Richard Brody

Carla, in “Between the Temples,” is given a terse but powerful backstory, and Kane conveys the character’s historically infused idealism, fierce purpose, and caustic humor with tremulous vulnerability and life-rich lucidity. She and Schwartzman expand Silver’s intimate cinematic universe beyond its frames and map it onto the world at large.

Filmed in 1969 but unreleased until 1989, Michael Roemer’s dyspeptic comedy, about a small-time gangster newly freed from prison, bares unhealed and unspoken wounds of New York Jewish life.

Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.

Tashlin transforms the mystery into a giddy parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: borrowing his highly inflected, riotously inventive visual styles, Tashlin creates a sort of live-action cartoon, with distorting angles yielding disorienting juxtapositions, whether from the explosive results of a dish of kidneys flambé or during balletic capers at a bowling alley.

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.

It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

Almodóvar pursues the politics of memory with uninhibited vigor, with a relentlessly physical immediacy that endows his tale of startling coincidences with the power of documentary.

Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended.

In The Barefoot Contessa, [Mankiewicz] shows the sordidness of the money-driven, ego-fuelled, ruthless machinations that are both central to the business of Hollywood and constantly threaten to derail it.

De Sica, working with a host of screenwriters, builds a teeming story—involving broken friendships, families, institutions, dreams, and lives—in which elements of observation and research are concentrated into intensely emotional moments that heighten the film’s moral and mnemonic power.

Nyoni’s frank, confrontational style is both derisive and empathetic; she extracts powerful symbolic images from the oppressive environment.

Between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.

Director Howard Hawks makes a familiar plot resound strangely with new sexual overtones.

A fascinating, inspiring view of a filmmaker whose methods are as boldly original as his movie.

Schatzberg doesn’t romanticize addicts’ troubles; with a tender but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations on shambling degradation and transient relief.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

The overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?

The filmmakers, despite their rueful gaze, inspire empathy for all parties to this miserable commerce.

Along with its trenchant, revelatory depictions and discussion of police work and related political ills, A Cop Movie pulls these hidden vectors of image-making, opinion-shaping power to the fore.

Gordon’s performance conveys something else that’s all too rare in movies of musicians—namely, joy. It’s a serene and lofty joy, with an element of wry detachment and even self-deprecation built in, but it’s vitally present nonetheless.

The spoken narrative, with its spare, literary diction and vigorous precision, seems to add details and even scenes to the image-scape. The copious observations and reflections that the speaker relates expand the movie—a mere seventy-one minutes long—into a work of novelistic amplitude.