Jesse Cataldo

Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.

Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.

Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.

Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.

Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.

Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.

Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.

Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.

The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.

Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.

The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.

It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.

By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.

Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.

Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.

The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.

A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.

It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.

It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.

The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.

It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.

The film is a patient exploration of the enlaced connections between professional and emotional sectors.

Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.

A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.

Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.

True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.