Few current documentaries seem as of-the-moment as Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters, a film shot through with pulsating clarity and startling ambition. It follows Jay Reinke, a Lutheran pastor in Williston, N.D., as he faces increasing hostility from townspeople toward his “Overnighter” program, which allows…
There’s a moment near the end of the second act of Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature Whiplash that threatens to completely derail the narrative: a character gets into what looks like a fatal car accident and keeps moving like he’s the Terminator. But that moment…
The success of James Wan’s The Conjuring last year, like that of Paranormal Activity back in 2009, points to a wave of purely affective horror cinema, less concerned with feeding on social anxieties of their time than with crafting jump scares and a spooky…
David Fincher’s Gone Girl immediately announces its intentions to deconstruct everyday images with a deceptive opening-credits sequence consisting of shots of empty houses, “for sale” signs, back alleys, and closed-up storefronts. Sure, there could be a socioeconomic subtext, some “How We Live Now” statement…
Jason Reitman’s latest Oscar shill, the formally inert and thematically overconfident Men, Women & Children, aspires to illustrate how humans — horny high school students and their horny parents, specifically — interact in this new technological world of ours. The characters are all but glued to the computers…
