Bernstein’s gifts as a storyteller are less narrative than atmospheric.
The film probes man’s interior and interpersonal conflicts while menacing him with external supernatural forces.
The direction shows a loose-limbed, sideways-glancing touch that hits the gags without suffocating them.
Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter Man From Plains is a poignant portrait of a great man.
Helvetica is a nifty, proudly nerdy acknowledgement of the effect letters can have on our consciousness.
David Cronenberg’s contemplation of codes of masculine honor is deliciously transgressive.
Rouben Mamoulian’s critical reputation as a filmmaker has always seesawed uncertainly.
Getting worked up over Shoot ‘Em Up’s excessive bloodshed is playing right into its hands.
The closing scene is so modestly pitch-perfect that the perfectly average preceding material barely deserves it.
Why Cruising? Why now?
James Wan continues to beat us over the head, though this time he has the decency to do so with some semblance of human emotion.
Rob Zombie’s gut understanding of what makes ’70s horror so great is unfortunately glimpsed in only short, sporadic bursts in Halloween.
Both figuratively and literally, Patricio Guzmán’s latest represents an excavation.
Director Neten Chokling envisions Milarepa’s vengeance as a spectacle of gaudy digital effects worthy of Xena: Princess Warrior.
Straw Dogs is about man’s quest to identify himself as masculine through the self-actualizing power of violence.
Alibi is awkwardly suspended between the gliding camera of silent cinema and the stagnant medium-shot of early talkies.
Lake of Fire provides gruesome, incontrovertible images to complement the film’s deliberations about morality.
The film is a textbook example of a director prizing himself over his material.
Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is, for the most part, some sort of incredible.
You give me a plucky loser trying to overcome the odds at any athletic endeavor, and I’m there.
Balls of Fury looks like another sports-spoof throwaway, but it does have a piercing reason for being.