Michael Atkinson

We like cows and crows and snow, but it’s Kiarostami’s phenomenological presence that somehow turns every image or camera posture into a question about living, seeing, empathy, and essence.

Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada’s film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.

It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City’s fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward.

It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.

Yang keeps all of the balls in the air, resisting definitive answers and conjuring a lean-in sense of intimate dread. Practically every sneaky, off-center image seems to hold a clue, but the takeaway is failed connections and disastrous modern discontent.

Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.

In effect, [Guerín] seems to be making Pinto's case — the intellectual necessity of passion and Muse-force, in order to compel men toward Art — while utterly enjoying the messy, unpredictable, real-world tumult the women make of it.

The film is a vehicle for Applebroog-appreciation, daughterly and otherwise.

You don't watch prolific doc-master Wang Bing's new film about a Chinese mental hospital so much as get imprisoned within it, pacing its dingy corridors and rooms like a zoo animal.

This is not a movie, really, but a back-rub and a cup of tea for Tsai purists, for whom the filmmaker's company, behind or in front of the camera, is all that's required.

Quite possibly the only film ever made focused on the centuries-long enslavement of the Romani in Eastern Europe, Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.

In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history.

A rambling daydream that aims literally to supplant your life, it's in effect a serial, in eight ninety-plus-minute chapters, TV-ready but defined by Rivette as a consuming theatrical experience. It consumes, all right, like a drug that won't fade, but it's also a lark, a metafiction without any reality, a magnificent irrelevance.

The movie is itself a rat-maze of one-sided mirrors, windows upon windows, anonymous hallways, compartmentalized instances of watching, being watched, seeing and not-seeing.

Textually, the setting's brutalist conflation between the far future and the distant past makes the film timeless, an elusive fable told with the viscous immediacy of a life on the diseased edge of civilization.

Distant, enigmatic, fragmented, and possessing a dead-eyed steeliness in the tradition of Michael Haneke, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ulrich Seidl. The Guitar Mongoloid is a quilt of moments, set pieces, and voyeuristic opportunities building to no specific thematic idea.

It's the rare contemporary film that's as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.

Involuntary doesn't simplify its stories into a single point of view or idea; rather, Östlund is merely visiting these high-pressure moments in which Swedish culture frays, melts down, and betrays its ultra-civilized idea of itself.

Easily the most rigorous, vital, and powerful movie of 2014, Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan may be a perfect Bazinian cinema-machine — reality is captured, crystallized, honored for its organic complexity, and delivered unpoisoned by exposition or emphasis.

In the end, this morphing of ideas and styles is more deadpan romantic than sociocritical, and sweeter for it.

The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.

Resnais's lightheartedness is infectious as he dispenses with the cinematic "reality" he never quite trusted, shooting the six-person farce on obvious sets, with curtains for doors and flat theatrical lighting.

Clayton's filmmaking, mustering frisson by both candle and blazing daylight, could serve as an object lesson in its genre.

The lovely ball-&-socket meeting of the two artists' sensibilities is what makes the doc sing, even if it is a chronicle of a death foretold.

Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his cast at a pensive and watchful low boil.

Possibly the Iranian new wave's last meta-man, Panahi is in an ideal position to make the unique methodology of his filmmaking merge with its substance. But he's always been fascinated by how a film's bell-jar bubble can be punctured, leaving a viscous interface between real and cinematic.

A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.

The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show hyperbole and symbology stew, the one most invested in narrative meaning.

Its realism is patient and inclusive.

With Child's Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute bourgeoisie life cracks and opens wide.

Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it's a thing of insensible beauty.

Seidl's visual style -- bitter-comic three-walled tableaux -- makes the scenario's tension between desire and reality almost unbearable, but Melanie offers hope by simple virtue of her youth, her unformed romantic folly, and her guileless courage.

There's little sense in trying to resist the film's relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fools' parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flash flood by film's end. Sorrentino's vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling.

Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.

One of the year's thorniest releases.

Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.

Drug War might arguably be [To's] best film for this reason—it doesn't attempt to raise the stakes on its genre, but instead fully exploits what's there, piecing together an elaborate narc campaign tale out of classic clichés and tight-knot plotting, and letting the disaster of balls-out crime make its own statement.

In the Fog has the inevitability of an avalanche, and only our overfamilarity with Nazi-tribulation scenarios, and perhaps its excessively punctuated ending, could slow it down. A better anti-summer blockbuster is hard to imagine.

Berberian may sound like it's more fun to pick over afterward than watch, but it's also masterfully crafted.

Sweet and fiercely humane, Song’s layered family portrait is decidedly Buddhist: silent when it needs to be and steadfast about approaching inevitable tragedy with care and patience.

Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.

It's hard to be certain whether the film's placidity is an ironic gag, but the modesty at work turns out to be pretty likable, as strange as that sounds.

It might be the most lonesome film about a tropical vacation we've seen, and the greatest film ever made about the weird socioeconomics of tourism.

Leon’s grungy resume indie is a conscientiously modest deal in the end, with a sweet, mumblecoresque ending, but it glows with unmistakable star power.

Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."

By now, grandchildren are ever-present, and stasis has set in. Apted's entire project is awesome in scale but subject to inevitable diminishing returns.

There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.

Something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet spots.

In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.

The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.

Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege.

One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.

Calling the movie simply Buddhist, in form as well as context, might be just another way of saying it's awesome, as in it inspires legitimate awe.

Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.

Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.

In the end, once we realize the title doesn't refer to these bantams' weight class but to their strength of heart, or something, the film feels blandly respectful and, oddly enough, apolitical.

Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.

Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).

The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).

The new film is more informational than resonant. But you can still sense a vacuum, a rat pit of stories waiting to be unearthed. The dark something that triggered the whole ordeal in West Memphis is still out there.

Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.

If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.

My Joy is a maddening vision and one of the year's must-see provocations.

Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.

Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.

There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.

Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.

Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.

Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed (in widescreen), Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft.

Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Light is most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker's stubborn righteousness.

Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.

One of the year's best films.

Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.

The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.

Corpse Bride never skimps on the sass (as a good folktale shouldn't). And the variety of its cadaverous style is never less than inspired; never has the human skull's natural grin been redeployed so exhaustively for yuks.

A minor triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings.

May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.

What a world we'd live in if Argento's Hollywood counterparts -- say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, or even Christina Ricci -- had this much imagination and nerve. Few of them, at any rate, have Argento's reserves of lonesome passion and unspigoted woe.

While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.

Lacks scope and doesn't resonate grandly as a portrait of an American underbelly like Morris' earlier works do. But it still packs a wallop.

Burton's films are endearing and impassioned despite the fact that they generally fail to tell a whole story, create a single rounded character, or inspire even mild laughs or chills.

Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.

Damon and Kinnear are both pitch-perfect, inhabiting their ingenuous, codependent little universe together with the commitment of eight-year-old best friends. True to form, the Farrellys toss sophomoric spitballs at us, but nothing stems the rise of big-hearted generosity.

Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film.

Never takes off, and much of the time Pool seems lost herself, resorting to clichés, redundancy, and dead-end allegory.

One of the year's best imports and one of the very few queer movies that transcends its sexual orientation.

Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.

However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine.

Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.

Dumont's movie has virtually nothing wrong with it -- aside from the fact that it drives people crazy. Take the leap, but expect no answers. Just like life, as they say.

Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.

Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe.

Like being jacked directly into Linklater's alpha waves, and the experience is bracingly new to movies.

Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.

A remarkable debut, and its first half is a genuine jolt.

A fresh and beautifully timed, if slight, romantic comedy.