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GERALD PEARY

Latest Articles

Review: Like Someone In Love

A decent little movie, but hardly a major one, from Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who, self-exiled, here shoots in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast.

By: GERALD PEARY | March 12, 2013

Review: The Gatekeepers

Great cinema journalism, The Gatekeepers was the National Society of Film Critics' winner for Best Documentary of 2012.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 26, 2013

Review: The Little Fugitive (1953)

It's the 60th anniversary of this pioneering American independent feature, which greatly influenced both cinema vérité documentarians and the French New Wave.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 27, 2013

Review: How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire

Daniel Edelstyn launched this film project after reading the spirited diary of his late grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, whose wealthy Jewish family split from Ukraine as the Bolsheviks were taking control.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 20, 2013

Review: Happy People: A Year In The Taiga

What Robert Flaherty did with title cards in his silent Nanook of the North , Werner Herzog manages with declamatory voiceover in Happy People : romanticization of the austere, self-reliant lives of hunters and trappers in the icebound north.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 12, 2013

Review: 56 Up

Upwardly immobile
56 Up is still moving and philosophic, though not as exciting as earlier episodes, which had more drama.

By: GERALD PEARY | February 05, 2013

Review: Quartet

Very veteran British actors nibble on the scenery in this pleasant, harmless adaptation of Ronald Harwood's 1999 middlebrow play set in a retirement home for ex-opera performers.

By: GERALD PEARY | January 24, 2013

Review: Bestiaire

Although there is no narration or manipulative music track, Denis Côté's long-take documentary look at Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Quebec, screams out (quietly) on the side of animal rights.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 31, 2012

Review: Hitler's Children

Israeli filmmaker Chanoch Ze'evi is the probing interviewer behind this chilling, unsettling documentary.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 21, 2012

Review: Barbara

In this brilliant Cold War political drama set in the GDR in 1980, a doctor, Barbara (the extraordinary Nina Hoss), is exiled from East Berlin to a provincial town by the Baltic Sea because she has requested to move to the West.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 18, 2012

Review: The Central Park Five

Rough justice
It wasn't the Mississippi Delta but enlightened, liberal New York City where, in 1989, five Harlem and Bronx teenage boys, black and Latino, were arrested, bullied by the police, and intimidated into making false confessions that they had raped and brutally injured a female jogger in Central Park.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 13, 2012

Review: The Comedy

Many in the audience rankled as Rick Alverson's The Comedy played in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 05, 2012

Review: My Worst Nightmare

Dream casting
The storyline of Anne Fontaine's French comedy is mainstream: a yuppie art dealer, Agathe (Isabelle Huppert), finds her condescending values challenged and her sexuality opened up by a crude but "natural" laborer (Benoît Poelvoorde).

By: GERALD PEARY | December 03, 2012

Review: Tristana

Papist plot
Though one was an atheist and the other a churchgoer, both Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock were obsessed with their Catholicism.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 21, 2012

Review: Brooklyn Castle

Katie Dellamaggiore's sweet, winning documentary spends one year with the chess team at Intermediate School 318, an inner-city junior high in Brooklyn, where despite a 70 percent poverty rate, the kids, grades 6-9, routinely win national championships.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 12, 2012