Chris Cabin

Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun.

Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.

Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, Some Like It Hot was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner.

An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.

Isao Takahata makes survival the thematic core of the story, but he never degrades his characters or fetishizes their suffering.

Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent.

As played by an eloquently beleaguered Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is arguably the most vivid and complex character the Coens have dreamed up since Marge Gunderson.

The film's criticism isn't primarily rooted in satire, but rather in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.

Pawel Pawlikowski shows great empathy toward the idea of illusions as a way of attaining emotional stability in even the most brutal terrain.

The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman's fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle's attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.

Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.

Even now, It Happened One Night carries the unmistakable tenor of a breakout hit, fueled by confidently zippy repartee and manic comic invention that almost none of the innumerable pretenders to the throne of romantic comedy can match.

For Lloyd, Thalberg, and the writers, the point of the film was to tell a compelling story and, like the Bounty’s inebriated physician creating various tall tales to explain his wooden leg, facts and meanings ultimately just got in their way of crafting a great entertainment.

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 Great Escape is that rare war film that doesn’t fully indulge in assumed nationalism, save for the fact that everyone speaks English. Sturges never touches on the essential hollowness and cruel pageantry of war, but he does the next best thing by depicting an international effort where victory, no matter how short-lived, depends on the cooperation of myriad talents, rather than the gruff can-do attitude of an unbreakable chosen one.

For the most part, the documentary succeeds in conveying a galvanizing sense of what made Winehouse so immediately engaging.

Thematically, Cinderella preaches something far more easily tangible and relatable to the everyday than a flying elephant, romantic pooches, or mining dwarves: respect and understanding for hard work and those who tirelessly labor with no need for false praise or special consideration.

There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it.

Throughout, Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.

The lack of sentimentality helps focus the viewer on what the film depicts exceptionally well, namely wanton bad behavior and enthralling, wall-to-wall ass-kicking.

Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.

It's in this view of the military life, and competition in general, that Porco Rosso reveals itself to be one of Miyazaki’s most personal works.

Shot by Charles Lang, one of the greatest American cinematographers to ever live, Charade is some sort of miraculous entertainment, self-aware and self-parodying yet never distancing or detached. Hepburn is the audience’s funny and flighty proxy, allowing us the great pleasure of being seduced by Grant’s unpredictable charmer.

Black Sabbath speaks to the vastness of Bava’s abilities in the realms of the terrifying and the supernatural.

True to its title, The Endless Summer exudes a blissful, mellow buzz that could easily be misconstrued as lazy or innocuous filmmaking.

The film refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving King’s personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality.

The dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice, but the ramifications are political as well.

In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.

It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.

Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.

The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.

Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.

Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.

A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.

Takahata’s wondrous film is itself at constant interplay between the unsentimental realities of human progress (and expansion) and the unbound thoughts and creative perspectives that fantasy can entertain without necessarily being reduced to mere entertainment.

As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.

Hancock lays the groundwork for Eastwood to transform what might have been an admirable, tightly told entertainment into something far more emotionally resonant, slyly self-aware, and rich in subtext.

Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.

The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.

Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée has created a film out of Cheryl Strayed's beloved 2012 memoir that never quite matches the blunt audacity of its simple title.

Though occasionally aesthetically alluring and evocative, feels like an introductory chapter to a more substantive, sprawling study of the actor.

It only conveys the awesome strangeness of its characters and their universe when director Brian Singer breaks away from the perpetual build-up of the film's unwieldy plot.

David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.

Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.

Much like his hero, Christopher Nolan's goal seems to be to take the humor and wildness out of imagination, to see invention in rigidly practical and scientific terms.

Though its politics are still quite progressive, La Cage aux Folles is ultimately a work of classicism, crafted with precision and efficiently paced.

When Xavier Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.

By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.

A full realization of the very worst fears one could imagine when its director, James Wan, unexpectedly emerged from the torture-porn murk with its original, spiritedly directed predecessor.

The film's exasperating atonality washes out any legitimate idea about identity, education, nature versus nurture, or artificial intelligence that Neill Blomkamp hoped to evince.

Roberto Minervini has created a moving portrait of feminism born out of hard work and intuitiveness, but he never belittles or condescends to the faithful.

The remnants of war are fractious and far-flung in Clint Eastwood's impressive revisionist western.

It’s a giddy, diabolical, and terminally underappreciated sequel to the film that made Joe Dante’s career.

Opening Night hits closest to home in its long, haunting, tension-fueled riffs between Cassavetes and Rowlands, playing lovers on stage and former lovers off stage.

Of course, Alice in Wonderland has long been the Disney film of choice in the realm of drug cinema, but this radical and ridiculous trip through a bombastically colored otherworld imparts a balanced wisdom that goes beyond bong-rip philosophizing.

That the filmmakers consistently catch the nuances of character that bind the two men to each other, rather than simply tracing the pros and cons of their dispositions, is what gives the film its melancholic yet vibrant resonance.

The film is thematically thin, and it has a tendency to embrace the action genre's more obnoxious elements, but there's a proudly no-nonsense air to its nonsensicality.

Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.

Jon Favreau's film comes off as flippant in its view of independent labor as a universally liberating experience for an artist and businessman.

Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.

The filmmakers cut the film to emphasize the story's familiar plot points, rather than highlight any instances of personal visual artistry.

With the film, Lee Daniels quietly pushes his talent for hashing out visceral, violent emotions into unexpected dramatic terrain.

It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.

The film has something for everyone but, in effect, offers nothing of substance to anyone. The interplay between Ameche, Cronyn, and Brimley allow for some lively, even touching scenes in a product—and make no mistake, a product is exactly what it is—that is, at best, adequate.

The story wisely focuses on the cast's worn-in and jazzy repartee and expresses a perfectly modulated sense of self-awareness.

Martin Rosen’s eloquent, wondrous film offers a deceivingly simple yet powerful view of a war-ridden rabbit society.

For the most part, it's a gas, but the light touch Raymond De Felitta gives the material is at once its saving grace and its tremendous limiter.

The zombies twitch, leap, gnash, and destroy, but the film has all the thrill and surprise of a model U.N. summit.

A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.

A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.

As much as the film is primarily a genre workout for director Kevin McDonald, the script makes room for a tough-minded, psychologically corrosive depiction of vengeance.

The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.

The flippancy toward the story's thematic concerns and character construction suggests that the film, like the boxtrolls' myriad gadgets and inventions, was largely built from used parts.

The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.

The film's aesthetic is marked by off-tempo editing and a tone that vacillates between grim and coy, and though it's occasionally visually evocative, it's also unmistakably over-calculated.

The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.

Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.

The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.

A cheekily gruesome and genuinely urgent entertainment, Blomkamp's latest nevertheless can't help but beg the question: Where's Snake Plissken when you need him?

It's tructured in familiar, safe terms, plays for very low stakes, and appeals to no one so much as white, male teenagers with chips on their shoulders.

The film devolves quickly into a pedestrian character study that basks in Gary Webb's public shaming and victimization, losing sight of the bravery and probing talent that characterized his writing.

If there's a general air of emotional authenticity woven throughout all this garden-variety, faith-in-family hokum, it's in the racing scenes.

The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.

When Jérôme Bonnell allows his two magnificent leads to work at the sparse dialogue, he invokes a powerful, elemental sense of frank, sexual discussion and high-end flirtation, imbuing the relationships with a maturity that's loathsomely rare in films today.

The film is equal parts I Will Survive and pop martyrdom, instigated by a star so enormous that she could likely bankroll the Department of Defense for the year of 1976 and still have money left over.

Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film's consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.

It's hard to ignore the fact that a substantial percentage of Letourneur's would-be character study is dedicated to concentrated Schadenfreude that's unbalanced and without any real narrative weight.

The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.

All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.

A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.

The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.

The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.

Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.

Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.

That Dom is so clearly an up-to-11 caricature, embodied with reliable pizzazz by Jude Law, makes the sentimental moments feel especially false.

All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.