Ed Gonzalez

One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.

Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.

Miyazaki celebrates individualism and nature’s simple, untainted beauties, subsequently pondering the transcendent power of communication between the “inside” and the “outside.”

Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.

The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness.

It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.

Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close-Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.

A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.

I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.

Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.

Abdellatif Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that's striking.

The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.

Deep Red is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts.

The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.

In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.

Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.

Radiating a startling intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.

Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.

Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.

There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.

The film exudes a sense of fleetingness; however static these lives may be, Tian's narrative perfectly evokes a changing season.

Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.

Just as the film’s gorgeous backdrops suggest characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads hauntingly convey the filmmakers’ idea of fate and love locked in a cosmic struggle.

A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.

Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then som

Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.

Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.

In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.

Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.

Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.

Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.

Though visionary, David Robert Mitchell's film abounds in undigested ideas and dubious sexual politics.

The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.

It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.

Blowup daringly suggests that an image without politics isn’t an image at all.

Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.

R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.

Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.

To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.

Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.

Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.

Today, hardcore fans have a way of trivializing the film’s moral significance, some calling it a mere “masterpiece of shock cinema.” This is to seriously underplay the film’s blistering humanity and the audacious aesthetic and philosophical lengths to which Browning goes to challenge the way we define beauty and abnormality.

Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.

More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.

Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =

With The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war commentary with bone-chilling dread.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.

The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.

This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.

In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.

David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.

Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).

At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.

Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.

Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity.

In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.

Inspired by an outline by Ray Bradbury and modified for the screen by Harry Essex, It Came From Outer Space remains the granddaddy of the ’50s atomic-scare pictures.

Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.

Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.

While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.

Structurally and thematically, Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails is an improvement over The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, even if the film’s non-linear convolutions of plot may purposefully distract. Set against a backdrop of genetic research and espionage, Argento’s formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness is on fierce display.

Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.

Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.

The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.

Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.

The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.

Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.

The states get higher with every breadcrumb Luis Tosar's creep lays down, and the film derives sometimes remarkable corkscrew tension from watching him being backed into a corner.

This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.

Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.

The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.

One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.

Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.

It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.

Dario Argento undervalues his material, but his set pieces are glorious enough that the film’s plot contrivances can be forgiven.

Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.

Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.

It’s the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there’s no room for peace here, just war.

Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.

The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.

Maelström earns its haunting, unpredictable ending, never exaggerating Evian’s moral dilemma. Still, without non-stop techno or the existential overtones of a Kieślowski morality tale, Maelström is just another Winter Sleepers.

It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.

The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.

This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.

The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.

One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.

Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.

Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.