Noel Murray

Well-plotted, with a strong lead performance by Michael Shannon, and a fair amount of authentic regional flavor. It isn't really meant to be a treatise on Southern life. At heart, it's a country-fried genre film, minus the peppery white gravy.

Someone as attuned as Varda to the quality of an image should know that a flat, disposable medium like video makes images harder to internalize.

The film’s as eclectic as it is eccentric, and it stays true to its own twisted sense of poetry, all the way to an epilogue that’s somehow even odder than anything that came before.

Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.

Regular Lovers isn't a folly-of-youth story that aches with emotion, like "Au Revoir," "Les Enfants" or "The Squid And The Whale." It's drier, and simpler.

Witty, disgusting, eye-popping, and incomprehensible, The Holy Mountain is every bit as pop-philosophical as Jodorowsky's earlier work, but it also contains original visual ideas nearly every 30 seconds, from frogs in armor to crucifixes made out of painted bread.

For the first 90 minutes or so, there’s remarkable vibrancy and spontaneity to this picture, as its creators and stars seem to be coming up with their story on the spot, with the cameras rolling. They seem inspired and excited. The mood is infectious.

Builds slowly--maybe too slowly--to a mano-a-mano standoff, just like "The Twilight Samurai," and just like the earlier film, the new one presents its climactic swordfight matter-of-factly, with no superheroics and a lot of hesitation.

This film has a worthy goal: to change the perspectives of people who might be hurting right now. For those willing to go with its flow, it has a real power.

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

In keeping with Jóhann Jóhannsson's score - alternately ominous, triumphant, and elegiac - The Miners' Hymns plays on the broader emotions of the subject. The film is all about the mysterious world down below, how camaraderie turned to conflict, and the nagging feeling of loss.

It’s more gentle and fanciful in tone, and though it’s as episodic and digressive as Jodorowsky’s best-known work, the various pieces add up to a clear, not-so-odd narrative.

Think of Not Quite Hollywood as a vividly illustrated catalogue of astonishing smut.

Tim’s Vermeer is more of an engineering lecture. And while it’s edifying in and of itself, it’s almost more fascinating because of the reasons it never transforms into anything else.

While the game Chevalier keeps evolving into something darker, the movie Chevalier is fairly static. The style’s unchanging throughout, holding to a slow pace and a muted sense of humor.

While Harvey does a fine job evoking the violent, character-driven crime pictures of the 1970s, he can’t quite make Into the Ashes feel original enough to be vital.

A lollapalooza of a twist ending elevates Isolated, a suspense film that for much of its first 75 minutes is just another well-acted, slickly produced variation on a too-common horror subgenre.

For a movie that’s so photo-realistic in its backgrounds and detailed in its character design, Ghost In The Shell is just as effective when it goes minimal, suggesting presence through absence.

It’s more a feel-good recap of an impressive championship run. But the game analysis is keen, and the arc of this story is undeniably inspiring, arguing that victory is sweeter when it springs from a common purpose.

García apparently prefers ambiguity, implying all sorts of heavy backstory for each of his leads but leaving the details vague, and he lets his actresses carry the baggage in their performances alone.

Even though Gondry and Chomsky’s very different sensibilities don’t mesh in such a way that either man’s work gains substantially from the alliance, they’re each such good company individually that Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is still entertaining.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Every scene of The Killing Fields (and every participant in its making) is in service of showing how abruptly a seemingly safe and vital individual can have everything essential stripped away.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (best-known for their Terry Gilliam behind-the-scenes docs Lost In La Mancha and The Hamster Factor) have made The Bad Kids in the “fly on the wall” mold of Frederick Wiseman, crossed with the “year-in-the-life” storytelling of Hoop Dreams. The structure of Black Rock itself is one of their biggest narrative assets.

More essay than documentary—and by no means a monster movie--Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo takes a closer look at the Japanese obsession with insect-collecting, and considers it as a partial explanation of the country’s national character.

It's the most obvious point that actually rings truest: that Wilder's sketchy vision of life, love, and death is as funny and moving as it ever was.

Patience reveals through images and tone as well as through the interviews how Sebald yearned for restorative meaning in the places he toured, only to end up lost in thought.