Jesse Cataldo

Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.

A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.

A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.

Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.

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.

Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.

The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.

It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.

A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.

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

Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.

A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.

It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.

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

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.

This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.

By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.

Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.

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

These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.

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.

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

As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.

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.

More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.

While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.

The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.

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

Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.

This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.

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

Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.

It takes the basic form of the revenge flick and dips it in tar, making for a movie that comes out sticky, nasty, and black.

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

Lawless may be full of half-hearted overtures toward depth and emotional complexity, but the film's prestige sheen is mostly a sham; the real focus here is the irrepressible lure of bad behavior.

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

It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.

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

Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.

Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.

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

Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.

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

Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.

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

This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war.

Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.

It defines Manoel de Oliveira's late period, during which his movies have continued to shrink in size and scope while remaining thematically expansive.

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

Susan Sontag’s debut film serves as an intriguing cinematic extension of her more well-known written work.

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

What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.

The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.

After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.

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

The staging of this dissociative roundelay is still presented in a forcefully lo-fi format, prizing roughly framed shots, improvisation, and flat characters, but there are ever clearer indications that Swanberg is producing something more than empty-headed slacker cinema.

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.

Like many of Agnès Varda's similarly themed explorations, the results are more than they initially seem, casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent, resulting in a film that's fueled more by compassion than curiosity.

While it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.

It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.

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

Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt.

Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.

Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.

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

As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.

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

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

Polisse has been compared to "The Wire," but beyond a shared interest in the Sisyphean nature of police work, the two are mostly comparable as inverses of each other.

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

The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject.

Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.

A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.

The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.

With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.

There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.

Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.

There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.

Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.

Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.

It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.

By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.

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

It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.

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

Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.

Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.

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

Too often Jimmy P. seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.

Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.

The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.

The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.

Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.

Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.

George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.

The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.

Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.