In The Sun, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov finds the perfect subject matter for his unique aesthetic, drawing an intimate portrait of controversial and eccentric Japanese…
Set in the gray, drab atmosphere of post-war England, An Education opens with a montage of academia: English schoolgirls being taught to graduate, work, marry,…
The weakest of Pedro Almodóvar’s four films this decade, the oddly muted melodrama Broken Embraces is also something no other work from the Spanish master has…
When I was in third grade, I discovered my love for writing while penning an essay about Amelia Earhart. I vividly remember sitting at my…
Oren Moverman’s quietly moving wartime drama The Messenger arrives just months after the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s much-hyped action-drama The Hurt Locker, two thematically similar, yet…
In its early ’90s milieu, its parade of ghastly coifs and mustaches, and its earnest attempts to mine modern investigative journalism for gleeful belly laughs,…
Director Spike Jonze has been quoted in interviews saying that he never set out to make a children’s film, but rather “a film about childhood.”…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man seems…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become, and…
Steven Soderbergh made an interesting choice in telling the story of Mark Whitacre, the agri-food exec who turned informant and paid a price. Part fraud,…
The single worst thing that ever happened to Michael Moore — as artist, as thinker, as gleefully sardonic agitator — was becoming incredibly rich and…
All tearjerkers are not created equal. This is a point too rarely acknowledged. When it comes to pocket-sized tragedies, those tidy doses of Hollywood-friendly catharsis,…
Based on the writings of the late David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a movie for people who like to listen to books…
Scary notion: what if YouTube, with its streaming transmissions of home-movie inanity and fleeting flashes of sign o’ the times import, was our first and…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do backflips…
Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse (among others) tapped into a cathartic cinema that favors real-time pacing and treats sequences of a tree quivering…
A VH1 programmer’s (wet) dream come true, It Might Get Loud assembles three generations of guitar gods under one roof, where they’ll talk shop, swap…
Bright Star, Jane Campion’s visually luscious period romance, tells the story of poet John Keats (impish British actor Ben Whishaw), and his immortalized love affair…
A web of tangled bare arms and legs, hands and feet and locked lips; this is the image in Alexis Dos Santos’ Unmade Beds that’s…
The moment an actor signs on to impersonate a well-known figure in a film is the moment that actor gives up any chance of delivering…