‘Bucks Harbor’ Review: A Wistful, Humane Portrait of Hardy Souls, Young and Old, in Coastal Maine

‘Bucks Harbor’ Review: A Wistful, Humane Portrait of Hardy Souls, Young and Old, in Coastal Maine

The coast is craggy and rugged in “Bucks Harbor,” and so are many of the faces — lined and hard-lived and visibly storied, in a way that plainly speaks to the original photographer in director Pete Muller, here making a fluent and expansive transition to documentary filmmaking. His camera loves the weary, callused men of the small Maine fishing community that lends the film its title, though his heart evidently does too: As it takes in the rhyth…

‘Kontinental ’25’ Review: A Transylvanian Bailiff Tries to Ease Her Guilty Conscience in Radu Jude’s Droll and Biting iPhone Comedy

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. 1-2 Special opens “Kontinental 25” in theaters starting Friday, March 27, 2026. There are any number of unique and memorable lines in Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s characteristically stinging “Kontinental ’25,” but the most trenchant of them all is borrowed secondhand from Bertolt Brecht: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.” Cynicall…

The Last Blossom review – a yakuza faces his final reckoning in affecting anime

A talking balsam flower asks an elderley yakuza to weigh up a life of violence and kindness in Baku Kinoshita’s quietly contemplative taleAn original story from director Baku Kinoshita and writer Kazuya Konomoto, this is the kind of quiet, contemplative anime feature that rarely gets a theatrical release. Enveloped in the dusk, the film opens in a lonely prison cell, home to the elderly former yakuza Akutsu. Now on his deathbed, he finds an unex…