Jesse Cataldo

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

The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.

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.

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 itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.

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.

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

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

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

It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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