Carson Lund

What makes Alice in the Cities so noteworthy is the tender, lifelike rapport cultivated between Vogler and Rottländer.

The insistence of Green’s gaze throughout the film encourages us to look beyond the mechanisms of speech and behavior at the more uncanny movements of the conscience.

The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission.

In the simultaneously heady and lyrical The Creation of Meaning, we're obviously implicated in that comment, as the film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.

Thomas Heise’s documentary seeks to excavate real human thought and feeling beneath the haze of larger political structures.

The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.

Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.

The film navigates a tricky space between pathos and absurdity and often turns on a dime from one to the other.

It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.

This is a sports tale in which the character building has almost nothing to do with the sport.

Cohen here is ever the model of grace and dignity around his peers, if not exactly entirely at peace with himself.

It showcases a genuine fascination with the mind/body split engendered by Skyping, online dating, and constant app usage through a plot that doesn't fuel itself on received wisdom.

The final optimism of the film's worldview lands with a conviction that's rare in contemporary Hollywood cinema—a resilience that's strong enough for Liam Neeson to ride out on.

The Juniper Tree’s peculiar pedigree as an American indie fueled by European arthouse tropes and constructed with a flair for the avant-garde and the handmade marks it as a welcome rediscovery.

If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.

Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film's folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.

The mannered direction is at its most effective when it inspires an enhanced sensitivity to the import of every gesture, visual or verbal.

Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.

That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.

What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.

Fantastic Planet’s blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children’s film and the adult drama.

Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia's own art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life and socioeconomic position.

Woman of the Year certainly has its other auxiliary charms: beautifully textured lighting by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg; a luminous, if limited, performance by Fay Bainter as Tess’s motherly aunt; and some enchanting simulations of soft winter snowfall. But it’s hard not to feel berated, in a time that’s seeing the resurgence of a pernicious nationalism, by both the film’s anti-feminist slant and its insistent compulsion to put a box around Americanism.

The absence of anything traditionally "painterly" reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the kind of capitalistic pro-growth machinations on display in the film.

Even more diverse than the film's historical material is its eccentric mash-up of styles and approaches.

Flowers of Shanghai operates on the whole much like Yoshihiro’s music, filling your senses like a thick haze, holding you rapt without petitioning for your attention.

The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.