Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Christopher Nolan’s terrific new film, Dunkirk, is powered by an engine of combusting contradictions: it’s at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine.

The best and most touchingly personal of all Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes At Midnight is pervaded by melancholy and loneliness, even though its characters are almost seen never alone.

The Magnificent Ambersons is still masterly. It’s the movie that all other films about families in decline are measured against.

Behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that’s more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.

It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?

Each shot in Late Spring is striking on its own; the mature Ozu belongs to that rare category of filmmakers whose work can be recognized from a single frame. But together—with all their abrupt shifts in visual perspective and time—they become a mosaic, deeply poignant and ultimately mysterious in the way it envisions a relationship between two people trapped by how much they care for one another.

In essence, Timbuktu is about how farce turns into terror.

By tackling one man’s sense of right and wrong (or lack thereof), Oppenheimer is ultimately tackling human nature.

For Wang, the strictly personal is the building block for everything else—whether it’s the well-worn groove of a long-term relationship or a Chekhov pastiche performed by a woman wearing a samovar as a hat.

Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.

When it’s all done, More and Morgan remain ciphers, and not the type whose intangibility is evocative of something greater. All we have are the known facts, and that is all that I Called Him Morgan provides in the end.

Greene, whose earliest documentaries were rooted in the cinéma vérité tradition and its portraits of ordinary American lives, has crafted a poignant group portrait with something to say about the crossed wires of pain and memory.

A different director might have fashioned the same basic material into something grandiose, but Huston errs on the side of understatement. Shot largely on location, this raw, pessimistic portrait of people struggling to keep from slipping all the way down reinvigorated the veteran director’s reputation, and stands as one of his best and most accomplished films.

One conundrum is that Elle is singularly a Verhoeven film, but doesn’t quite look like one.

Though his symbolism sometimes errs on the side of obviousness, Bi shows an uncommon knack for recreating and exploring the space of a dream—its transforming identities and places, the unreality made more transportive by the 3D format’s underutilized potential for creating dramatic space, matched by the mutations of the camerawork from close-up to tracking shot to crane shot and back again.

Though the formulaic treasure-hunting plot sometimes gets out of hand, it doesn’t muddle the intended message.

The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.

If Things To Come doesn’t completely fulfill Hansen-Løve’s career mission of elevating minor incidents to major themes, it still rings with her clarity and personality. She conveys in single sentences what less confident filmmakers might expound on in a monologue, and makes small gestures more poignant by tossing them off casually or making an unexpected cut.

There are hiccups in its ambition, but it’s hard not to get swept up in all the technologies, characters, and politics crammed into the movie’s compelling dramatic conflict, which casts the charismatic Michael B. Jordan—the star of Creed and Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station—as the most complex villain in the post-Dark Knight cycle of superhero blockbusters.

Uniquely ambitious, Rivette’s film (technically a serial) spends nearly 13 hours stitching paranoia, loneliness, comedy, and mystical symbolism into a crazy quilt big enough to cover a generation.

This focus on minutiae doesn’t paint a complete picture, nor is it meant to. But it underlines a point too rarely made: Every film is an accumulation of things the average person wouldn’t notice. If there’s a real educational function to criticism, it isn’t to inform, but to teach an audience how to look.

It goes without saying that much of it will feel familiar to those already well-versed in the Jia filmography: there’s a yearning, a search, and, finally, a return.

If nothing else, Fishing Without Nets looks good on a big screen, directed in the kind of slick, just-off-arthouse style that mandates every shot of a character walking be framed from behind.

Desplechin tackles drama with wildly confident eclecticism, sometimes even besting Martin Scorsese in pure movie-mad feverishness: iris shots, radically different camera styles, unexpected musical and literary quotations, theatrical flourishes, scenes broken up in collage.

These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.

An occasionally perceptive and endearingly un-commercial drama undercut by some serious narrative awkwardness.

It’s the movie’s quietest, softest moments that register most strongly, be it Alexandra’s low-key performance of Victor Herbert’s “Toyland” to an almost empty bar, or the final scene, which finds her and Sin-Dee alone in a Laundromat at the end of a long, bad night.

It’s much more involving as a work of pure and hypnotic collage than as a researched narrative of facts, dates, and names.

Drug War brings to mind Soderbergh’s recent "Side Effects", a film defined by similar changes in perspective and genre. However, while "Side Effects" is best at its midpoint, before the viewer has really figured out what kind of movie it is, Drug War becomes both weightier and more playful with each transition, building to a harrowing finale.

His muse Ventura is there, too, cast as a meta character; he plays a clerygman who has lost his flock and now ministers to an abandoned church that looks suspiciously like a small movie theater. Which is about as close as Vitalina Varela comes to bluntly stating its themes: presence, absence, rekindled faith.

The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role.

Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.

Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.

It’s not that Hawks’ style rescues El Dorado; it’s that it integrates all of these problems, producing a movie that feels effortlessly complete and consistent, despite being, frankly, all over the place.

Shot partly on location in Ireland and designed in the lushest greens ever squeezed out of Technicolor, The Quiet Man is a movie that isn’t about a whole lot, but yet seems to contain so much—from Wayne’s easygoing charisma to the notoriously protracted climactic fight to the febrile, film-noir-like flashback to Sean’s boxing days.

If Ross had embraced anything like a narrative line, would it have taken away from the elemental imagery of his brief, unconventional film? One can’t really tackle life and what it means on both a personal and social level without prying into the people who live it. Ross keeps his distance—and in doing so, keeps Hale County’s potential at an arm’s length.

Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.

Zhao, who acts as his own cinematographer, has a great eye for scale and contrast, and the less Behemoth points out its symbolism, the more potent it becomes.

An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.

It’s unclassifiable.

Like countless Swanberg films (the prolific director has completed 17 features in less than a decade), 24 Exposures is populated by characters who are defined not by their actions, but by their unwillingness to act. The difference here is the presence of an exterior force—the murders—that makes Swanberg’s naturalistic style seem affected.

An exercise in mellowness, right down to the snatches of tinkly-twinkly sentimental music.

Sleepwalking through a role is just about the worst insult you could level at an actor, professional or otherwise, but that’s more or less what Ventura — again playing a poetic representation of himself — does here.

It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.

In that respect, it may be self-conscious to a fault. Plotted with typical shagginess, it lags as it tries to treat its two protagonists equally; they may be kindred spirits, but Khaled’s fears of deportation and his search for Miriam are a lot more urgent than Wikström’s mid-life crisis. But in drawing the two men together, the film creates a simple, persuasive metaphor.

The fact that movies are a technology of motion makes them uniquely suited to capturing stillness; Geyrhalter takes full advantage, using vivid sound design and his own eye for striking static compositions to create haunting tableaux.

Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.

Essentially an essay film, Museum Hours is less interested in plot than in using its characters as a way to give ideas shape and voice; however, because their performances are natural and improvisatory, the movie never seems didactic.

Though shocking violence and black humor run through the length of the movie, what comes through most strongly is its pessimistic political conscience; were the movie less earnest, it might seem Verhoeven-esque.

Underneath the prickly screwball banter, the jokes, the movie-isms, the occasional zaniness are probing questions about how we define ourselves and whether a community of faith can still represent something more important than gossip and an annual Holocaust remembrance bake sale.

Office is one of the most original and imaginative musicals of the last decade, in spite of Lo Dayu’s largely unremarkable, temp-track-like score.

It might not be the kind of movie that anyone needs to see twice, but its variations on the classic building blocks of suspense implicate our own guesswork in interesting ways.

The look of the film is a hoot: double lens flares over wood paneling, psychedelic lighting, crude animated sequences, slow-mo and telephoto shots, and enough vintage MTV fog machines to kill a hair metal band.

Unfortunately, Cutie And The Boxer feels the need to contextualize — and possibly valorize — the Shinoharas as artists, which detracts from its portrayal of them as a couple.

A pile of muck (old muck, too) with no rake, Steven Spielberg’s National Board Of Review-approved Nixon-era newspaper drama The Post lacks the exact thing it glorifies: a reporter’s instinct for story.

Here, in this entertaining, preposterous goof of a kung fu movie, are all those values missing from the mainstream of American action filmmaking, not the least of which is a sense of the camera as a participant.

Téchiné has made one of his simplest and most elemental films, which is both Being 17’s most arresting feature and its weakness.

While it lacks the surrealistic and fairy-tale elements that distinguish many of Guiraudie’s films (among them Sunshine For The Poor, Time Has Come, and Staying Vertical), Misericordia is nonetheless pervaded by a casual dreaminess and a disregard for the strictures of realism that leads in some (intentionally) silly directions.

It makes for an ironically modest, tasteful tribute to two filmmakers who, in their finest and most moving moments, were anything but restrained.

The film boasts one of Diaz’s most dramatically conventional, involving, and satisfying narratives.

Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction.

For a movie that’s often embarrassingly funny — with its absurdist hangout dialogue, posturing nobodies, and perfectly timed spews — Relaxer is fundamentally sad.

The end result is too boxed in by the demands of the franchise era and the usual restrictions of a PG-13 rating to qualify as art. It can’t show morally troubling violence or embrace hopelessness, and its day trip into the heart of darkness has to end with a ray of sunshine—“The horror, the horror...” in quotation marks.

It’s so thickly packed with technical and verbal dazzle that whatever biting point it might have had to make ends up completely lost.

While the improvisatory movement of the camera helps create a sense of ambiguous tension in the scenes where the crew interacts with the pirates, it also undercuts several more overtly dramatic moments. However, this shortcoming of filmmaking imagination is largely redeemed by the pessimistic wallop of the movie’s ending.

The most stylish thing about it is the eerie original music by Mica Levi, the art-damaged noise-popster-turned-composer who previously scored "Under The Skin" and "Jackie."

The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.

One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.

In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.

Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling.

Fishback and Hall move confidently between the obvious ironies and foreshadowings of Spiro’s kitchen sink (as in, “everything but the ______”) realism.

Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.

Over and over, it pitches us reasons to care about these young women—an all-too-perfect example of a documentary that exists to make people feel good for watching it.

A viewer is always aware that they are being shown a place and an era, which helps explain why Eden manages the tricky business of being a movie that is overtly about lost time, but which unfolds chronologically, without as much as a flashback.

The cast carries the film; Dowd, as Linda, is especially terrific. Yet the feeling that one is watching a latter-day teleplay is hard to shake: The unvisual, periodically clumsy direction never finds a way around the confined space or the ugly lighting. One can applaud Kranz’s restraint.

Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.

Fighting misery means having fun, which is what filmmaking is supposed to be, and, despite its lengths and scope, Arabian Nights always feels handmade.

A disorganized, dawdling mess of a movie that is rarely anything less than charming.

One might argue that Coco could stand to be weirder and more self-indulgent; the alternate reality it creates is entertaining and expansive. But then it wouldn’t be a Pixar film. It is impeccable, time-tested craftsmanship, not experimentation, that drives Coco, both in its most familiar beats and in its most moving moments.

Bridge Of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game.

At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.

Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.

As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry.

For much of the movie, nothing happens, and it’s not the rigorous, locked-in nothing of the long-take art film, but the slow-motion, music-montage nothing of the artsy American indie.

Closed Curtain is a spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren’t about himself—which seems to be the point.

At its most compelling as a conventional character study of an unconventional female lead.

It’s a credit to both Mackenzie’s talent as a director of actors and to the underlying humaneness of his vision that he argues that the right option is the more difficult and less predictable one — and that he does so without relying on sentimentality, unearned sympathy, or a happy ending.

It feels as though wherever the camera might be—and however it might be moving—is exactly where it belongs.

The problem with Banana Split isn’t the surface phoniness or lazy comedy but the fact that the movie doesn’t offer any insight into its ostensible subjects—among them break-ups, female friendship, and teenage jealousy

A stolid film that largely rests on its director’s competence at helming extravagant aerial views of pyrotechnic destruction.

And yet the movie never errs in its sincerity, which extends all the way to the decision to depict Pasolini’s murder in graphic detail.

Not to say that the movie is a mess. Instead, it plays out as a more or less conventional direct-to-video-style thriller, distinguished by a handful of subtexts and images that might have been developed in a different version, but here register as mere quirks.

Ramon Zürcher’s miniature debut, The Strange Little Cat, is one of the most confident and unusual first features in recent memory.

A mesmerizing sci-fi drama.

Binoche and Stewart inhabit their characters’ complicated friendship, whether they’re doing the nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes business of managing a career or getting drunk at a small casino.

The Other Side Of The Wind is ultimately about an artist’s fear of seeing a reflection of his own sublimated desires — the way that art hides as much as it reveals about its maker. We’ll be debating it, defending it, reappraising it for a long time to come.

The movies may be, in part, about fantasy, but they always look like they’re from somewhere very real.