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,…
Directorial collaborations are notoriously uneven and almost always judged by the parts while ignoring the sum. A successful portmanteau relies on either a galvanizing…
In its early ’90s milieu, its parade of ghastly coifs and mustaches, and its earnest attempts to mine modern investigative journalism for gleeful belly…
Paranormal Activity reputedly had its genesis in director Oren Peli’s lifelong fear of ghosts, which led him to do intensive research into haunting, demonic…
A postmodern mash-up of horror movie fun, The House of the Devil is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating homage to ’70s horror films, set firmly…
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…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man…
Not unlike this year’s other half-baked sci-fi social commentary, District 9, Surrogates begins with a montage of thoroughly phony newsreel footage that forecasts the…
Zombie movies are a dime a dozen and, at this point, most U.S. citizens have either written, starred in, or been an extra in…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become,…
Antichrist is an exorcism of the foulness and unmitigated hatred stewing inside notorious provocateur Lars von Trier. Its production follows a crippling depression which…
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…
The single worst thing that ever happened to Michael Moore — as artist, as thinker, as gleefully sardonic agitator — was becoming incredibly rich…
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…
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…
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…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do…
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…