This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
Aleksandr Mindadze’s Innocent Saturday ultimately adds up to a lot of nasty hysteria.
One country’s classics are another’s unknowns.
The latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne left me speechless.
Part Coen brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like abortion and midlife crises.
With The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius stretches a feather-light gimmick to feature-length.
It’s ironic that the talking-heads interviews in Alex Stapleton’s documentary feel so self-conscious.
Béla Tarr’s supposedly final film sees the filmmaker exhibit the tenacity and methodical approach of a crime scene investigator.
The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they’re even asked.
Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, the film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and driven deep into our hearts.
Is it possible for a cinematographer to be considered an auteur even more than the directors for which he works?
The film lacks the fire and emotional depth of Almodóvar’s best work.
Considering the film’s title, it’s indefensible how little McQueen actually attempts to explore any of his characters’ shame.
I Wish is a truly benevolent vision of childhood.
Even when the strain to invest genre material with epic-scale profundity sometimes shows, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia still manages to weave a hypnotic spell, longueurs and all.
Cyril’s story is a tragically real one with symbolic overtones, and it’s one that’s brought to painfully wrenching life.
Every character’s gesture is paradoxically bombastic and consequential.
It’s best to approach Two Years at Sea as an environmental immersion more than anything else.
The film is Ferrara’s barebones, superficial musing on the hypothetical “What would happen if everyone knew the world was ending”?
Blame it on the idiot box.
Santiago Mitre Mitre infuses The Student with a fleet political-thriller pace that can be said to reflect the main character’s mindset.