A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.
Jazmín López’s Leones is a classically mundane scenario, executed beautifully in 35mm.
Li Luo’s personal catharsis trumps whatever traditional value there is to retelling Journey to the West.
Jards is a jam session.
Essentially 90-minute promo video carefully orchestrated by the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg and his handlers.
It practices the same sin that gets nonprofits into hot water back in the real world: lack of accountability.
David Guy Levy, unlike David Fincher, punishes his characters as well as his audience with a naughty kid’s glee
Common stereotypes about the Roma (gypsy) character—spunky, irate, crass—are put to the test in Mona Nicoara’s Our School.
56 Up works as yet another summit reached by Michael Apted.
Sometimes a film describes itself in miniature without realizing it.
As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.
The Law in These Parts is a film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
RZA’s deliriously stone-faced dedication lodges the film firmly between a kōan and a limerick.
The sometimes cloying formalist whimsy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems admirably up-front compared to Jean-Marc Vallée’s tactile, supposedly realistic whimsy.
The film invites comparison to Stephen Chow’s work, but Stephen Fung and his crew have no interest in Chow’s meticulous choreography or eye for stark composition.
The Thieves is a dazzling heist film that can’t help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy.
What distinguished Jack Arnold’s pictures from mutant spinoffs/knockoffs is even more imperative to sci-fi today than it was in 1954: wonderment.
Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don’t need to.