Glenn Heath Jr.

This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.

Shit Year is a thematic twin to Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," both heightened fables about the slow disintegration of a retired actress mourning her now-dead career by retreating inward.

When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.

If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.

There's absolutely no fresh perspective here; just more juiceless samplings of what's already been cooked to death.

Director Leon Ford displays a wonderful empathy in his examination of Griff and Melody's lonely environments, allowing their fringe perspectives to flower organically from the mise-en-scène.

There's nothing inherently flawed about this nomadic and potentially life-affirming narrative, but Rosenbaum manages to instill every moment on the road with a sense of shrill conventionality.

The film's first act is wholly concerned with the juxtaposition of physical similarities and ideological opposites, and Tamahori spends entire sequences upending the balance between the two.

Daylight reaches an apex of terror that it never quite tops.

If Barkin and Grondin create a swamp's worth of deceptive intricacies in their moments together, the rest of the cast is regulated to expository mop-up duty.

If the trajectory of R foreshadows tragedy early and often (what prison film doesn't?), the filmmakers manage to infuse quiet moments of reflection and panic into each man's traumatic experience.

While Reversion sets up a complex communication platform for a universe being slowly ripped apart, it doesn't know how to relate this idea in human terms.

Exquisite looking but substantially hollow.

The most interesting dimension of Altered States has to be the way Russell sexualizes Eddie’s relationship with godly figures, most notably symbols of Jesus, crucifixion, and his father.

The film remains a stunning collective of method acting and 1970s social critique.

While not nearly as emotionally impacting as some of Disney’s other classics, Bambi might be the most restrained and lyrical of the bunch, a poem to the simplicity and purity of natural life.

What's most interesting about the intense deliberations that ensue, specifically when a piece of seemingly indisputable evidence is brought back into question, is how a fresh angle and perspective, usually born from Juror 8's critical thinking, can permanently alter the tone of the discussion.

Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies.

Hard Times feels most like a brilliant prerequisite to the cinema of Michael Mann, a focused neo-western where the last man standing is the one truest to himself.

Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten.

High and Low is a masterful cinematic elevator connecting two warring social perspectives, finding a common ground between them in the pressurized corners of the classic crime drama.

As a collage of glossy gangster conventions and one-liners, The Long Good Friday explodes with energy, but it’s the political and social tensions that make Mackenzie’s film a lasting vision of British tragedy.

One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.

One can’t mistake I Spit in Your Grave for anything other than a raging political text, a rigorous reminder to the power of a disturbed imagination, be it victimizer or victim.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a political tract that understands itself also as a cinematic exercise.