Joseph Jon Lanthier

Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.

Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.

The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.

Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold.

The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.

The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.

It lulls us into its reckless passivity to the point that even the comedic duds possess a languid hint of funny.

Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.

Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.

The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.

Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.

By examining the relationship between Samson and Delilah through the wrong end of the telescope, Thorton soaks in the arid, unaccommodating surroundings with occasionally oxymoronic lucidity.

Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.

The Pulitzer-winning playwright’s movies are often a few steps ahead of their audiences, but Homicide seems to have intuitively anticipated its now-exemplary status.

A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

The camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.

To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.

Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.

Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.

A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.

Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.

Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.

In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.

The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.

This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.

Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.

Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.