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.”

Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.

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.

The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.

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.

Aladdin is ultimately less offensive than patently ridiculous, mostly because its ethnic white noise is really just an excuse for Robin Williams—as a postmodern blabbermouthed genie who grants Aladdin three wishes—to put on the most elaborate, narcissistic circus act in the history of cinema.

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

Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.