Clayton Dillard

An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.

Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.

Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.

Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.

It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.

Jerome Sable's debut feature couldn't be further from De Palma's delirious cinematic essays on vision and genre.

There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.

Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.

Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.

Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.

A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.

As with Claire Denis’s previous Chocolat, emphasis is placed both on how the French legacy of colonialism persists into the present, as well as how Black men are often filtered through the white imagination to ruinous ends.

Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.

It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.

Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.

Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.

It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.

Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.

Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.

It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.

Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."

Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.

Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).

Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.

Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.

A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.

Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.

Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.

Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.

While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.

The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.

Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.

This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.

Tati biographer David Bellos called 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday “Tati’s most perfect film,” and in many ways, it’s difficult to disagree with this sentiment in terms of tone and form.

Dr. Strangelove is unique as an American studio film in that nearly every scene addresses its alignment of military action with sexual impotence and bodily excretion. It’s possibly the filthiest studio comedy ever made, even though there isn’t a single gross-out gag, curse word, or graphic image in its entire running time.