Ed Gonzalez

The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.

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.

A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.

DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.

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.

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

Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.

Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.

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

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

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.

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

Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.

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

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 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.