Richard Brody

In Bogdanovich’s analytical twist on the genre, even joyous liberation leaves a huge mess.

The hard-won consolations of seasonal sentiment emerge in the searching performances as well as in the impressionistic handheld images.

The Novelist’s Film is straightforwardly chronological and naturalistic, but that makes it no less intricate or sophisticated a reflection on the nature of movies, both intellectual and practical.

With a teeming cast of vibrantly unglamorous Chicago characters who hold Eddie in a tight social web, Swanberg—aided greatly by Johnson’s vigorous performance—makes the gambler’s panic-stricken silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill of secrets and lies.

In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself.

The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition.

[Losier] revels in Cassandro’s offstage charisma and in his acrobatic artistry while also revealing the authentic violence of the sport’s blatant artifice.

The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

Dumont doesn’t stint on the Lucas-like dialectics, and he works wonders with wryly blunt yet nonetheless spectacular effects-driven action scenes. But, most exquisitely, he delights in visions of earthly, natural majesty.

Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.

When the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen’s venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.

The film puts his work convincingly and revealingly into the context of his turbulent life and the passionate politics of the times. Above all, however, the movie puts on display Winogrand’s singular way of working—and proves that, as with many of the artistic luminaries of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, his process is as original a creation as his art, and is inseparable from it.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

Russell does more than fill the film with its high-wattage parade of stars, who energize the proceedings from beginning to end. He creates vivid and forceful characters—slightly heightened caricatures whose unnaturally emphatic presences befit the air of serendipity that gives history the oddball heroes it needs, and that gives them the happy ending they deserve.

The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of Passages reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

For all its loose ends and unanswered practicalities, its wild urgency is thrilling. It defies the expectations fostered by Lee’s prior films; it steps back even as it moves inward. It is, in the modern-classic sense, a late film.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.