Recommended 13 Tzameti - French movie with an Eastern European sensibility about a young handyman who decides to follow instructions intended for the owner of the house he's repairing. He ends up in a remote house, where he is forced to take part in a brutal game of Russian Roulette in which only one of the 13 participants will survive. Bicycle Thieves - Criterion has released a DVD of Vittorio De Sica's 1947 classic... more ›

While a couple of movies are hardly enough to qualify as zeitgeist, there's something serendipitous about the back-to-back release of two films featuring teenage Latino protagonists growing up in East Los Angeles.* Wassup Rockers and Quinceañera both focus on teenagers defying familial and cultural expectations, but even though they were both shot on video and take a quasi-documentary approach towards their subjects, they achieve very different results.... more ›