This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
The film delivers an intriguing message about mental illness as we understand it to manifest itself within us.
Every year, New Directors/New Films showcases the latest works from directors more or less new to the cine-block.
I took almost no notes during 35 Shots of Rum, because it seemed kind of beside the point: Claire Denis’s pleasures are almost all immediate.
Maria Beatty’s Bandaged is the S&M filmmaker’s foray into the indie mainstream.
Agnès Jaoui’s Let It Rain is the kind of film it’s hard not to be snotty about.
Sympathy comes at a premium in Chouga.
The problem with Gomorrah isn’t that it feels incomplete or underdeveloped.
Both The Headless Woman and Tony Manero are staggering in different ways.
What makes Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy so haunting is mostly ineffable.
Happy-Go-Lucky works because the outlines are banal but the performances are phenomenally lived-in.
This year’s edition seems most conspicuous for not bearing the teeth marks of Dario’s daughter Asia.
Steven Soderbergh’s immensely anticipated Che trains a cool head and a sharp eye on Che Guevara.
In Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman indulges all his thematic quirks like a dieting matron lunging at a box of bonbons.
Atom Egoyan’s latest finds the director back in Canadian Traumaland after his Hollywood sojourn in Where the Truth Lies.
The ringside clashes, as befits the director of Requiem for a Dream, remain baroque visions of corporeal abuse.
Blindness feels less like a metaphor for urban isolation than just a zombie movie in which the zombies decided not to show up.
Fraternal auteurs aren’t having much critical support this year.
Appaloosa is horseshit, mostly.
Fears of The Sky Crawlers being overcome with Western tropes are dispelled as soon as Oshii Mamoru’s trademark, oddly grave pet beagle waddles on screen.
The stand-out, Dog Tags, vividly dramatizes its characters’ desires, all rooted in the decrepitude of land and memory.