Credit hometown boy Nichols with getting the look and feel of rural Arkansas right.
Cosmopolis alternates between mannered repression and cold frenzy.
Kiarostami transplants his customary techniques to the soil of Japanese culture with unquestionable success.
Reygadas’s new film is a textbook example of how to tell a basic story in the most complicated, off-putting manner conceivable.
Self-critique or self-indulgence, Holy Motors isn’t afraid to attempt everything under the sun.
Anchored by an impressively modulated performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt is otherwise an indecisive, weak-kneed film.
Dominik mines an altogether different vein, worlds apart from the mournful, meditative, Malickian The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
The staging is so endlessly, even incestuously, self-referential as to earn the epithet mise-en-abyme.
Spectatorship, being forced to watch from a remove while uncontrollable events transpire, is one of Amour’s subterranean themes.
The slender facts in this particular case can’t even begin to withstand the mammoth weight of a 150-minute running time.
Hillcoat’s latest cements the mainstreaming of an original.
Garrone follows up Gomorrah with a more contained treatise on surveillance as transcendence and entertainment.
The cinematography, by longtime Seidl collaborator Wolfgang Thaler, in tandem with Ed Lachman, is particularly fine.
Student attempts to do for Crime and Punishment what Darezhan Omirbaev’s earlier Chouga did for Anna Karenina.
The film is an intensification of the rigorous aesthetic preoccupations and occasionally precious thematic concerns that have long marked Anderson’s films.
What emerges most saliently from Mintzer’s interviews is Gray’s commitment to the idea of problem solution in creating his style.
So it is that the one year we didn’t stick to our frilliest-always-wins guns here, we came up short.
Few would argue against The Tree of Life being one of the very best films of the year, but it remains the biggest wild card of awards season.
No film this year is poised to collect more Academy Award nominations than Michel Hazanavicius’s silent movie about the silent era.
Note to self: Be careful what you wish for.