Even as we get caught up in the Shakespeare drama, we are always aware that we are watching a group of men who are incarcerated.
Kiarostami’s images evoke a sense of theatrical artifice rippling through the real world.
Ang Lee’s latest, Life of Pi, signals its visual strengths from its very first frame.
Night Across the Street too often degenerates into long perorations or overworked metaphors.
Memories Look at Me is an unusually personal portrait of family life in China.
Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Here and There is as studiously unself-dramatizing as its subject.
Throughout, Michell and screenwriter Richard Nelson keep you at arm’s length from Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Christian Petzold’s close-to-the-vest approach fits in the context of a narrative that takes place in 1980 East Germany
As always, alongside the marquee selections, the committee has programmed a diverse selection of under-the-radar films.
Part Coen brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like abortion and midlife crises.
With The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius stretches a feather-light gimmick to feature-length.
It’s ironic that the talking-heads interviews in Alex Stapleton’s documentary feel so self-conscious.
Béla Tarr’s supposedly final film sees the filmmaker exhibit the tenacity and methodical approach of a crime scene investigator.
The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they’re even asked.
Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, the film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and driven deep into our hearts.
Is it possible for a cinematographer to be considered an auteur even more than the directors for which he works?
The film lacks the fire and emotional depth of Almodóvar’s best work.
Considering the film’s title, it’s indefensible how little McQueen actually attempts to explore any of his characters’ shame.
Even when the strain to invest genre material with epic-scale profundity sometimes shows, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia still manages to weave a hypnotic spell, longueurs and all.
Cyril’s story is a tragically real one with symbolic overtones, and it’s one that’s brought to painfully wrenching life.