Jake Cole

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 Ryan Coogler film's greatest traits is its reticence, its refusal to say 10 words when two will do, or to say one word when silence says it all.

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.

At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.

Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.

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

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

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

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.

No Austen adaptation, even the most revisionist ones, have ever felt as vicious as Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.

In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.

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

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.

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.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

The film explores the extent to which Olivier Assayas’s characters have always found, and lost, their identities through the aid of their surroundings.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

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.

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

The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.

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

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.

One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.

The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.

Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.