Writer-director-star Jon Favreau cooks up tureens of fun and charm in “Chef,” a welcome return to his more intimate, indie film roots (“Swingers,” “Made”) after helming such mega-budget pictures as “Iron Man,” “Iron Man 2” and “Cowboys & Aliens.”
Written and directed by Gia Coppola, “Palo Alto” is adapted from a collection of short stories by James Franco and conjures a delicate, very specific sense of middle-class adolescence, the indeterminate, nascent feelings of the teenage years.
“Moms’ Night Out” is a hectic mess that does just the opposite of what it clearly set out to do: It makes motherhood seem like one of the most ill-conceived ideas since New Coke.
Affable and optimistic, the Canadian documentary “Cyber-Seniors” depicts the efforts of enterprising teenagers to get a technology-averse older generation to sign on, log in and start friending.
“Documented,” the first-person account by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, trails his impressive campaign for passage of the Dream Act path to citizenship for some of the 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal residency.
Moviegoers would be hard-pressed to find a film more laden with corporate logos than “Fed Up” — and that’s one of the strengths of this galvanizing documentary: It pulls no punches in its informed outrage against the food industry, zeroing in on the rampant use of sugar and its many multisyllabic variations.
The largely involving Korean crime thriller “Broken” finds earnest widower and textile factory employee Sang-Hyeon (Jung Jae-Young) in “Death Wish” mode when his daughter, middle school student Su-Jin, turns up brutally raped and murdered.
