Jaime N. Christley

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.

It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.

The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.

Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.

What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

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.

There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.

The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"

A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.

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.

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.

It’s a weird experience that Kitano is offering to movie audiences: We thrill to the violent, heroic exploits that leave many a pierced eyeball, many a severed limb, many a bullet-riddled corpse, but we find uplift in his celebration of community, music, dance, light, color, and companionship.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 movie, like a day at Disney World, pulls the viewer through an incessant, nigh-claustrophobic landscape of surrealism and fun. Resistance is futile; the sugar is the medicine.

Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.

Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.