FILM The central characters in Nicole Holofcener's new film, Please Give, Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), display a fluency in the language of large round numbers that is occasionally disturbed by bouts of self-inflicted sticker shock. Read more »

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By Elise-Marie Brown

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FILM Che Rivera, a strong, middle-aged Latino man, approaches his son with festering anger and fury in his eyes. With outrage, he yells, "Why does this motherfucker have his tongue down your fucking throat?" as he points to a photo of his teenage son kissing another man. "Why do you think?" his son replies in a sharp tone. His rage surfacing, Che leans over, beats the boy, and forces him to leave their Mission District home.Read more »

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FILM The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they're all busy keeping from one another.Read more »

FILM The people in Atom Egoyan's movies have a tendency to be hiding things — pieces of their history, damages inflicted along the way, and complex motivations that are keys to our understanding of how the lives in a knotted web intersect and affect one another. We follow these expressive yet withholding characters, often back and forth through time, and collect subjective and fractional versions of the truth. Read more »

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FILM By the time the first of Stieg Larsson's so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending. Its author planned 10 volumes total, but only finished three (plus some work on a fourth) before he died in 2004, none printed during his lifetime. The following year The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit (though the English-translated third won't come out here till May).Read more »

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FILM Like only the very best filmmakers, 25-year-old Raya Martin knows that a movie screen in a theater is a site for waking dreams — and also a window into forms of sleep. Martin's first feature-length effort A Short Film About the Indionacional (2005) commenced with an extended foray into one woman's nocturnal restlessness. His new and stunning work Independencia (2009) is sprinkled with stark sequences of characters lying down to fight or embrace their dream lives. Read more »