Almayer’s Folly is a work of engulfing jungles and rivers, vehement and incantatory speeches, and piercing female gazes in front of and behind the camera.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are modern cinema’s poets laureate of working-class marginalization and spiritual crises.
Tacita Dean approaches the problem of filming the notoriously reticent Cy Twombly by finding the most cramped, hidden spaces to stick her camera.
Unlike the dire Red Riding Trilogy, Dreileben occurs in vertical rather than horizontal time.
Restless mostly suggests a fuzzy remake of Four Nights of a Dreamer starring the cast of Twilight.
The best special effect in Danny Boyle’s hectic, ultimately tension-dispersing latest is James Franco’s performance.
Vincent Gallo’s high-pitched whine is back in full force for his latest effort to seize the title of cinema’s great, obnoxious total filmmaker from Jerry Lewis.
François Ozon’s latest is more like Pastiche.
Miral is a middlebrow stew of distracting star cameos, stilted speechifying, and references to The Battle of Algiers.
Takashi Miike embraces his inner classicist with 13 Assassins, a sturdy yet surprisingly conventional samurai saga.
Only tutus and pointe shoes separate the dainty stage in Black Swan from the gladiatorial ring of The Wrestler.
The Town is a fatuous star vehicle that leaves little doubt about who gets the most soulful close-ups.
After Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wantonly prettified toy cities, Trash Humpers’s pageant of belligerent grubbiness is almost welcome.
Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists.
Visions of demented lyricism giddily punch through Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’s hack-policier surface.
With The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam gets his Fellini freak on.
The White Ribbon suggests a Children of the Corn prequel played as rigid thesis.
In Antichrist, there’s no anchor to the cataract of malevolent images other than Lars von Trier’s own crawling neuroses.
For every project finished there are numerous others abandoned or left incomplete.