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…
With a film festival as stacked to the gills as the TIFF, thematic trends are bound to pop up. Last year, doppelgängers appeared to…
Another year, another insanely packed Toronto International Film Festival. While there are certainly titles premiering at TIFF this year that interest me, my festival…
The first thing you may notice about Jersey Boys is the lighting—or more specifically, the light sources. Set mostly in darkened rooms that look as if…
Edward Yang has often been lumped in with the “slow cinema” of his Taiwanese compatriot, Hou Hsiao-hsien. And it’s true that Yang’s 2000 film, Yi Yi, moves quite slowly, basking…
For a while, it seemed like 2013 had front-loaded its highlights; many films making our Top 20 either played the festival circuit in 2012 before…
Today marks the return of Walter Hill to the big screen—with the Sylvester Stallone-starring Bullet to the Head, the director’s first theatrically released film since 2002’s Undisputed.…
All one need do is look at the many and varied riches cinema had to offer in 2012 to disprove the crowing — yes,…
Abbas Kiarostami has mostly stayed away from love stories—he tends to find it impossible in his films to recreate situations that even remotely hint…
But let’s not fool ourselves into believing that the original TRON was ever anything more than a curious novelty with some then-groundbreaking special effects. The…
There’s a scene about halfway through Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s tepid The Tourist during which an Italian policeman appears to doubt Johnny Depp’s mistaken…
Early critical response to Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit, a faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’s western novel, has been mostly positive, yet many…
Boxing is a sport dependent on mental strategy, despite what its surface-level brutality suggests. In The Fighter, the physically tough but emotionally stricken welterweight…
Six years after an extraterrestrial race landed on Earth, a photojournalist is dispatched to Mexico to escort an American heiress back to the States.…
Just as Woody Allen keeps demonstrating a preference for leaving behind a depressing legacy of quantity over quality, that other favorite Great American Director,…
The American dissects the emotional enigmas of those working in two of the oldest professions — assassins and prostitutes, respectively. Its cryptic characters depend…
No one’s going to argue that the Nazi propaganda machine, helmed by Joseph Goebbels, didn’t exploit the power of the filmed image. Case in…
Isolation is a universal theme, but it can also describe an intrinsically American experience of teenage angst. This contextual difference firmly separates Let the…
Self-seriousness can mortally wound the work of a pulp filmmaker who depends on his flashy style. In the case of British director Neil Marshall,…