Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.
Ismael’s Ghosts simultaneously collapses and expands Arnaud Desplechin’s entire body of work.
Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts is a lucid, free-form sprawl of stories nested within stories.
Kino’s Blu-ray wisely doesn’t attempt to explain its layers with copious extras, leaving the viewer to tease out the director’s final head game.
Alain Resnais’s final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present.
Costa-Gavras’s new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.
The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director’s manipulations.
Xavier Durringer’s film unfolds as a series of closed-door meetings, semi-public negotiations, and lots of private worrying.
Trans-global cross-currents and the continued practice of neo-colonialism are at stake in the haunting Sleeping Sickness.
Angelo Cianci’s farce takes the wrong things seriously and pokes fun of nothing worth laughing at.
This Christmas, no Arnaud Desplechin fan should be without a Blu-ray player.
Rashevski’s Tango is proof that mediocrity need not always be familiar.
Grief has rarely felt quite so empty as it does in Quiet Chaos.
In under 20 minutes of screen time, Jeanne Moreau supplies the film with an otherwise absent emotional weight of reconciliation to the anguished history of WWII France.
Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t so much direct movies as conduct marathons.
It’s exciting as well as a little nerve-wracking that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s latest feature offers many firsts in his career.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long takes are intimately attuned to his ongoing thematic interest in the bonds between the past, present, and future.
Dice it any way you want, this material was, is, and will always be pretty cheap.