Black Swan is maddening, uneven, often bonkers, but it’s also often strangely beautiful.
Circo has the succinct haunting contradiction of a good Steinbeck story, perhaps something out of Tortilla Flat.
Gerardine Wurzburg’s Wretches & Jabberers is a recruiting video, not cinema.
The film is a strange, well-intentioned mess that builds to an unusually effective ending.
Conor Horgan has a nice eye and ear for disturbingly intimate little incidents that tell us more than any series of expository speeches could ever hope to.
A tasteful, appropriate presentation of a canny, entertaining, and, yes, moving art-reform doc.
Haggis never explores the compromises and sacrifices that Liam Neeson’s terrific cameo prepares us for.
The film is either an insane, almost entirely unquestioning celebration of all crime movie clichés or a chilling subversion of them.
The film is so laughably Freudian it could play as a parody of certain acclaimed horror film studies.
The film could work as a sick stunt, but Koen Mortier largely plays the scenario straight.
Safina Uberoi’s A Good Man feels incomplete, perhaps too tasteful.
A fine presentation of a modestly pleasurable, if maddeningly familiar, Woody Allen film.
Immigration Tango is the kind of surreally terrible comedy you’d come across on HBO at three in the morning…in the 1980s.
Films like Hideaway reaffirm how much most movies withhold from us.
An unusually beautiful horror film that understands that adolescence isn’t one fixed state of past tense.
A fine presentation of an absurd yet promising horror debut.
It seems to miss the irony of what the recent proliferation of faux-exploitation films actually partially represents.
A good transfer of a masterfully made, if somewhat slight, film.
A decent presentation of an uneven but unusually intense crime thriller.
An okay presentation of an actor’s workshop masquerading as a movie.