Richard Brody

Birbiglia films what he knows, offering ample and intricate scenes of improvisations performed onstage, along with an insider’s view of the industry.

The vision of such severe regimentation is shocking; Zin-mi’s tears of shame and her sharply limited range of knowledge and inhibited behavior embody an outrage.

The film's technical achievements may be complex, but its emotions are facile.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

The glaring absence of political chatter doesn’t mar Treitz’s achievement: he has made an instant-classic Western.

The story...opens out into a dazzling multigenerational array of characters, as well as a panoply of trenchant themes.

The pleasures of the design fade along with those of the pat and callow drama.

Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.

The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

A comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz.

Ingeniously, Coogler has transformed “Rocky”—the modern cinematic myth that, perhaps more than any other, endures as a modern capitalist Horatio Alger story of personal determination and sheer will—into a vision of community and opportunity, connections and social capital, family and money.

Filming with long, ironically balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life.

[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.

With a blend of local lore and partisan fury, theatrical artifice and journalistic inquiry, Gomes single-handedly reinvents the political cinema.

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

A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

The simplifications and sanitizations of Brooklyn would be only dreary if they merely served the purpose of a streamlined and simplified story-telling mechanism. What renders them odious is the ethos that they embody, the worldview that they package.

Wiseman’s very subject is the difference between neighborhood and community—between the happenstance of urban geography and the commitment of self-identification.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

At its most persuasive, it conjures live-action versions of Chinese paintings, as if Hou were more at ease with the settings and stakes than with the personalities.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

Within the vigorous entertainment of Straight Outta Compton is a sharp-minded realism about the machines within the machines, the amplifiers of money and media that, behind the scenes and offscreen, play crucial roles in the flow of power.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.

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.

Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.

He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.