It seems like an innocuous title – until you realize (or learn) that “The Manzanar Fishing Club,” a new documentary by Cory Shiozaki opening today in limited release, deals with one of this country’s most shameful chapters: the internment of Japanese citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Shiozaki’s film uses archival footage and interviews with survivors – or children of survivors – to look at the impact of the law, enacted after Pearl Harbor in early 1942, that forced naturalized and American-born Japanese to leave their homes and their belongings behind when they were forcibly moved to the American equivalent of concentration camps. (More…)

“Family – it’s what really matters,” says Robert Miller (Richard Gere), or words to that effect, to a gathering in his posh Fifth Avenue townhouse that includes his wife (Susan Sarandon), grown children, grandchildren and friends, who have assembled to celebrate his 60th birthday.

So, in Nicholas Jarecki’s entertaining, if slightly schematic, “Arbitrage,” it’s only fitting that, in the very next scene, there’s Miller, nuzzling the neck of his French mistress Julie (former Victoria’s Secret model Laetitia Casta).

Message: Nothing is what it seems in this guy’s life. (More…)

Casually brutal, drily (but only intermittently) funny and frequently just plain strange, the German “Snowman’s Land” is a gloomy comedy that’s funnier in theory than in practice. (More…)