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…
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…
It’s been a long 10 days at the 2014 LFF, but I’m back with news of films from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia,…
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…
War in cinema is often treated either as a crucible upon which manhood is tested and goodness defended (Saving Private Ryan) or as a portrait…
Jorge R. Gutierrez wants to teach people about his heritage. He also wants to make colorful, energetic animated films to dazzle a wide audience. With…
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,…
If I’m overloaded on caffeine and discussing the virtues of Keira Knightley with a random Italian woman, it must be that time of year again.…
Few current documentaries seem as of-the-moment as Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters, a film shot through with pulsating clarity and startling ambition. It follows Jay Reinke,…
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…
The success of James Wan’s The Conjuring last year, like that of Paranormal Activity back in 2009, points to a wave of purely affective horror…
David Fincher’s Gone Girl immediately announces its intentions to deconstruct everyday images with a deceptive opening-credits sequence consisting of shots of empty houses, “for sale”…
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…
The last time director Antoine Fuqua and actor Denzel Washington teamed up, back in 2001, Washington ended up scoring a Best Actor Oscar trophy for…
Having been put on the map by Coraline and Paranorman, stop-motion studio Laika returns with The Boxtrolls, a film which, while ostensibly possessing the same eye-catching visuals…
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…