A masterpiece and a doodle make for an odd but worthy double bill for Powell enthusiasts.
A jumpy, erudite cinephile, Olivier Assayas uses Maggie Cheung’s three days in Paris to take stock of cinema as the century comes to an end.
Alternately dreamy and scratchy, Assayas’s meta-satire still beguiles.
Of more interest to completists, but any journey with Werner Herzog is worth taking.
Hate is a dog from hell in White Dog, Samuel Fuller’s abused and abandoned late-career masterpiece about homegrown racism.
Fuller’s hound from hell chews Crash‘s can’t-we-get-along platitudes and spits them out.
A fabulous package for a frigid Cold War chestnut.
Martin Ritt’s grim The Spy Who Came in from the Cold plays like an anti-thriller companion piece to the director’s acclaimed anti-western Hud.
A throwaway package for a pair of interesting Rossellini curios.
Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen were bound to work together.
Our jingoistic era might do well to revisit Gance’s compassionate visions.
Fertile to a fault, Abel Gance’s films seldom settle into a single format, style or genre.
A package of lacerating outrage from one of the greatest of all filmmakers.
The artistic psyche has never been more joylessly explored than in Synecdoche, New York.
Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t awful, though it’s certainly an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film.
A tasteful rendition of a story that demanded a more macabre grasp.
No trace of cuteness can be found in The Match Factory Girl, the toughest and most concentrated of the trilogy’s tragicomedies.
It’s too easy a joke to say that Blindness lacks vision.
Soderbergh’s professed neutrality toward Guevara’s life and times succeeds mostly in leeching the emotion out of them.
Ashes of Time doesn’t starve for hyperkinetic genre calisthenics.