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,…
The recent controversy over the casting of predominantly white actors in Middle Eastern roles in Exodus: Gods and Kings is, it turns out, the least…
No stranger to treating lurid and uninviting subjects in a chilly fashion, Atom Egoyan’s glacial style of filmmaking has always been both a blessing and…
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…
In only her first feature, writer-director Jennifer Kent shows a scary assurance and maturity in plunging headfirst into the chaotic realm of psychological hysteria with…
With the recent Twilight series, the vampire myth had gotten caught in a rut, burying what had been an endlessly, richly expanding legend in a…
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…
It’s amusing to think that the V/H/S horror franchise has gone from bigger, to smaller, to smallest in the span of three films. Last year’s…
After two Hunger Games films setting the stage for revolution in the future dystopia of PanEm, audiences are apparently finally ready for a third film…
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…
Is Nacho Vigalondo prescient, or is he simply savvy enough to have tapped into our cultural obsessions with the lifestyles of the rich and famous?…
The self-consciously “epic” epic Interstellar is wildly ambitious, massive in scope, gorgeous to look at, often clumsily sentimental, very serious, and frequently overly expository. In…
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…
Alexandre Aja is an exhausting filmmaker. The director, whose ultraviolent, viscerally gory High Tension stands as one of the most notorious films in the infamous New French…
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…