Peter Sobczynski

Ghost Elephants is a portrait of obsession that, while gentler than some of Herzog’s other works, is mesmerizing from the first moment to the last, yet another title of note in what remains one of the most incredible filmographies of our time.

Although some of the footage seen in “Porcelain War” is grim and hard to watch, the film is ultimately a celebration of the resiliency of the artistic spirit, even in the most horrifying of circumstances.

Whether one looks at it as a summation statement from an artist taking stock of their life and work at the end of their career or as another one of the brief cinematic diversions that he has taken on in between his feature projects, “It’s Not Me” is a reminder that Leos Carax is one of the most fascinating and formally interesting filmmakers working in the world today.

It offers up a deep and often fascinating dive into his oeuvre, utilizing a central conceit so nervy that most viewers will either marvel or recoil at its sheer audacity.

This is not a film for everyone by a long shot. Still, those willing to take a chance and embrace it on its own very distinct and occasionally deranged terms are likely to find themselves agreeing with the ultimate assessment of Mirren, who once described it as “an irresistible mix of art and genitals.”

Although the duo's reputation hardly needs bolstering these days, it gets just that in this extraordinary exploration of their legacy by one of the many filmmakers who have found themselves enthralled and inspired by it.

While “Jim Henson: Idea Man” may not break any new ground regarding Hensonian research or documentary filmmaking in general, it should prove valuable to younger viewers curious to know more about the man behind so many beloved childhood icons.

Instead of piling on contrivances and cheap psychology to move the story along, Kavtaradze keeps "Slow" situated in a refreshingly human level, respecting the intelligence of her characters and the audience.

This is a soft-spoken but ultimately powerful work that makes the case for the importance of empathy in treating those with mental illnesses, and makes you hope that programs like the one depicted here will one day become the norm.

Outlaw Posse doesn’t quite work in the end but there are enough moments of note scattered throughout it to let you forget that from time to time.

Viewers will find themselves entertained and curious to get home and see just how many of the records in their collections bear the creative imprint of these guys.

To Kill a Tiger tells an important story in a compelling manner that makes it worth watching, but its journey is so intense at times it might prove to be too much for some.

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

Rise, from French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, is not blazingly original by any stretch, and any moviegoer paying even the slightest amount can predict most of the plot's moves. And yet, something is to be said about presenting a familiar narrative in a straightforward and undeniably entertaining manner.

A quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal, featuring what will surely go down as one of the best performances of 2023.

While Juniper as a whole is not great, it has enough wit and intelligence to be better than it sounds. Most of all, it has Rampling, as captivating as ever; she proves once again that she can single-handedly take somewhat dubious material and make it eminently watchable.

Full Time looks and sounds like a nail-biting thriller and tells a story that many viewers will be able to relate to on an intensely personal level.

It isn’t necessarily bad, per se, and it contains just enough in the way of intriguing elements to more or less hold one’s interest for its running time. However, Next Exit never shifts into a higher dramatic gear at any point, and it concludes on a note that is more than a bit unsatisfying.

With his latest film, “House of Darkness,” LaBute tries something similar to "The Wicker Man." And while the results may not be nearly as outlandish this time around, they do make for an intriguing and occasionally quite witty battle of the sexes, in which not all of the bloodshed is strictly metaphorical.

Whether or not Blanco is able to save his factory, Bardem is able to navigate the narrative missteps surrounding him and ultimately make "The Good Boss" worth a look.

Listening to these people grapple with Proust’s work and relate it to their own individual lifetimes of experience is often fascinating.

Endangered is unlikely to change the minds of anti-press zealots (not that they'd even be watching it in the first place) but others will hopefully come out of it both shocked and startled to see what is happening to journalists around the world these days.

Despite my ostensible disinterest in the subject at hand, I found myself mesmerized by this spare, affecting, and powerfully humane work that may seem quiet and reserved, but which ends up packing a surprisingly powerful emotional punch by the end.

This Italian import's title may make it sound like either a kids movie or a cooking documentary, but it proves to be a wild and compelling work that simultaneously evokes the influence of such disparate filmmakers as Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, and Sergio Leone (not to mention a dash of “Broadway Danny Rose”-era Woody Allen) while still coming across as a fresh and unique cinematic vision.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

Whatever "Breaking Bread" lacks in artistic ambition, it makes up for with its good heart, sincere intentions, and, most importantly, all of those luscious images of food.

The trouble is that while many of these bits and pieces are often fascinating, they never quite pull together into a truly compelling or satisfying narrative.

Although it's undeniably well-made, it lacks the kind of energy that might have helped make it truly come alive, and seem like more than a historical reenactment.

For the most part, So Late So Soon is a moving and thoughtful meditation on the inevitability of aging and mortality and the unstoppable lure of the creative process.

A film that is a somewhat uneven journey, though one that proves to be ultimately rewarding in the end.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

Even though the film is ultimately not much more than an exercise in nostalgia, that's hardly a bad thing when you're delving into a past as rich as the one on display here.

If watching a low-key portrait of a person struggling through a personal crisis with a refreshing lack of cheap melodrama sounds intriguing, well, that's exactly what director Kazik Radwanski has delivered with undeniably compelling results.

Cuartas' film provides a generally interesting spin on both the vampire mythos and more typical dysfunctional family dynamics. And while I can't promise it will provide you with a good time at the movies, at least in the conventional sense, I can tell you it's one that's likely to stick with you for a while.

It isn’t bad, per se, but I just never felt the emotional impact it's clearly hoping to achieve.

Those who are willing to give it a chance—and that would include thoughtful teenagers who would respond to a film that approaches their lives in a serious and reasonably non-judgmental manner—are likely to find it as fascinating as I did.

Admittedly, this 85-minute film is not the kind of movie you wish that had been a lot longer. And yet, it's still worth exploring for a number of reasons—primarily the strength of Crawford’s performance—and those who do not have a problem with raw and unflinching dramas may indeed find it well worth watching.

It's impressively staged, especially considering the low budget, and contains a number of action beats that put their high-priced Hollywood competition to shame.

Body Brokers was clearly made with good intentions, but while it might still fill you with anger towards the predatory aspects of the rehabilitation industry, you'll also be upset that the script is not nearly as great as it could have been.

The film has merit as a sprawling and effective work that combines the expected action beats with quieter, character-driven moments, and elements of pure weirdness to surprisingly strong effect. Even when it doesn’t quite work, and it's undeniably uneven at times, it at least has the good taste to offer up flaws borne of ambition instead of laziness.

It's fascinating that while the movie deals with exceptionally grim material, it never becomes too unbearable to watch.

Ultimately, Greenland never comes together into a truly satisfying package, but it deserves a little credit for trying to do something unique within such a familiar framework.

Limbai captures all of this in a direct, unforced, and restrained manner that makes its points about the need for reform to social services without becoming overly strident.

To the credit of the filmmakers, 76 Days has been made in such a skillful and gripping manner that even those suffering from COVID news fatigue will find themselves caught up in it.

I found the film to be an engrossing look at Zappa and his legacy that nevertheless avoids the mere hagiography that films of this sort run the risk of embracing when not handled properly.

While it's unlikely that this film will take up too much time in any future Lifetime Achievement Award clip reels, Dreamland is a testament to the importance of sheer star power to help carry even haphazard material along, at least up to a point.

Even in a filmography with more than its fair share of impressive achievements, it deserves consideration as one of Wiseman’s greatest.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most deeply personal films of his long and brilliant career, I am not just indulging in a bit of critical hyperbole.

This is a movie so strange, bizarre and so unclassifiable that as soon as I was done watching it, I contacted my editor to see if deploying the phrase “batshit crazy” would be acceptable.

House of Hummingbird deserves a place alongside the likes of “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Ocean of Helena Lee” and “Eighth Grade” as one of the most knowing and intelligent cinematic takes on the pains and occasional pleasures of female adolescence of recent years.

While the results will obviously not come close to resonating with the public in the manner of “Walk the Line,” My Darling Vivian does an admirable job of recounting the story of a woman who was ultimately far more than just a footnote in someone else’s life.

In reality, this is the kind of low-key gem that horror fans are always looking for but so rarely find — one that is smartly conceived, visually stylish and genuinely creepy at times.

The addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

As a whole, The Good Liar is not quite good enough to deserve the comparisons to the works of Alfred Hitchcock it's clearly aiming for, though it is just good enough to suggest what Hitchcock himself might have done with it on a second pass.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

Because it is the first film to be released by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama that signed a highly publicized deal with Netflix, American Factory will no doubt find an audience far larger than the typical documentary focusing on the contemporary labor movement.

And yet, while it does not really work — at least not enough to warrant a full recommendation — it is one of those films where some of the stuff that did work was good enough to inspire me to hold out hope practically right up to the closing moments that it would all somehow all pay off in the end.

While the end result is certainly no masterpiece, it is still better than the average action potboiler and contains a couple of exhilarating set pieces that offer further proof—not that any is needed at this point—that De Palma remains one of the unquestioned masters of creating and executing moments of pure cinema.

The results are uneven — how could they not be? — but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.

There are moments of unexpected humor that blindside you.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

Those not on the Deadpool bandwagon already will probably not be converted by this version and those who are fans may find it to be a vaguely interesting curio they'll watch once.

This is an interesting concept in theory and for a while, it is undeniably compelling to watch, aided in no small part by a couple of strong performances at its center.

The end result may be little more than an exponentially more expensive version of those cheapo Syfy channel movies, but at least it has the good taste to be exponentially better as well.

On the one hand, it never quite works in a conventionally satisfying manner—it is wildly uneven, occasionally obtuse and it never quite seems to have a solid grasp on what it is trying to say. On the other hand, it still manages to register in a number of unusual ways thanks to its haunting visual style, offbeat tone, and its intriguing method to put us into the disintegrating mindset of its central character.

While originality may not exactly be in great supply here, these familiar elements have been mixed with enough wit and style to make for some sleazy, insanely violent, and reasonably entertaining B-movie trash.

The major problem with That Summer is the inescapable fact that it only barely qualifies as a movie.

The film has an engrossing and powerful drama that is all the more effective for writer/director Vivian Qu’s refusal to keep the story from spinning off into lurid melodrama — all of the story points on display have the harsh bitterness of truth to them.

While the end result may not quite reach the heights that Miyazaki has regularly hit during his amazing career, it is nevertheless a worthy effort, filled with visuals that frequently dazzle the eye even if the story is more likely to inspiring the scratching of heads instead.

The result is a slow burn of a drama with a restrained tone that may put off some viewers, but which will captivate those who responded to its low-key wavelength.

Alas, it also contains many of the same inherent flaws as most movies of this type, and not even the genuinely good and powerful aspects on display are quite able to overcome the more troublesome elements.

One only has to go into his latest effort, Happy End, for a couple of minutes to realize that the old Haneke is back with a vengeance.

An ambitious but occasionally uneven animated film.

Despite its early unevenness, Only the Brave tells its story in a sincere and relatively non-exploitative manner that isn’t overly dominated by visual effects, and the cast does some very good work as well.

This is a strong film that tackles a charged subject in a fair and even-handed manner. The Force will give viewers of all social and political persuasions much to think about afterwards.

The end result is a film that may not rise to the level of “Don’t Look Back” or “Truth or Dare” but still manages to create a sense of intimacy and revelation, even as we sense that there is really no such thing as an unguarded moment for Lady Gaga.

Aan odd fusion of an earnest socially conscious drama and a B-movie mystery programmer that never quite comes together despite a strong performance from Adele Haenel at its center.

The result is a dark and stirring variation on the standard coming-of-age narrative that, much like its central characters, does not follow the path one might expect.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

Huppert is still there plugging away in every scene. To the extent that False Confessions does intermittently succeed, it is due almost entirely to her efforts.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is your typical sci-fi/action/comedy/rock&roll/kung-fu/political satire/neo-western/guys-on-a-mission extravaganza.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

This is an uncommonly smart, well-made and ultimately touching meditation on grief, revenge and the ordinary perils of adolescence that should resonate strongly with adults and thoughtful teenagers alike.

They (Assayas/Stewart) have managed to out-do themselves with a work as mysterious, moving and haunting as anything that has materialized in a movie theater in a while.

Like most films of its type, “The Final Chapter” is utterly ridiculous in every possible way but unlike a lot of them (I am looking at you, “Underworld”), it at least has a healthy sense of its own absurd nature that comes as a blessed relief. And a couple of the action bits are gloriously goofy to behold.

While it may not quite be the modern-day “Casablanca,” it is nevertheless a grandly entertaining stab at old-fashioned storytelling...buoyed by smart and stylish filmmaking, a good performance by Brad Pitt and an even better one from Marion Cotillard.

This decidedly dark and super-violent South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su tells a tale so jam-packed with betrayals, double-crosses and alleged authority figures that even the most dedicated of genre buffs may find it too unrelentingly grim and cynical for their tastes.

The end result is a sturdy and frequently dazzling version of the material that should leave audiences swooning with delight.

While moviegoers desperate to see anything that doesn’t involve a superhero may be willing to overlook its shortcomings, others will undoubtedly be disappointed to find that it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

The one major problem with Into the Forest, the one that keeps it from making that final leap of good movie to a potentially great one, is that the final third is just not quite as strong as the stuff that precedes it.

The film as a whole just never quite overcomes the inherent familiarity of its premise to become its own unique thing. Those looking for a story equal to Cranston’s contributions to it are liable to come away from it feeling slightly disappointed.

One of the essential documentaries on Hollywood.

The Measure of a Man may be a hard film to watch at times, but with Lindon's great performance at its center, it is one from which you cannot look away.

Nina Forever subverts audience expectations at every turn and develops the kind of genuine emotional power that keeps it from being just another gory goof.

Jane Got a Gun has its good points and less demanding fans of the Western genre may find some value in it, especially considering how few films of its type actually get made these days.