Steve Macfarlane

Without a frame of footage nor a single interview presented from outside the camp, the documentary shows a capitalist nightmare that accords its victims zero wiggle room.

Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.

Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.

Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.

The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.

The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.

Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.

Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.

The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.

A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.

This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.

What first feels like a neurotic avoidance of Sol LeWitt the man instead becomes a kind of mirage of his life, as though he managed to evaporate into his body of work.

It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.

Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.

By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.

It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.

With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.

Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.

Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.

A dazzling heist film that can't help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, South Korea's number one box-office champ of all time is never less than clever.

Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.

Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.

The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.

Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.

Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.

Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.

Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.