Jaime N. Christley

The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.

Deep End is as soaked in pheromones and nervous electricity as Mike, but he's as much a product of the world of desire that surrounds him as one of its participants, and when the end finally comes, there's only a reprise of earlier dream imagery to suggest that there was anything other than a spasmodic, hormonal twitch involved in bringing about its conclusion.

The lightning in the film’s bottle isn’t some generic feel-good humanism, but a complicated one, fighting for its own existence, sometimes angry, sometimes despondent.

At this point in the franchise, Anderson is content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting, all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense.

Metropolitan celebrates and mourns the specific character of a place and time, youthful associations and crushes, a toolkit of values, even if those values are not exactly shared by, say, housewives in Duluth and auto mechanics in Albuquerque.

Gordon Willis's too-dark lensing is an ideal match for the Scenes from a Marriage-inspired sequences of marital and amorous discord.

Few films have expressed, with as much force and lyricism as Ozu’s Late Spring, the various emotions (melancholy, bittersweet joy, impassioned regret, taciturn resignation) associated with the ongoing, perpetual dissolution of “the world as we know it.”

The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all.

After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.

Preminger had the confidence in his performers and faith in his intelligent viewers: a happy combination.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.

The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.

Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories

The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.

Regarding Michel Piccoli's Max, Claude Sautet's film resists judgment, neither condoning nor signposting the despicable nature of his choices.

In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.

Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.

More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.

William Wellman’s 1937 version of this oft-told tale, of the rising starlet and the plummeting alcoholic has-been she refuses to cast aside, is usually regarded as the second-best of the lot, a few steps behind George Cukor’s 1954 remake, which has the unfair advantage of being one of the unimpeachable masterpieces of American film.

After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.

It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.

Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.

A good platter for a great, underappreciated classic of British cinema (under the direction of American expatriate Cy Endfield)—light on supplements but strong in presentation.

The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.

The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.

The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.

Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.