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The greatest red documentary filmmaker of the 1920s, the greatest documentary filmmaker of the ’20s, the greatest filmmaker . . . ever? In the alternate universe where...
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Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi–road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff,...
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Portuguese fado makes something wistfully jaunty out of inconsolable loss and so does João Pedro Rodrigues’s third feature, To Die Like a Man—a mysterious,...
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Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries—or...
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This week’s big movie may be found on TV. Arch-independent filmmaker Todd Haynes makes a characteristically sidelong move toward the mainstream with his five-part...
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Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator’s gaze. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—a movie in which the most celebrated line...
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Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist’s first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema. A...
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Coming in the wake of The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim, François Truffaut’s fourth feature, The Soft Skin, has never gotten much...
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The acme of no-budget, Buddhist-animist, faux-naïve, avant-pop magic neorealism, Apichatpong Weera-sethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a movie...
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Written, directed, and co-produced by George Nolfi (a neophyte helmer whose writing credits include The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Twelve), The Adjustment Bureau...
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The flow of history accelerates, slows down, and turns back on itself in the course of David Perlov’s six-hour Diary 1973–1983, a landmark Israeli film having its...
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We have our martyrs and they have theirs. The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria, only to be...
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The tale of a disoriented cannibal family trying to survive in the lower depths of Mexico City, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is a darkly comic social allegory...
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The pillars of the old New American Cinema have never lacked for ambition: In 1968, Andy Warhol showed a one-
time-only 24-hour movie; a few years later, Hollis Frampton...
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Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secondario Ed...
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The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 historical novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, a bestselling tale of second-century Roman...
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Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet uninflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the...
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Danish artist Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, which had its local premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, documents an anti-monument to negativity. Admirably...
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As spacey as its title suggests, Gregg Araki’s latest youth film is an occult mystery set in the ultimate SoCal college playpen. Kaboom is Scooby-Doo with sex, drugs, and...
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Fritz Lang (1890–1976) may not be Hollywood’s greatest genre director—I’d nominate Don Siegel—but, as the mad genius of juvenile trash, Lang stands...
