There are horrors, yet the film’s overall mood is one of enchantment.
After Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wantonly prettified toy cities, Trash Humpers’s pageant of belligerent grubbiness is almost welcome.
Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists.
Steven Soderbergh may set out to expose the resonance behind a fabulist’s giggly ruses, but in the end it’s the audience who gets duped.
Visions of demented lyricism giddily punch through Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’s hack-policier surface.
With The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam gets his Fellini freak on.
Humorless and sanctimonious, Burning Plain groans with shoddy ironies and overbearing serendipity.
The White Ribbon suggests a Children of the Corn prequel played as rigid thesis.
In Antichrist, there’s no anchor to the cataract of malevolent images other than Lars von Trier’s own crawling neuroses.
Crude is both a tribute to human-rights tenacity and a sobering account of the multinational-Moloch greed that can keep justice in limbo.
Writer-director Dave Boyle’s deadly comedy peaks early with a broad lampoon of samurai movies.
Liverpool ponders the lure and absurdity of nests in a world of unending, faraway ports.
Any collection of Japanese thrillers in which Seijun Suzuki is actually not the nuttiest guy around is worth checking out.
The film earned the Dardennes a screenwriting award at Cannes, and, indeed, the plot machinery is more visible here than in their other gritty fables.
The infamous grindhouser Torso pales next to director Sergio Martino’s more inventive sleaze-thrillers.
Though not without voyeuristic subtext and sleazy kicks, Torso makes for a pretty anemic bloodfest.
The DVD release of this bold, long-unavailable tour de force should be an event to Godard-heads everywhere.
Godard’s films are records (documentaries, even) of personal interests, ecstasies, and agonies at a particular time in the artist’s life.
Its visual splendor seems designed to remedy the audience’s collective memory of the moon landing as a grainy, square image on TV.