For French director Gaspar Noe, life and death are not physical certainties but evolving psychological perspectives that often overlap. His three feature films (I Stand…
Think about these: Annie Hall, Sleeper, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan, and Purple Rose of Cairo. Are you smiling? Are you basking…
Paying off its central gimmick, promised in the trailers, of classy, prestige picture actors like Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich firing machine guns…
Six years after an extraterrestrial race landed on Earth, a photojournalist is dispatched to Mexico to escort an American heiress back to the States. After…
As the saying goes, there’s only one thing worse than being a slut: being a virgin. A ludicrous notion if you value your health, but…
Just as Woody Allen keeps demonstrating a preference for leaving behind a depressing legacy of quantity over quality, that other favorite Great American Director, Clint…
What Frederick Wiseman is doing barely constitutes as documentary filmmaking anymore — there are no talking heads, no narration, all sound is diegetic, and only…
The American dissects the emotional enigmas of those working in two of the oldest professions — assassins and prostitutes, respectively. Its cryptic characters depend on…
The opening montage of I’m Still Here summons a cloud of fame engulfing actor Joaquin Phoenix — awards, accolades, the media appearances, the movies, and…
When Zhang Yimou announced he was to remake the Coen Brothers’ 1984 seminal noir Blood Simple, one couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking.…
No one’s going to argue that the Nazi propaganda machine, helmed by Joseph Goebbels, didn’t exploit the power of the filmed image. Case in point,…
In 1969, Jacques Mesrine (May-reen), French arch-criminal and would-be folk hero, was on the lam from both French and Canadian authorities. He fled to the…
The stunning opening sequence of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone immediately communicates a specific relationship between region and mood. The flawless voice-over narration and lingering…
The labyrinthine social hierarchies of David Fincher’s The Social Network facilitate a narrative pinball game; competing male egos, hidden agendas, brooding desires, and palpable anger…
Isolation is a universal theme, but it can also describe an intrinsically American experience of teenage angst. This contextual difference firmly separates Let the Right…
Troubled families rarely dissolve overnight. Instead, a slow erosive process corrodes pacts and compromises over weeks, months, and even years. Inevitably, each member becomes trapped…
Self-seriousness can mortally wound the work of a pulp filmmaker who depends on his flashy style. In the case of British director Neil Marshall, obvious…
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Those words have never rung so true as they do in conjunction with Alexandre Aja’s headfirst dive into…
It’s a commonly held misconception that the exploitation cinema of the 1970s and early ’80s was “cheesy,” constituting unintentionally funny, poorly made trash notable only…
Forget Monty Python — ten years ago, some friends and I stumbled across a British SNL-type television series called Jam, a mixed bag of some…
Turkish director Fatih Akin’s movies are often musical in nature, fitting their rhythms to rhythm and their tones to tune. If Head-On, his first real…