During the 1960s, painter Margaret Keane’s artwork, largely depicting children with outlandishly large eyes, was sold under the name of her husband, Walter, who apparently…
If you haven’t seen Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler before seeing Rupert Wyatt’s new Mark Wahlberg-starring remake, don’t watch it in close proximity to the…
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep opens on the smoldering aftermath of a brushfire, gray smoke rising off the charred earth as the wind blows and…
Many consider Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice to be a minor work; the New York Times’ review dubbed it “Pynchon Lite.” Choosing a seriocomic yarn…
It would be a mistake to overstate the similarities between the events presented in Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan — a series of non-violent protests gone awry in Kiev,…
Noted experimental filmmakers Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have a lot more in common besides sharing a first name. Their respective oeuvres are filled with…
Ostensibly a biopic about pioneering mathematician Alan Turing, The Imitation Game’s opening credits play out under a recording of King George VI’s 1939 radio broadcast…
Casanova, that notorious 18th-century lady-killer, ravenously consumes food during every one of Story of My Death’s first several scenes. Shortly thereafter, he defecates it all…
With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’s torch-carrying efforts on behalf of the tried-and-tested beauty of the American West continue to be moving. Taking into account…
Producer-writer-director-editor Josephine Decker’s debut feature Butter on the Latch is simultaneously vague and direct in its intent. Decker mixes styles from shallow focus and extreme…
Opening with a tableau of a woman dressed in red, standing over her kitchen sink with her back to the camera, Robert Greene’s (Kati with…
Part of the fun — and the discomfort — of watching Nightcrawler is in gradually adapting to the rules of its nocturnal world, a sprawling network of photojournalism castaways…
Though it touches upon the comedy of remarriage film, the family vacation film, the bourgeois critique film, and the male-id exposé film, Force Majeure is…
Whether or not one ultimately finds David Fincher’s recent film Gone Girl feminist, misogynist, or somewhere in between, it is thrilling to see a narrative…
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), the latest film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, is a showy directorial performance about performance. By design, it’s swooningly…
Near the end of Listen Up Philip, the audacious third feature from Alex Ross Perry, narcissistic author Philip (Jason Schwartzman) attempts to rekindle some sympathy…
Just as much an essential piece of historiography as it is a poetic, ruminative look at the effects of folklore on the Eastern European condition,…
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…
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…
For an actor, part of the art of embodying a morally questionable character is to first seek a point of empathy rather than glaring signs…