Scott Tobias

The clipped tough-guy language, Juan Ruiz Anchía's rich chiaroscuro lighting, the layers of "short cons" and larger deceptions—they're all elements of a genre whose time had passed, but that Mamet was able to revive with effortless aplomb.

Sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama.

Given their reputations as feminist provocateurs, the coming together of Breillat and Argento seems natural, even inevitable, and The Last Mistress gets a charge from their feisty, uncompromising spirit.

Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.

Debut features are rarely this confident and accomplished, much less such a perfect blueprint of what to expect from a filmmaker down the line.

Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.

Portraits of maternal ambivalence are rare in cinema and Bronstein pushes it to the limit, turning motherhood into a white-knuckle experience with the highest of stakes.

These images and reports have stirred consciences without quite stirring decisive action, and an earnest indie doc like this one seems like another cry in the wilderness.

Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.

Seidl has made an insightful film that’s more about the trials of a young woman’s coming of age than about being overweight.

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie.

Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.

While there's an element of left-wing fantasy in Lemmon's conversion from unquestioning patriot to newly awakened skeptic of U.S. covert activities, Lemmon's emotional directness, driven by a need simply to find answers, makes that transition entirely plausible. Within this decent citizen lies the conscience of a nation.

It’s a piece of escapism that can’t escape from itself.

More than a slight, pleasant oddity, Hukkle shows Pálfi's keen attunement to the sensual possibilities, both in nature and in cinema.

Abuse Of Weakness is the director’s attempt to account for actions that seem inexplicable, and make the audience understand and sympathize in kind.

Though Climates lacks "Distant's" haunted, poetic melancholy, it has a vivid, sensual texture that's unmistakably Ceylan's. He's one of those rare directors who doesn't need a credit for identification.

Serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Though its heroine's mysterious seizures and blackouts are terrifying in the way they undermine her quest for self-determination, Requiem isn't a horror movie so much as a thwarted coming-of-age story, like "Carrie" without the bloody reckoning.

German director David Wnendt and his co-writer, Claus Falkenberg, are determined to package one teenager’s unhygienic coming-of-age into a slick, funny, accessible romantic comedy. They mostly pull it off.

Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

Daniel Dencik’s unusual documentary Expedition To The End Of The World sounds like a grand seafaring adventure, as expeditions to untraversed Arctic territory tend to be, but its tone is much more philosophical.

As Marty continues to run scams, the laughs continue unabated, but the dread only deepens, because we realize he’s a creature of need, capable of anything but empathy. And he’s been pushed to the precipice.

Though the plot's soap-opera turns become tidy and predictable, the film shows remarkable attunement and sympathy toward a group of characters whose lives intersect and unravel on a cruel twist of fate.

The beauty of the film is how organically its themes are presented - it's a slice of life that comes about its sweeping ideas with surprising delicacy.

The Ghost Writer may not go down as one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but if it does end up being his swan song, it’s the ideal denouement to a life and career of unsettling resonance.

If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.