International Cinema

Set during El Salvador’s Civil War, Luis Mandoki’s sentimental yet horrifying Innocent Voices shows how the carnage affects a little boy’s life.

Muslim father vs European son road movie has topped the Mar del Plata Film Festival, while Emmanuelle Devos and Laura Linney shared Best Actress honors.

Bruno Ganz Is an out-of-control Adolf Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is a coolly deranged Magda Goebbels in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s convoluted drama Downfall.

The Sea Inside movie: Javier Bardem is an inadequate lead in Alejandro Amenábar’s pro-euthanasia melodrama. But the supporting cast is first-rate.

A Bollywood ‘priest sex movie’ - about the affair between a clergyman (Shiney Ahuja) and a much younger woman - has infuriated Indian Catholic radicals.

The controversy surrounding the Meera Nazar kiss has the Pakistani actress vs. that country’s Ministry of Culture. Ashmit Patel is her Bollywood costar.

French César shocker: Abdellatif Kechiche’s low-budget Paris banlieue drama featuring a cast of unknowns has beaten two well-regarded international hits.

Gianni Amelio’s acclaimed father-son drama was the Italian film journalists’ top Nastri d’Argento winner. Pedro Almodóvar and veteran Mario Monicelli were also honored.

A Carmen-inspired South African ‘dance movie,’ German anti-Nazi fighters and a Taiwanese watermelon sex tale are Berlin’s top Golden Bear winners.

Pedro Almodóvar is snubbed while Alejandro Amenábar’s pro-euthanasia drama The Sea Inside has shattered the Goya Awards’ record.

The British Academy Awards’ Oscar-focused new submission deadline rules have had unintended and ironically counterproductive consequences.

Mean Girls quotes have earned Tina Fey an unexpected Writers Guild Awards nomination, while animated + non-English-language movies again bypassed.

NSFC Awards surprise: A Clint Eastwood melodrama is the unexpectedly mainstream winner of the generally more ‘esoteric’ U.S.-based critics group.

Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach Film Society has had to fight (anti-gay?) puritanism, as a complaint about big-screen ‘explicit sex’ has led to a police investigation.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr has publicly derided the Academy Awards’ arcane Best Foreign Language Film rules that keep prestigious work out of the running.

Christophe Barratier’s boys school drama The Chorus is an unabashedly sentimental rehash of numerous other such tales (e.g., Going My Way).

A superb Don Cheadle stars as Kigali hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina in Terry George’s absurdly ‘uplifting’ genocide drama Hotel Rwanda.

French film producer René Cleitman’s prestigious credits include Cyrano de Bergerac and several Prix César and Oscar-nominated titles.

Culture clash movies have dominated this year’s European Film Awards, while Pedro Almodóvar was the biggest loser and Liv Ullmann got the longest standing ovation.

Personal and political realms are inexorably intertwined in the Chilean coming-of-age drama Machuca, set at the time of that country’s 1973 military coup.

Shades of Hitchcock and Antonioni in the Rio de Janeiro-set Fernanda Montenegro showcase The Other Side of the Street / O Outro Lado da Rua.

The London Film Festival’s Satyajit Ray Award has gone to Nicole Kassell’s U.S. drama The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as a child molester.

Featuring attendees like Omar Sharif and Youssef Chahine, Tunisia’s Arab cinema showcase has bestowed top honors on a socially conscious Moroccan drama.

Award-winning Iraq War-themed drama gets US distribution + veteran Oscar winner has been hospitalized + Antarctica is getting its very first movie theater.