Weekend Movie Forecast: Crossing Over, An American Affair

According to the Times's A.O. Scott, Catalan director Albert Serra's film Birdsong is "less a retelling of the Nativity story than a dream about it, filtered in lovely black and white through a sensibility that recalls Luis Buñuel and Samuel Beckett... At times their bickering suggests the stooges more than the magi, as they negotiate deserts, thickets, mountainsides and the recalcitrance of their own slow, bulky bodies. But there is also a quiet, reverent grace in the way Mr. Serra films these serious, clownish men, treating them as curious features of the natural world... Birdsong is a quiet, contemplative, sometimes inscrutable film, which finds strangeness in a familiar story — and also in the world itself, from which Mr. Serra’s camera coaxes an obdurate, enigmatic beauty."