That South Korean girl group 4Minute started 2015 with a self-conscious “revamp” of their brand isn’t surprising, since this kind of maneuver is seen often in the…
Defined by no genre so much as she is her deep roots in Arkansas, and an uneasiness toward her Pentecostal upbringing, Iris DeMent is still more-often-than-not filed…
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…
What Frederick Wiseman is doing barely constitutes as documentary filmmaking anymore — there are no talking heads, no narration, all sound is diegetic, and only…
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…