Steve Macfarlane

A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.

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

Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.

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

Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.

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.

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.

What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.

Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.

It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.

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

It's as unsparing a sketch of twentysomething life in New York City as American independent cinema has yet offered.

While the trivia value may feel tremendous, only One9's interviews with Nas, his father, Olu Dara, and his brother, Jungle, manage to make the doc legitimately moving--a history lesson in popular culture.

The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.

Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.

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.

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.

When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.

A shrill Indiewood torture porn that, despite promised shocks and revulsions, doesn't even have the conviction to hold its camera on the story's most appalling twists.

Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.

Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.

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.

Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.

The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.

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

The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.

It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.

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.