The festival’s greatest singularity is two-fold: its lack of pretense and judicious curatorial eye.
Mikio Naruse recognizes the futility of prayers in the face of a harsh, perhaps genetically predisposed reality.
Ramin Bahrani casts nearly every scene as a disingenuous, pedantic example of the cosmos’s callous cruelty.
I never knew Scott, so my sadness is a viewer’s sadness, purely selfish.
The elephant in the room of The Thing Called Love is a desiccated River Phoenix
In terms of pure hyperspeed velocity, even breakneck turntable maestro Mix Master Mike has nothing on Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!.
Wild Tigers I Have Known self-consciously attempts to stake its claim to a tract of the queer cinema landscape.
Its subtle analysis of shadowy tropes proves both a continuation and a deepening of Preminger’s use of moral ambiguity as a tool of human insight.
Did you hear the one about the gay Icelandic soccer team?
L’Iceberg is a more than welcome breath of fresh air.
Ryan Fleck’s carefully observed Half Nelson doesn’t overcome its origins as a padded-out expansion of the filmmaker’s 2002 short Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Oy vey. The film gives Jews an insufferable holiday family comedy to call their own.
Sangre reveals Amat Escalante’s kinship to the prol-obsessed cinema of Bruno Dumont, only the director forgets to spike the story’s punch.
No Way Out borrows the template for socially conscious filmmaking from both Gentlemen’s Agreement and Crossfire.
Failure to Launch is a not-so-distant cousin of those happy-go-lucky herpes commercials that play on television.
The film is so unreal that only a starved and weak-kneed cinesnob will be suckered in by it.
Cavite posits a wake-up call without ever really embodying what its lead character is waking from.
It is to director Auraeus Solito and screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto’s credit that they view their characters through a quietly revolutionary queer perspective.
Consensus is not fixed. Shout loud enough and long enough, and you can change it.
PETA members may take to The Shaggy Dog.
The Oscar telecast was generally well paced and well judged.