Director Sacha Gervasi attempts to frame Hitchcock as a love story between the director and his wife Alma, a rekindling of their passion for one another without actually presenting evidence of the initial spark or the carefully laid foundation between them.  

Right off the bat in Lincoln, director Steven Spielberg gives us one of his signature moments, a framing device in the story that is supposed to be based on historic facts that smacks of pure invention and threatens to derail our investment in, not just the individual moment, but the film as a whole.  

Slowing down, in the Buddhist way, is all about opening oneself up to the cacophony of life. Audiences should keep this notion in mind during screenings of The Sessions, the new film from writer-director Ben Lewin, featuring John Hawkes in one of those quietly human performances.  

I’m not certain when the feeling set in for me, but at some point during the Flight screening I attended, I was overcome with the sense of observing the dark days of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the virtuoso Texas guitarist who died in the early 1990s after years of working as a sideman (most notably with David Bowie on his 1980s classic Let’s Dance) and taking center stage with his own band.  

I had to catch myself in Toronto during the festival press screening of Cloud Atlas, the new film from Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis (Andy and Lana), and carefully consider what it would mean to define their adaptation of David Mitchell’s book as “novelistic.”   

The year 2012 bears the burden of apocalyptic Mayan calendar predictions and a curious onscreen fascination with speculative science fiction dramas but, apparently seeking to top things off, writer Dinesh D’Souza teams up with John Sullivan to speculate about the true intentions of President Barack Obama in 2016: Obama’s America.  

In what should be an iconic image, we see Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, a Folk singer who recorded his first single “I’ll Slip Away” back in 1967, strolling along with his guitar case strapped across his back. His long dark hair billows in halo-like fashion around his head; his eyes hidden behind dark shades.
  

For the couch-bound adrenaline seekers, the American Express/Tribeca Film series offers up Sleepless Night, a French production from Frederic Jardin (of the 2002 comic drama Cravate club) that mines similar territory.  

This year’s seventh annual Downtown Dayton LGBT Film Festival lineup definitely addresses a new honest reality, this striving for a sense of urgent authenticity, both through the films and the celebratory events.  

Our first few moments in the presence of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) capture the extraordinary power and the isolation of the character. What Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of The Master, and the mercurial Phoenix have created here is a portrait of an old god, maybe the last of his kind to walk the Earth.  

This year marks my fourth sojourn to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and I have been able to add a few extra days to my usual long weekend mad dash through an impossibly overbooked itinerary that leaves me feeling like a camera-toting tourist snapping pictures of all the officially sanctioned hotspots.  

Now in its third year, the Cincinnati Film Festival is committed to helping filmmakers project their visions, as more than 80 works of various lengths and styles will grace venues in Clifton, Downtown and Over-the-Rhine Sept. 6-14.  

Best friends forever is a clichéd phrase that gets bandied about between people closely linked for a time, through a particular patch of life, but few of these relationships truly last. Only a precious few bond on the deepest levels and fewer still cross the gender divide.   

Unlike the action junkies chopping up the battles to pile on more frames helter-skelter, Tony Scott would actually slow the moments down, to let us see the beauty of stillness before the clash. He gave us a chance to breathe and steady ourselves.  

Sometimes a story taps into a primal human desire, a need so intrinsic that it makes belief come to life. Screenwriter (and director) Peter Hedges, working from a story conceived by Frank Zappa’s son, Ahmet, dares to make audiences hope and believe in something so real with The Odd Life of Timothy Green.