Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 is a one-man spectacle that is hampered by repetitive filmmaking technique and some sloppy editing. Expectations for Crazy Samurai 400 vs.…
As with any Herzog effort, there are pleasures to be found in Fireball, but the end result still offers decisively diminishing returns for the prolific director.…
The works of Lloyd Kaufman, founder and director of Troma Films, have always been about breaking the boundaries of what can be shown and told in…
Manga and anime artist Osamu Tezuka has been almost universally praised for his works in numerous genres (romance, sci-fi, even erotica); his son, Macoto Tezuka,…
Peninsula is admittedly better than most recent zombie fare, but is reflective of an overall cinematic failure to innovate the genre. The zombie film is, at…
Atom Egoyan’s latest is a self-serious dud that finds the director trying and failing to recall his once impressive weighty themes. There’s a certain level…
The Trip to Greece continues the series’ trend of increasingly mature developments and proves a satisfying end. The Trip to Greece, purportedly the closing installment…
Bacurau’s initial promise of a raucous genre celebration ultimately devolves into a shallow approximation of those pleasures. There’s an undeniable sensuousness to the surfaces of Bacurau:…
Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary offers similar but waning insight to his two previous, more successful efforts. The Cordillera of Dreams is the third and final film…
Young Ahmed is an misguided effort in the Dardennes’ usually rock solid filmography. Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne have created a corpus of films strong enough to…
The Traitor operates as both biopic and mob flick, reveling in the murky complexity of its central figure. A biopic of Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (played…
François Ozon‘s latest jumps from the testimony of one character to the next, following the thread of its main subject: a priest’s sexual abuse of…
Diego Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s latest film, is entirely comprised of archival footage, most of which comes from Italian news sources that preyed upon the famed…
For those who haven’t yet written off James Franco’s entire career, there’s some cause for optimism in the first act of Zeroville, his much delayed…
The Day Shall Come, Christopher Morris’s follow up to his debut (and sleeper hit) Four Lions, treads similar ground as its predecessor — though it…
Gael Garcia Bernal’s Chicuarotes tries to defy expectations for a film in which the actor-director himself plays a performer, committing itself to an exploration of…
There are many portraits of human crisis in the annals of cinema. Many take the form of a series of events being heaped upon the…
The Wandering Soap Opera manages to create the perfect portrait of a nation without culture, without guidance, lost in a post-dictatorial haze. Filmed in 1990…
Ding (Fan Wei) is the director of a farm during the heyday of the second Sino-Japanese war. He’s been tasked by a group of shareholders…
While Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films continued to grow a stronger and stronger reputation among the most vulgar of auterists, another series — of Japanese…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s film…