Criterion does right by Olivier Assayas’s lovely tone poem, his best film since Late August, Early September.
How much further do we have to go to find ways to eradicate terror without abdicating our shared values?
If you spend an entire career chronicling power relationships among the incurably self-absorbed, is that not in itself a form of self-absorption?
Jerzy Skolimowski’s film is only interested in soiling its viewer with a cheap and gimmicky moral relativism.
Films that try to convey a state of disorientation live and die by their central metaphors.
The past may be decomposing, but the kids are all right.
Gus Van Sant’s haunting and immediate Paranoid Park understands adolescence as a kind of first draft.
The last third’s attempt to frame the drama as King Lear-level tragedy plays as an unnecessary reach.
Married Life is only interested in its own ironic machinations.
In the interlude between disaster and reconciliation, Éric Rohmer treats the audience to various symposiums on the nature of romantic fidelity.
The image is a little more saturated than I remember seeing in the theater, but the stylized look comes across beautifully.
In the audio department, the film curiously gets nothing more than a mono track.
The setup for John Singleton’s latest urban drama is pure western-movie lore.
This year’s most celebrated Sundance smash, Hustle & Flow is little more than a calculated bid for Hollywood megabucks.
Scott Caan’s directorial debut certainly aims to tribute.
Don Argott’s documentary initially plays as a fawning postcard from the world of alternative education.
The Interpreter wants nothing more than to be tasteful.
Mondovino is a remarkably focused docu-essay, beckoning audiences to form their own opinion on a complex and timely topic.
Perpetual paranoiac Woody Allen seems unusually distracted from his own mortality lately.
Cinévardaphoto abounds in ambiguities, highlighting a photo’s ability to freeze a moment in time while time inevitably marches on.