Jesse Cataldo

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.