When its third act erupts into full-blown theatrical maximalism, it practically turns into a Brian De Palma film.
Though long considered a minor late film, it’s now clear that Monsieur Verdoux is Chaplin’s masterpiece.
It should come as no surprise that the special features presented here run very Scorsese-heavy.
The film spends its first act establishing a flimsy emotional groundwork before gleefully taking a sledgehammer to it just seconds into act two.
Carruth’s Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
This is the rare case of a film about a social outcast whose relational difficulty isn’t rooted in readily identifiable character deficiencies.
Brad Anderson’s film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
It may be a cartoon, but the film’s deep engagement with municipal history is very much real.
Though it’s long been eclipsed by the Luis Buñuel remake, Renoir’s version endures as a bracing, deeply strange film.
The action merely meanders when it should be hurtling forward, running in circles when one expects it to head toward a conclusion or some sense of resolution.
Personal, understated, and surprisingly strange Sinister is one of the most compelling horror films of the past decade.
The film is an amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics.
War Witch, though ostensibly a character study, is nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film.
Motorway takes an appropriately soft-shoe approach to one of the more endearing action-film premises in recent memory.
If nothing else, Dark Skies is the definitive horror film for the Tea Party era.
A certain tendency of the American cinema is to confuse dramatic seriousness with moral seriousness.
The Kid with a Bike reconfirms Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s reputation as masters of the modern class drama.
One of the most accomplished American dramas of the 1990s arrives on Blu-ray sporting a suitably exceptional A/V transfer.
Whether you pay the gold price or the iron price, HBO’s top-notch box set of the show’s second season is well-worth the investment.
The film trades entirely in falsely literate seriousness and maudlin high tragedy.