Joseph Jon Lanthier

America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.

8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.

If only Beineix could have imagined an existence for his star-crossed protagonists beyond the source material (the question of whether successful maternity would have sobered Betty yelps for an impossible sequel), he may have managed a sultry masterpiece.

Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.

The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.

Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.

Mystery Train is a singularly enthusiastic American anthem that trenchantly interprets the cult of audiophilia as filthy gas stoves roasting marshmallows, raspy radio DJs hawking fried calamari, and ill-equipped racial armies ignorantly clashing by night.

Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.

The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.

The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.

Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.

An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger.

After 30 minutes or so, Gonçalo Tocha's anthropological proposition slides into dubiousness.

The specific narrative handicaps throughout are mostly too banal to warrant exegesis, though the choice of vintage pop tunes for dramatic underscoring is particularly grating.

The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.

Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.

Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance.

Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.

Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.

An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.

The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.

Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.

The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.

The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.

Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.

Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.

Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.

The documentary veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit.