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 Extremity canon, has a maximalist style, a sort of throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks approach that yields twice as many miscues for every moment of batshit brilliance.…
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 The Book of Life, Gutierrez manages to scratch both itches at once. It’s his first credit as a director and his sixth as…
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, Jessica Oreck’s eminently perceptive documentary The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga serves a narrative double-duty. As a visual introduction to the ways…
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. Yes, I’m at my fourth London Film Festival, having now established myself as a long-term resident of the U.K. capital. The festival is…
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 gets into what looks like a fatal car accident and keeps moving like he’s the Terminator. But that moment also liberates the film…
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” signs, back alleys, and closed-up storefronts. Sure, there could be a socioeconomic subtext, some “How We Live Now” statement in this montage, but…
With a film festival as stacked to the gills as the TIFF, thematic trends are bound to pop up. Last year, doppelgängers appeared to be a trend, with films like Enemy, The Double and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. This year, with the first three films…
Another year, another insanely packed Toronto International Film Festival. While there are certainly titles premiering at TIFF this year that interest me, my festival experience so far has mostly been spent catching up with titles that played at Cannes, which, sadly, I was unable to attend this year…
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 all the air’s been sucked out of them, numerous shot point to light sources in the foreground: table lamps at a nightclub, spotlights shining…
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 in wide shots and long takes, and impressing upon the viewer a deliberate, contemplative tempo. But that film represents a logical maturation of the relatively livelier A Brighter…
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 finally getting their official theatrical runs Stateside (Like Someone in Love, Frances Ha, and our top pick) or they premiered in May of this…
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. His two-hander action poetry has surely been missed; it’s the kind of tough, taciturn, no-nonsense genre filmmaking that’s frequently dismissed by middlebrow critics and sorely…
All one need do is look at the many and varied riches cinema had to offer in 2012 to disprove the crowing — yes, once again this year — from certain quarters about the “death of cinema.” Digital may be overtaking celluloid as the medium of choice for…
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 at intimacy, his art being so closely monitored by authorities whose conservative religious values disallow any such representation. Through the Olive Trees is the closest…
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 story of video game designer Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who, while attempting to exact revenge on the software corporation that stole his work, is actually…
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 identity alibi not because it stretches credulity, but because it is so boring. Of course, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning this if it weren’t…
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 mask their praise with trepidation. Critics have rightfully celebrated the film’s technical prowess and classical feel, so most of their skepticism boils down to…
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 boxer “Irish” Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg) has a simple plan and sticks to it despite all odds. Mickey takes a lot of punches, wearing…
Six years after an extraterrestrial race landed on Earth, a photojournalist is dispatched to Mexico to escort an American heiress back to the States. After they’re robbed, the pair must travel through the so-called Infected Zone to make it back home. That’s pretty much all there is to…
Just as Woody Allen keeps demonstrating a preference for leaving behind a depressing legacy of quantity over quality, that other favorite Great American Director, Clint Eastwood, also seems intent on putting out as many movies as he possibly can before he heads for the hereafter. The strategy paid…
The American dissects the emotional enigmas of those working in two of the oldest professions — assassins and prostitutes, respectively. Its cryptic characters depend on anonymity, and when the cracks of identity start to show and their surface-level resolve begins to erode, death is most certainly around the…