Jake Cole

Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.

Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.

As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

Jafar Panahi spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.

Philippe Garrel's film uses its characters' stodgy, formal language to betray their self-consciousness.

The only way that this film could be any more racist is if the Dwyer family holed up with Lillian Gish and waited for the Klan to save them.

Joel Edgerton's boilerplate direction is a blessing for a genre increasingly saddled with literal visualizations of madness.

Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.

Half-assed mentions of the Avengers, as well as a few cameo appearances sprinkled both within the feature and in its credits stingers, exude less shame than a crowd-pandering politico.

Terminator Genisys feels like being trapped in a conversation with a child breathlessly recounting the highlights of the preceding movies.

The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.

Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.

The blatant staging and rich emotional undercurrent of Vertov’s documentary footage presage Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth mantra, and was a far cry from the utilitarian social-realist mandate that would soon drain Soviet cinema of this experimental edge.

Though lacking the thematic depth that characterized the Archers’ earlier work, The Tales of Hoffmann ranks among their finest triumphs for its purely aesthetic self-justification.

Miracle Mile is one of the most fascinating curios of the ’80s, a disaster movie that turns the decade’s optimism back onto itself.

Throughout, Joyce Chopra patiently and shrewdly observes the contradictions of human behavior that Laura Dern brilliantly conveys.

Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.

Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.

One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.

The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.

Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.

Gradually, Van Peebles turns stereotypical images of postwar bourgeois prosperity against themselves, leading to a denouement that feels oddly empowering in its total alienation from the status quo.

A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.

A showcase for director Alfred Hitchcock’s intense study of the German Expressionist movement, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog boasts artfully animated intertitles, plunging shadows, and oppressive camera angles.

What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.

Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry.

Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.

Even when the band plays away from private eyes or songs simply play over disconnected footage of them having fun, the strength of their songcraft is stirring.

One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.

This tonal shift transforms Manon of the Spring from a caustic morality play into something more reflective, an elegy to a way of life whose residents did not fully appreciate until they themselves had helped to end it.

Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.

The tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker’s farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.

Cassavetes and Rowlands lend a screwball energy to this thriller, ably playing conflicting moods of suspense and silliness off each other to complicate an otherwise straightforward genre film.

Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.

As striking as Mudbound's combat scenes are, they largely exist as setup for the postwar-set second half of the film, which scrutinizes the way that the atrocities witnessed in Europe laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America's own bigoted divisions.

The biblical root of the [Dekalog] may suggest didacticism on its face, but whatever morals are advanced are decidedly ambivalent.

La Cava’s supple but cutting romantic comedy is one of the finest works of class-conscious comedy in Hollywood history.

Of all the ’70s road movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the only one in which the characters find themselves.