In The Last Station, four dimly imagined characters act out the drama surrounding the final days in the life of Leo Tolstoy.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that the real story lies in what Darius Marder has left off the screen.
The film’s pleasures are to be found almost entirely in the meticulously recreated period design.
The film dissolves into an amorphous, uncertain haze out of which, finally, it can’t see its way out.
The most audacious thing about writer-director Peter Rodger’s Oh My God may be its appallingly bad taste.
The film gets at something essential about man’s sense of his own dignity and the importance to the American notion of self.
Frederick Wiseman is concerned with process, the process of art’s creation, and, to a lesser degree, the process of an institution’s functioning.
Jared Hess still seems to see his characters as little more than objects of comedic fun.
Storm effectively builds its moral and political investigation into the fabric of its central court case.
An Irish-set comedy-drama, Turning Green isn’t particularly comic or compellingly dramatic.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that this is one film that already has its eye on the next chapter.
In The Wedding Song, director Karin Albou shrewdly links national politics with its domestic sexual counterpart.
Following the recent release of Criterion’s Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes box set, the posthumous celebration of a Japanese master continues.
In Shōhei Imamura’s fatalistic vision, individual agency is soon dissolved by the forces of history.
The recent proliferation of documentaries detailing the world’s ills has been at once encouraging and disheartening.
For a project that aims to be so location specific, most of the segments seem largely isolated from their nominal settings.
Trucker stands as an object lesson in the triumph of intelligent commitment over shopworn material.
Adventures is more miss than hit, mostly because Ari Gold plays his character too broadly.
The film is a ravishing dose of pure cinema, and a litmus test for the viewer’s capacity to withstand Pedro Costa’s exacting formalism.
Though not among Jacques Rivette great films, Around a Small Mountain shares a lot of qualities with the director’s best work.