This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
The Aviator’s Wife is valuable for being perhaps the most stifled movie that Rohmer ever made.
Õunpuu manages to portray the deep anxieties inherent in “climbing the ladder of success.”
Apocalyptic amour fou corrupts the earth in Happy End, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s adaptation of Dominique Noguez’s 1991 novel about love, loss, and nuclear bombs over Moscow.
With startling and memorable beauty, Sun Spots blends HD imagery with a slow sense of creeping terror.
The Mirror is an affectionate tribute to a way of life I’m not necessarily inclined to celebrate.
To Grandrieux, people are figures in landscapes, in fact parts of the landscape, so that the films literally become action painting.
The film brings a bleakly comic sensibility—as well as an insider’s perspective—to 60 turbulent years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Like fellow French film essayists Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, Luc Moullet is extremely playful.
The secret passion of the cinephile is to find a hidden treasure.
The extended car ride sequence in Kinatay represents the dizzying peak of Mendoza’s filmmaking.
The disappointment educed by Like You Know It All is of a qualified sort.
Patrice Chéreau may be among the working filmmakers the most attuned to the human body.
Perfect Life is a panoply of perfect, perfectly repulsive moments.
Someone recently told me that film and video artists produced 2.5 billion hours of viewing material last year.
The film is simultaneously gut-churning, heart-wrenching, and head-thunking, a smorgasbord of alienation and detonation.
The film is a compilation of deadpan vignettes about Romanian life under Ceausescu’s authoritarian ’80s rule.
The problem with Be Good is one that it shares with other, similarly ambiguous character studies about people with hidden pasts.
Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll cares not for gritty reality but merely the stuff of fairy-tale movies.
The film’s value beyond its exquisite use of setting to craft mood is a dicey question.
It’s clear from her work in Applause that Paprika Steen has a face for the camera.