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“Monsieur Lazhar,” Canada’s official entry for the 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar, concerns an Algerian immigrant that finds work in Montreal standing in for an elementary school teacher who recently committed suicide. It sounds straightforward enough, but nothing is as…

“Sleeping Beauty,” which played in a discreet 9:30 slot on Saturday night at the 12th Annual Santa Fe Film Festival, has already gained a reputation for being erotic, insipid, brave, disappointing, groundbreaking, regressive and a host of other contradictions. It’s…

Snacking, by its very concept in the US, is something we do as a reward. It’s a time of cramming stuff in our mouths in a moment of celebration (okay, or stress). But when we do it in a movie…

When Oscar-winning editor Hughes Winborne spoke with great humor at the Santa Fe Film Festival’s special presentation of “The Final Rewrite,” his idea of a Hollywood movie editor’s Help Wanted ad might have sounded something like this: HELP WANTED: creative,…

I had the pleasure of attending one of the 2011 Santa Fe Film Festival’s panel discussions Friday afternoon at Zane Bennett Gallery. Brent Kliewer, this year’s program director for the festival, hosted the conversation. The audience was made up of…

“A Useful Life” by Federico Vieroj is a 67 minute mini-feature that focuses on a major turning point in the life of Jorge, the curator of a small art house cinema in Montevideo, Uruguay. Vieroj’s movie is about the fate…

The packed audience at the Screen today on the last day of the Santa Fe Film Festival were all wondering if Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus”, would give us both a great story and a…

In the slow-paced, detail-obsessive, character-rich, Oscar-contender from Turkey at the Santa Fe Film Festival, the story snakes around the characters like the creek through the hills and slopes, occasionally seen, sometimes only heard, but always a part of the landscape.…