Snoop Dogg fans beware. The Tenants may not be what you'd expect from a movie co-starring your favorite Rhythm & Gangsta MC. It's a bookish drama about class, color and creativity that's as confining as its tenement setting. You may rather party at Big Momma’s House.
 
Not that The Tenants ain't got game. Director Danny Green's screen adaptation of the 1971 novel by Bernard Malamud looks for ironies in pre-chi chi Brooklyn and finds them.

With The Syrian Bride, Israeli director Eran Riklis sturdies his reputation as a filmmaker who can tell a local story with universal appeal -- Israeli audiences included. It's the sort of breakthrough that resonates with the self-proclaimed maker of "obscure Chinese or European films" who spent part of his boyhood in the U.S. and loves American movies.

 

Summary:
 
Barry Sonnenfeld sends a harassed dad and his family camping in an RV, and arrives at a PG comedy that's actually amusing.
 
Story:

Bob Munro has promised his family a Hawaii getaway, but suddenly swaps it for some old-fashioned bonding and Rocky Mountain camping in a recreational vehicle. The embattled soda exec must clinch a deal in Colorado to save his corporate neck, but he will endure everything from backed up plumbing to teetering over a rock before subjecting his loved ones to worry. Spared such news, they're free to act out in dad's mobile monstrosity. Along the way, raccoons, cascading torrents and other unity-forging indignities will remold these quirky souls into a family. Father knows best, however potholed the road to realization.

Interview with Patricia Finneran, Festival Director, 2007 
SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival

Maryland’s Silver Spring sprang to life June 12-17as Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival unspooled 100 films from 42 countries--and even tacked on an extra day. According to festival director Patricia Finneran, “We got 1,735 submissions and if there were any more I stopped counting.” Laura Blum sat down with Patricia to get the skinny on the growing fest.

Hail Steven Spielberg and his new masterpiece! So declared Time magazine, which got the first Munich interview and may have had some studio gods to appease.

But with my eyes I saw it: the flick's an Olympic bore. At two-and-a-half unnecessarily stretched hours, it's a thriller that sprawls more than it thrills.

Vigilante justice is alive and kicking in Tommy Lee Jones’ feature directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada — even if its titular character is not. Played out along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, this Western morality tale aims to bury anti-Mexicanism for once and for all.

As ever in a Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) screenplay, Three Burials torques separate lives into a twist that keeps turning long after the screen goes dark.

MINE opens theatrical run: 
Hurricane Katrina's animal survivors have their day
Geralyn Pezanoski's fine new documentary Mine is all about what happened to the household pets -- mostly dogs -- during, after and even long after Hurricane Katrina. While the during and after sections are fairly expected, though Ms Pezanoski's mind, heart and camera, still manage to catch the odd and affecting moment, it's the "long after" section -- the film's lengthiest -- during which Mine really rivets.

In his elegant and obtuse way, Austrian director Michael Haneke expresses a dark and mysterious vision in deploying his odd period film, The White Ribbon. The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or for best film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.