Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

This is a film set entirely in places where people aren’t meant to stay for very long, a world of continual transit and gratification, with no endpoint. Maybe it’s the world that money creates for itself.

Perturbed and darkly funny.

Whitney herself remains a figure of some mystery, her rise and fall refracting the hopes and anxieties of the people around her, with a tragic echo in the death of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, in 2015.

Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.

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 intoxicating mix of kitsch and chic barely conceals the psychosis underneath.

Made 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, Cosmos makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown.

To is one of the purest directors working today, and he flourishes within Three’s self-imposed limits, folding and reorienting the space of the hospital using privacy curtains, swinging doors, and a constantly moving camera — in the process producing a rollickingly entertaining movie.

Alternately candid and cagey, Robert Greene’s documentary turns the chores and frustrations of a modern-day homemaker into a study in roles — social and personal, conscious and unintentional, on-camera and off. It isn’t, by any means, a difficult movie, but neither does it take any easy routes.

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.

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.

Part locked-room mystery, part political allegory, Non-Stop is one of the most purely enjoyable entries in the ongoing cycle of Liam Neeson action-thrillers.

The trick of Disorder is that it plays right to the audience’s suspicions and desires.

It is slow and solemn in stretches and often remote, but it rewards patience with a transcendent epilogue that departs from the main character’s point-of-view to find a glimmer of meaning.

It comes across, instead, as a directorial flight of fancy, an imaginatively goofy take on an already goofy idea, exaggerated by Besson’s blunt style and an uncommonly fast pace.

It’s almost unbelievable that something this narratively arty is being released as a mainstream horror movie, but the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky’s most skillful.

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.

Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.

Part of the movie’s mischievous charm lies in De Heer and cinematographer Ian Jones’ sophisticated use of Steadicam, which moves almost exclusively with Charlie, often seemingly in a struggle to keep up with his brisk, determined walk.

Their use of Kaleida’s sparse, slinky “Think” — one of the most effective and eccentric sound track choices in a recent action movie — underscores the sense that what the viewer is watching is essentially a very loud and bloody dance piece.

In an era in which the big movies are bigger and more expensive than they’ve ever been, few acts of resistance seem more meaningful than making a small, careful, and personal film that still wants nothing more than to invite the viewer into its private world.

Split is funnier, campier, and more freewheeling than anything its writer-director has done — slightly overlong, but reminiscent of Brian De Palma films like "The Fury" and "Femme Fatale" in its refusal to be boring.

Mann’s first feature in nearly six years, the hacking thriller Blackhat is rough even by the standards of its director’s current creative period.

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.

Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.

A smorgasbord of camp, Grand Guignol, and bird imagery that thumbed its metal beak at commercial considerations.

But despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself.

The Great Pretender has its share of dark punchlines, but its central concern is a sympathetic one: what we see in other people and how we would like to see ourselves.