Flip a coin to choose between Orlando von Einsiedel’s The White Helmets and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s Watani.
Piper’s story of a sanderling trying to transcend its fear of water feels like an outtake from a Planet Earth episode.
A victory for Asghar Farhadi would be nothing short of a rebuke to our president’s politics of fear.
“I gotta watch this now?!” said my fellow awards pundit Eric Henderson on the morning the Oscar nominations were announced.
The effect of writer-director Christopher Smith’s film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself.
The film’s sense of nostalgia is ultimately a reflection of how little the film asks of its audience.
It’s a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller’s patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.
It’s at its funniest when sending up the neuroses we’ve come to associate with romantic attachment and rituals.
See below for a list of the films that just missed making it onto our list of the best films of 2016, followed by our contributors’ individual ballots.
“I pray but I’m lost, am I just praying to silence?”
By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.
Ouija: Origin of Evil complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.
The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.
Tim Burton’s direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.
Every incident in the film is a time-biding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.
One may be excused for thinking The Exorcist is also in part an adaptation of The Thorn Birds.
Don’t Breathe’s sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.
One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.
The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.
Train to Busan’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.