Just four films into an already distinguished career, South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most formidable genre directors. His…
The weakest of Pedro Almodóvar’s four films this decade, the oddly muted melodrama Broken Embraces is also something no other work from the Spanish master has…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man seems…
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 film’s…
Antichrist is an exorcism of the foulness and unmitigated hatred stewing inside notorious provocateur Lars von Trier. Its production follows a crippling depression which stifled…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do backflips…
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 quivering…
A web of tangled bare arms and legs, hands and feet and locked lips; this is the image in Alexis Dos Santos’ Unmade Beds that’s…
The summer movie blockbuster with half a brain, or the one that suggests its audience actually has one, is often revered like the one-eyed man…
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s darkly compelling second film, Tony Manero, is a sadistic character study set in 1978 Santiago. It’s unrelenting and often unpleasant to…
Not unlike last year’s Academy Award-winning doc Man on Wire (which also played at the Provincetown Film Festival), Louie Psihoyos’ The Cove utilizes familiar narrative…
German actress Nina Hoss has a central role in Christian Petzold’s second feature, Jerichow, one of the best films of 2009’s first half, and now…
Three American soldiers pace cautiously around a cluster of bombs in an Iraqi village as children from balconies and storekeepers from street-level doorways follow their…
With his late-career peak, 1992’s Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen explored the rocky slope of marriage in all its complex infidelities and regrets. Since around…
Despite a general indifference toward Tony Scott’s taut, but largely uninspired remake of the 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, this critic…
Pixar welcomes us back into the realm of lighter fare with Up, the esteemed animation studio’s tenth film, and, at an agreeable 90 minutes, arguably…
There’s likely to be no better opening sequence in a film this year than the one found in Austrian director Gotz Spielmann’s fifth feature, Revanche.…
Ramin Bahrani’s first two films, 2006’s Man Push Cart and 2008’s Chop Shop, wear the Iranian-American director’s neorealist influences proudly, and their release marked the…
It’s a pain to review omnibus films. To do so is to review (in this case at least) three separate features, weighing the hits and…
The Band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” plays during the opening sequence of Jody Hill’s new black comedy, Observe and Report,…