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,…
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre bests its Disneyfied cousin Slumdog Millionaire in nearly every way. Whereas Danny Boyle’s film is frenetically shot, frantically paced, and…
Following 2006’s Half Nelson, a convincing depiction of friendship between a 13-year-old and her crack-addict teacher (a role which Ryan Gosling won an Academy Award…
Many of cinema’s most divisive filmmakers are accused of betraying the story they’re trying to tell by utilizing various stylistic affectations. Of course, this is…
Amy Adams is quite an actress. Excluding her forgettable role as the middle-nun in Doubt last year, Adams has turned in consistently compelling and nuanced…
Everlasting it may not be, but, at 131 minutes, Jan Troell’s new Swedish melodrama isn’t exactly short. It plods, and it does so while telling…
The International, the new thriller from director Tom Tykwer, could have been dismissed as an easy knee-jerk reaction to our current economic crisis, but the…
In Paul McGuigan’s dopey superhero techno-thriller, Push, the Asian mob bad guys’ superpower is screaming really loud. They would best be called “screamers,” but their…
Awarded the Palm D’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Laurent Cantet’s fluid and free-form drama, The Class, commits itself to the natural, unaffected representation…
Thor Freudenthal’s Hotel For Dogs, based very loosely on a 1971 children’s book of the same name, succeeds at doing exactly what it wants to…
Call Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir — a compendium of recollections and remembrances of an old man (Folman), concerning the massacre of Lebanese citizens in…
David Fincher has always enjoyed taking on pretty extreme, often ambitious projects. He adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, a mind-bending thriller about secret underground…
What Woody Allen just doesn’t seem to get anymore — overlooking the fact that his dialog is basically paraphrased versions of the same stuff he…
A few weeks back we presented you with our lists of the best films of 2008, so far. Without much fanfare we now share our…