all the world’s evils, they immediately fly away, destined to plague humankind for eternity....

Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener is intrigued by problems....

The Last Station is a complex but entertaining study of a 48-year marriage and the way subtle and extreme changes that take place in each partner can take a terrifying toll on the relationsh...

As soon as you hear the title, you can probably guess what kind of film The Book of Eli is going to be....

By the time you read this, Avatar will have grossed enough to pay down the national debt, bail out a few more banks and provide top-shelf health care to everyone west of the Mississippi....

The films of Austrian director Michael Haneke offer no easy answers. Haneke presents the time, place, characters and backstory before eventually revealing a problem....

To those who frequented small, dingy art houses in the 1970s and 1980s, the death of Eric Rohmer in January meant that a film artist of the first rank has faded to black....

Back in 1994, when Peter Jackson was a relatively unknown director, he made the small but brilliant Heavenly Creatures, a tale about an “unhealthy” friendship between two teenage girls in 19...

It’s 1967 in Minnesota, and life is getting more and more difficult for physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg)....

In the make-believe world of The Invention of Lying, everyone strictly obeys God’s ninth commandment....

Bright Star is a die-hard romantic’s romance, eschewing tawdriness in favor of shy smiles, stolen glances and soft kisses....

The idea of bartering or battling with the devil for one’s soul is an old one....

Halfway through Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, about the time I should have been engrossed in the tommy-guns-a-blazin’ battle between bad guy John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and good guy Melvin...

The first feature-length film by video installation artist Steve McQueen (no relation to the late actor) presents a detailed and disturbing look at conditions inside Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison ...

A well-established French cinematic tradition is to spin out a story that seems to be about very little—until you get a peek beneath the surface and can see it is about a dizzying number of things....

The low-budget English production Is Anybody There? is now reaching screens in the United States, thanks to the presence of Michael Caine in the lead role....

An old Senegalese proverb says, “An elder who dies is like a library that burns.” This belief is at the heart of the small but moving independent film Goodbye Solo, directed and co-written b...

Nominated as Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards and awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Gomorrah chronicles the violent activities of the Camorra, or “the System,”...

Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is a homeless woman driving cross-country with her dog, Lucy, and sleeping in her car at night to save money and stay warm. One morning, her car won’t start....